A key issue beyond the supply and demand of programmers is the wider technological transformation of the economy. Programmers are highly remunerated because they provide massive market value to the capital owners and they do that essentially by automating, by teaching machines to do things previously done by people. This activity seems to create significant capital accumulation and machines don't usually forget what they learn or need to be reprogrammed from scratch: once a problem is solved, its solution is frequently made available to other programmers who can build on it to solve even more complex problems previously thought intractable for computers.
If this continues unabated for the long run and we don't hit an intrinsic automation plateau, it can logically have two possible outcomes: either programming will become the main employment of humans and source of income, which seems unlikely, or the capital owners with the help of programmers will manage to make large swaths of the population unemployable.
Another feature of technological capitalism is that it highly conducive to monopoly rents, walled gardens and strong barriers of entry. The early mover advantage of Microsoft on the operating system market still earns it billions in pure rents. So competitors who would like to change and equalize the earnings distribution, for example by employing programmers in another country, will be in general unsuccessful.
I know it doesn't seem like that now, on the contrary, the tech industry seems like a wild west of endless possibilities and opportunity for all, but it's worth pondering if the apparent "tech boom" isn't really a massive economic shift for a very different, highly polarized and almost feudal society, with the programmers acting as the samurai, the sell-swords used by capital-owning rulers.
If this continues unabated for the long run and we don't hit an intrinsic automation plateau, it can logically have two possible outcomes: either programming will become the main employment of humans and source of income, which seems unlikely, or the capital owners with the help of programmers will manage to make large swaths of the population unemployable.
Another feature of technological capitalism is that it highly conducive to monopoly rents, walled gardens and strong barriers of entry. The early mover advantage of Microsoft on the operating system market still earns it billions in pure rents. So competitors who would like to change and equalize the earnings distribution, for example by employing programmers in another country, will be in general unsuccessful.
I know it doesn't seem like that now, on the contrary, the tech industry seems like a wild west of endless possibilities and opportunity for all, but it's worth pondering if the apparent "tech boom" isn't really a massive economic shift for a very different, highly polarized and almost feudal society, with the programmers acting as the samurai, the sell-swords used by capital-owning rulers.