Because there’s a longstanding view that since programmers love what they do, they shouldn’t be compensated as highly as other fields with demanding requirements. Employees at large tech firms are as profitable as bankers, yet they get paid a fraction as much compensation. Not to mention that it generally takes years and years of unpaid homework / hobby work to learn how to be a good software developer - just taking four years of college CS with no outside hobby work will not prepare you in any way. Nobody expects that from doctors, lawyers or bankers.
So the pool of great programmers is generally limited to those who love the job _so much_ that they’re willing to forgo income to do it. Someone with a “125 IQ” and strong math abilities could get a job on Wall Street, or as an actuary, etc and make more money for less frustration.
At Amazon, they target 75th percentile comp – but I really doubt they also target hiring 75th percentile developers on average. So they’re basically trying to hire 90th percentile employees for 75th percentile comp. I’d argue the entire industry does that in comparison to non-engineering industries.
The next time a CEO complains they can’t hire enough engineers, ask them how much over market they’re offering.
I see your point but I think "forgo" is a strong word. I have made and will continue to make a great salary with great benefits and be able to choose companies based on cultural fit.
That's something that I would never give up for an extra 50k a year.
Yes, but you're also hanging around on HN. :) I'm thinking more of the other guy, who was just as smart as you but perhaps not in love with tech, and had to decide if he wants to give up 50K to be an engineer. (I think you're referring to choosing between engineering jobs - I meant choosing between career paths.)
Also: it's sad that beyond the comp issue, they're often sacrificing prestige, at least in the US. It's just as hard to become a qualified engineer at top firm, but the general public just doesn't find that as impressive as being a lawyer, doctor or banker. I know lots of lawyers and bankers for whom a big reason they're in that job was the prestige and ego-boost associated with it.
I've been doing this a while, and have found that prestige from non techis, for us engineers, is based on the company we work for. Tell someone you're an engineer at google or facebook and you get the prestige. Tell them you're a programmer at some startup they've never heard of and their like "yeah, whatever".
I think a lot of it has to do with people overusing the term "engineer". I know people with that work for the phone company that have lower skill jobs but still get the title "network engineer" or some such. Normal people can't distinguish between this and the hard profession.
Agree with you there. I have some friends that do the kinda dev I feel is radioactive, but then they tell me about their benefits and wages and I'm like "where's the hazmat suit?"
some benefits are hard to quantify and/or equate to $. For example, each person would value commute time differently, but how many people actually compute the cost of a longer commute beyond just gas and time? What about its effect on your health and mental state? Sometimes we neglect/forget to take these things into account, but sometimes it's just hard to factor them in altogether...
by now most of the world’s programming would be happening in low-to-medium-wage countries and that customers wouldn’t have to pay a lot for high quality software. But it hasn’t happened (e.g., see my posting about California’s state government spending $327 million on a straightforward ecommerce site
Uh, the reasons government IT projects are typically huge wasteful boondoggles are not because programmer salaries are too high or programmer talent is mediocre.
I was puzzeled over that number too, as putting up a site like that, even if you are buying the servers from scratch and hire a first rate web dev, shouldn't cost more than 10-20k$. I went through to the linked artice, and appeareantly, most of it went for consultants.
I mean there are consultants out there that are worth their money, and I bet the site is kai-zen optimized very nicely, even though I can't tell, but 327 million $ is quite a hump for that website. The main problem seems to be that government contracting is not a regular market, else joe's jquerry shack would have ourrun and outpaced accenture in both cost and quality.
At $125/hour and $5000 for servers, $10-20k could be spent up in a couple weeks or so. That seems pretty reasonable, and certainly not as absurd as $327 million, which would amount to about 1200 years of FTE effort.
If you were the government or a big company with a reputation would you call up 1 guy and say "you've got a few weeks and 120/hr, make a site and well run it in our data enter"?
Think of all the things that can go wrong! Security, PII, etc.
> The main problem seems to be that government contracting is not a regular market
I have to wonder if it would be come a more regular market if companies weren't required to drug-test all of their employees in order to do more than $100,000 of Federal contract work [1]. I'm sure their are companies out there that would prefer not to compromise their employees' privacy for the sake of work they might not need.
i guess there is a backend there that isn't accounted for yet. I went with 5k for web design and 15k for 3 pretty average servers (using jeff atwoods specs as a general number, where he comes out to $2,750 for raw server cost without allocation), but in retrospect, 3 average servers could be somewhat small for a site like that.
The article starts with the primary assumption that programming is a commodity skill, then is astounded when the world doesn't back up his theory. Not exactly going to learn a lot like that.
Why programming isn't a commodity skill? Or will become such commodity soon?
Programming is like a house builder. Yes there are better and more experienced builders, but most of them can build a house top to bottom with no problem.
Programming is not like building houses. The computers on which the software runs are the "house builders"-- the parts of the system doing the repetitive work. Programmers are the architects and civil engineers who are tasked with inventing new types of houses every time.
To add on to your point - you can program anything with little to no startup costs anymore, whereas you can't build anything architecture wise without large amounts of money.
For certain values of "problem" as defined by the builder? Sure.
For what a buyer defines as a "problem"? Highly debatable.
Even in house construction, an activity that has been performed for literally THOUSANDS OF YEARS, there is no commoditization. If nothing else accounts for this, the bewildering array of local building codes assures that commodity construction as presented by a builder (like a national prefab builder) is really a business-level API that presents a uniform interface to buyers that hides a team that handles all the local idiosyncrasies underneath.
And if you expand it beyond just house construction to all construction, which is probably a better comparison, it's even less of a commodity. Cost and time overruns are common in multi-million dollar building projects, just like they are in multi-million dollar software projects.
Sorry, but that analogy is completely wrong. I would recommend reading Fred Brook's "The Mythical Man-Month" (among many other books on software estimation) to understand why.
He argues that unlike activities involving physical mediums like house building, computer programming creates with an intractable medium. You would be surprised, in the field of programming, that many so-called "programmers" cannot even build a simple house that is stable on its own foundations.
Unless you're building a 20x20 cm shack, which is about what most intro into programming courses aim at, and the level where some people simply stay. Or in the words of hacker school "completely useless and destined for dev/null".
If houses were vaguely specified, constantly changing, enormously complex designs for invisible things that had to interface with an entire ecosystem full of other "houses" then yes, programming is like house building.
Programmers are, in essence, creative problem-solvers. That skill set is difficult, if not impossible, to commoditize. Building a house well may require some creative problem-solving, but it is not as frequent or as important when compared to programming.
I would say programmers are like skilled laborers in this simile. Some are plumbers, some are electricians, some are woodworkers, some are handymen. I wouldn't hire a plumber to wire a house, nor an electrician to plumb it. Either might be able to do the job, or might not. A handyman probably can, but most likely not with the same quality, or knowledge about how to fix more specific or harder problems.
I don't expect a programmer that's been steeped in the world of UNIX daemons to write a good customer facing website on their first attempt, and I wouldn't expect a front-end Javascript programmer to know how to deal with multiprocess programming in C/C++. Asking them to do so may not result in something "with no problem". At least not in an acceptable time frame.
If only. Aside from very, very standard patterns, software development is like building a totally different house each time, and builders tend to have a bear of a time when things deviate from accepted patterns. There is an immense range of productivity and quality among developers, and you can't make up for having less skilled developers by hiring more of them.
Well, see, that's the difference between a house builder and a programmer. Not just anyone can write a program with "no problem". Sure, sure, anyone can learn to write one off hacks (much like building couch forts), but building something that doesn't fall down when the first woodpecker comes along takes a lot more experience, training, thought, effort and time.
1) I'd imagine programming ability is fairly correlated with IQ, which puts a limit on the percentage of the population that has the requisite analytical skills to be effective programmers.
2) Programming is as much about communication as it is about writing code. People have this idea that you can reduce a program to a precise set of specifications that can be formulated by non-programmers and shipped off to China to be coded up. I find the idea ridiculous. People don't come with to lawyers with the precise contours of the case they want to build and simply ask for the lawyer to write up the briefs. They don't come up to doctors with a precise treatment plan and simply ask them to administer the medications. Programmers are problem-solvers, and that's a two-way street, and that makes shipping critical programming work over to China and India untenable because of communications barriers.
"People have this idea that you can reduce a program to a precise set of specifications that can be formulated by non-programmers and shipped off to China to be coded up."
Yup... If this was actually possible, we could just write software to do it and not need programmers at all.
"But that doesn’t explain why people in the Philippines or China aren’t training themselves en masse to be able to soak up the $30-100/hour jobs that would be readily available to them"
Rentacoder is readily available, its just that word on the street was most jobs paid about $5/hr.
Amazon's Mechanical Turk has some extremely fuzzy stats and not much more than anecdotes but earning around $7/hr has been reported. Higher pay, more fun, less effort?
Waiter/bartender at a tourist restaurant is probably the most fun and could pay even more.
Why is the market so fuzzy and illiquid? Why aren't there ten places I can go to find "write perl to import this old fashioned CSV file into that database" and see exactly what thats worth? Fix that and then wonder where the people are.(edited to rephrase there's no market, so no one plays the market)
The reason there aren't ten places you can do that is because it isn't at all clear how to compare your specification to others which may sound similar, but vary over orders of magnitude in difficulty or time required. If you want to fix that, then provide a more precise specification, e.g. in a format which lets machines compare your request to others in the past, and which lets you easily verify that this is exactly what you are asking for (implying an extreme form of "waterfall" process).
This would get rid of a ton of the risk of software projects. On the other hand, providing a really complete specification is nearly what programming is; by the time you have nailed one down you have done most of the real work.
Most of the market not only can't provide such specs, it isn't what they need. They need to pay for time in some kind of iteration process. Those who have pretty precise requirements and know what they need, are best served going to highly specialized vendors who have done the same kind of thing a million times and can therefore schedule and price precisely. But many of those already are selling that product for $29.95 or $300 or $3,995, with an option to buy extra services.
You likely already know where you can find code to import a CSV into a database to specialized requirements. Or at least you know who you could pay to tell you exactly what to buy.
You just don't want to pay extra for these things.
I don't think the GP was referring to development environment setup time as a significant amount of the spin-up time of a software engineer. If it is, you've got bigger issues.
1 - All projects can be run in a VM
2 - Setting the development environment is all a new developer needs
Let me try to instil some expanded vision into things:
- I can't have a VM for our specific embedded hardware with its specific devices
- I haven't seen a VM for AIX on Power (maybe except running on Power HW)
But most importantly, Vagrant can't put on the developer's head everything specific (s)he needs to know to do the job. Like how to use the proprietary utils that we need to integrate in a project. Or what the project is all about.
I didn't mean to imply that Vagrant is appropriate for all situations. However, it has certainly been a boon to my web project.
I hope you'll forgive me for misunderstanding "Just try and see how long until a developer has the development environment." -- The language is ambiguous, but "until a developer has the development environment" means software to me. That is, that the developer has the tools he needs to make changes to a code base. You're right that I may have taken too narrow of a view, but my interpretation also seems reasonable.
Its easy to run, all you need is a pair of shoes(not even that in the extreme case) and a bit of open space. I wonder why we don't have olympic runners in every neighbourhood ?
More seriously, I suspect its a consequence of the 10000 hour rule applied to a discipline which builds some of the most complicated structures known to man. It takes a lot of training, formal or informal and a lot of good feedback to make a good software engineer. Plus, CS is not the easiest of disciplines to study.
That, along with the fact that good practitioners, in almost any discipline are by definition the top few percentage.
The bigger question would be, as the profession matures and builds up an institutional body of knowledge like civil engineering, would the number of 'good enough' engineers rise.
The author of this would have his answer if he understood the IQ floor necessary to be a good engineer, access to computers at a young age and willingness to troubleshoot obscure problems is relatively rare in the population.
There are far less high IQ individuals in the world than the world needs right now.
We can teach coding to young people, but as of now we can't reliably increase IQ.
We have studies that prove agents such as piracetam administered to pregnant rats increase the intelligence of their offspring.
If the Tech titans that want cheaper labor really want to solve the problem of lack of quality engineers they could think long term and throw massive amounts of funding at neuroscience and nootropic research.
In the information age we all live and die by our wits. Policy and R&D money should be directed at raising the mean intelligence of the population through novel scientific breakthroughs.
Far easier though to just lobby for government policies that make it easier to import the rare kind of people Google, Microsoft and Facebook need.
So we have a situation where no one is focused on solving the root of the problem (a need to increase the cognitive abilities of humans) and no one is lobbying to protect the financial interests of working coders in the United States.
I'm going to directly contradict you here and say that IQ increases reliably: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect - IQ is a relative measure that is adjusted periodically. I also don't think that IQ is a direct mapping to programming skill.
I also find the suggestion that there aren't enough smart people to be able to do programming highly questionable. There are far more people who are capable but not able to pursue programming than there are people are who are not "fit" mentally.
Yes, the Flynn effect shows that this is possible and occurring. I feel very strongly that humanity needs to radically accelerate this process, with drugs in the short term, and genetic therapies in the long term.
Isn't Silicon Valled allready hooked on a constant supply of aderall and modafil? Now add Hydergine, Piracetam and Deprenyl into school lunches, and you've got your super children.
Or hack whatever is broken with the educational systems around the world. I'm still in school (technical highschool, programming focus), and none of my friends that is worth his salt in programming is good in school, and that puzzles me because they keep telling us that they're desperate for good coders. D is one of the best js coders I personally know, and he raves about it all the time. He dropped out of the part of the school that I go to (which would lead up to college), and likely won't stay in cs due to that. B is one of the best php coders I know. He's also a D student. A's good too, but had a 2.0 GPA as well.
There's a fair share of good potential programmers around (even though my observation might be somewhat biased), but many of them won't ever get into college. And how do you face HR without a degree? Go to hell kid, we want credentials.
I'm pretty sure you don't need more leads, you need better conversion, or else we're all going into marketing.
Speaking as the only person in my office who was a degree in CS (one has a geology degree, the other dropped out half-way through his graphic design degree, both make more than I do), no, you don't need a degree to get a job as a software engineer. The job I had previously wasn't altogether different, either. I think less than half of us had degrees in CS.
At least that leaves me with a spark of hope, but it's still quite discouraging that you could be the best programmer in your entire school, and still not be admitted for a CS degree. It kinda defeats the whole point of school, degree, job.
If schools judged CS applicants by their ability to program, I'd agree, but they don't. They judge them based upon their likelihood to succeed in the program (amongst other things, like building a diverse student body or whatever). That is, they judge them by their ability to be a good student. If all of the evidence goes to show that a prospect is a terrible student, why would a University accept them knowing that they are likely to fail?
Now, your friends may be more than capable at succeeding in university, and if a school only took the time to get to know them, they might see that, but, on paper, they look the same as someone who likely couldn't succeed in school (because they haven't, really, up to that point).
That all sounds all horrible about universities, disregarding these capable students because of an inability to really get to know prospects, but that's not on them. If you want to get into a good school, try harder.
As far as it defeating the point of getting an education, I'd wholly agree that college is not a worthwhile pursuit for a future-SE if your only reason for going is to get a job. You'll spend a lot of time in college learning skills that are not directly applicable to your future employment. You could arguably get to a point where you're good enough to hire more efficiently by skipping school. Whether or not it's worth passing on the things you really won't experience outside of school in exchange for a more efficient route to money is really up to you.
When I'm interviewing developers, I don't care about degrees. I don't even look at schooling on resumes. You might need it for the recruiters, but not for the actual job.
Can you code and are you at the level we need for the position? There are too many programmers that can't pass FizzBuzz but have CS degrees.
> The author of this would have his answer if he understood the IQ floor necessary to be a good engineer, access to computers at a young age and willingness to troubleshoot obscure problems is relatively rare in the population.
As a scientist, even mentioning IQ is a good way to lose your career in the US. It's frustrating because the general population are turning to off-label drugs and supplements. 30% of college students are taking some sort of ADHD drugs for performance enhancement and even more when including nootropics.
The gigantic demand for stimulants and nootropics is a good indicator that people are feeling the strain of the information age and reaching for answers.
We need far better answers. The situation is only going to intensify as more low end jobs are automated.
Yes, I am using IQ as stand in for an unchanging benchmark of cognitive ability, which it is not. Perhaps it would be better to say the world needs an increase in human crystallized and fluid intelligence.
Why isn't there a glut of baseball players who hit .408 in the major leagues? Because it's a rare person who can hit a ball thrown at nearly 100 MPH 40% of the time. Software engineers are common but people who deliver quality product after product is a rare bird. Programming at a high level is not as easy as this author seems to think.
Every company seems to think it needs programmers who hit .408 in the major leagues. Maybe the problem is that they think making money is a zero-sum game like baseball, so that they have to have the "best team" and not just a team which can build what's necessary to make some money (not the most money, that would also be a game).
You're assuming that 2 people hitting .200 are equivalent to one hitting .400. This isn't true in baseball, nor in software development.
The competition is because the person hitting .400 is worth at least an order of magnitude more than a person hitting .200. The same discrepancy is not found in salaries, so you obviously prefer to hire from the top.
And like many brilliant and talented people, they're completely clueless that in the real world, many other people just don't have the natural abilities that they themselves have, thus they are repeatedly perplexed that others just can't do the "easy" things they do. Often I've seen instead that they will instead ascribe others' failures as moral failures, which bites doubly against those that are trying hard but can't measure up.
I struggle with that myself. My attitude toward people who aren't accomplishing much with their lives is "Well, work harder!" But while much of my own success is due to hard, focused work, much of it is also due to raw intelligence and talent. Not everyone has that.
Great coder can't understand why there aren't more great coders around. Film at 11.
Perhaps Greenspun has "suffered" from working with too many great coders, or finds programming easy, so he can't understand why there aren't more great coders around. Maybe if he studied more sociology, or IQ statistics, or hell even economics (in the form of market demands) he'd be better equipped to understand why there aren't more great coders.
I know who Greenspun is, and I have a lot of respect for his programming chops, but this comes off as someone either disconnected from reality, or someone thinking that because they are expert at one thing, they are expert at everything.
He also wanted to make his employees work 70+ hour weeks:
Suppose that a programmer needs to spend 25 hours per week keeping current with new technology, getting coordinated with other programmers, contributing to documentation and thought leadership pieces, and comprehending the structures of the systems being extended. Under this assumption, a programmer who works 55 hours per week will produce twice as much code as one who works 40 hours per week
just because "this person" might be solid still doesn't mean anything. quite possibly it might actually delude him from reality if he's way above average
I think there may be a glut of potentially good software engineers. In fact, I know several high-IQ programmers who are skilled, but sadly, probably unemployable.
I think the problem seems to be (at least) four-fold. 1. They don't have the prerequisite cultural background. 2. They are self-motivated to pursue their own creativity but less interested in others'. 3. They don't have a fondness for excess money. 4. They have a hard time being obedient and subordinate.
There is absolutely a market for really good creative people who aren't obedient or subordinate. You have to be able to back up your disobedience with results, though.
Building "business-scale" software is almost always a team effort. It doesn't matter how brilliant someone is if they can't work well with their team; in fact it's generally a recipe for disaster. 2 and 4 here are deal breakers for any decent software team.
The ability to "disagree and commit" is crucial for members of any team that want to both express creativity, but deliver results.
It just irks me when people come to me and offer me an idea, then say they'll give me 1% of a company that I build all the software to it. Either I don't understand why that happens or it's just plan greedy. I'd rather work in a company that pays me well now while playing with my own ideas in parallel.
And likely, they'll want you to take over the financing and distribution, as well as the marketing and accounting as well, because those are all hard things they don't want to deal with. They just want to have the idea. And they stay blissfully unaware that with just the idea (and maybe a patent pending), it's be 3-10%....of wholesale price for them.
By good, it is often meant to be in the 5% of the standard normal distribution. So "good" is an infinite shifting condition. When there are more developers, it becomes just harder to be good enough. This scares therefore often novice off. They implicitly think that they have to be "really" smart to retain a life long job.
I think that there are enough developers. But everybody is searching for the geniuses that can create a competitive advantage.
I didn't downvote, but programming is nothing like playing in the NBA. The NBA is zero-sum: There are by definition (15 players per team * 30 teams) NBA players in the world. There exists no such hard limit on "good programmers"; if there were more good programmers people would pay them to solve problems that currently go unsolved.
The NBA has a fixed number of players. The analogy doesn't fit at all. I'll bet if you made 10 new teams, and only allowed them to sign players that other teams don't want, that a number of them would be better than the worst teams in the NBA right now.
Why doesn't the pay reflect the supply and demand? I consider myself a decent developer with 9 years of industry experience in several domains and my salary is only $88k. It sounds like based on the demand, I should be pulling in a lot more.
Maybe because we're in it for the work, not the money. $75-100K is enough to provide a comfortable life suitable for supporting that work. Not enough of us hold out for bigger offers to push the line up; pay enough to support coding something interesting 8-10 hours a day and we're happy.
A friend noted "as engineers, we would do this stuff for free - it's just all the ancillary BS we get paid to put up with."
Where are you located? Geography is still a big factor in hiring decisions, so demand is not evenly distributed. In Silicon Valley, $88k is what good-but-not-great fresh college graduates get paid.
The point still stands, unless you work for the handful (or less) of companies that pay FU money to their engineers, you're still paid equivalent of what a Dentist makes, and much less than what a good salesperson makes in a much much smaller city.
I think the answer is that the demand isn't actually very high. Programming is still considered a cost center for most companies, the quality of the product is determined by how much they are willing to spend on salary, not vice versa.
Judging from how much attention all the good software engineers I know get from recruiters and from conversations I've had with people actively hiring, the demand in SF/Silicon Valley is incredibly high. I have personally taken advantage of this demand through lucrative contracting gigs.
Sure, crappy companies in dying industries might not be able to compete, or might not even realize that they're failing to compete, but why care about them? They don't make the market for people who are actually good at software.
I think it's because (though it's always carefully framed to leave this implicit) the argument here really isn't whether there's a developer shortage. It's whether to do more stuff like H1B which increases supply and decreases wages.
I"m not a software engineer, but I wish I had learned it in college instead of studying business. Now as a startup founder I'm at a disadvantage because I can't just start building products I see, I need a team just to start.
As the CEO of Contour it wasn't about pay for great engineers. It was about having an interesting problem to work on and a company culture they wanted to be a part of. Yes you compete on pay, but for a start-up, everything else you offer is as important.
Growing up I didn't even know what you could do with engineering. I loved math, but had no idea what you could do by being an engineer. I think a lot of kids don't realize the creativity you can harness with engineering and how you can "build" real things. It was always presented to me in terms of math and being nerdy. Just like writing, I hated it because it was about "grammar" and not about expressing yourself. Now I love to write.
For kids I think it is framed up wrong and until more engineers have kids and teach their kids just what you can do, we will be short software engineers.
I'm now trying to teach myself with codeacademy and it's hard.
Why wouldn’t the millions of unemployed Americans train themselves to code?
I'd say this is exactly what my friends and I have done. We had been nerds growing up but the majority of us went into liberal arts majors in college. After graduating and finding out that our slips of paper were meaningless, a few of us taught ourselves how to program and a few of us built upon college IT jobs to go into system administration.
When we were younger, I think we generally had some pretty bad misconceptions about the software development as a whole, especially regarding relative difficulty compared to other careers. While the money and job security were the things that drove (most of) us in that direction originally, we've all become completely obsessed with a tech world that we generally misunderstood when we were younger. I've spent a lot of time trying to convince other out-of-work nerds to do what we did but I think most either don't believe you can get work without a CS degree (by assuming that we just got lucky) or think that it is well beyond their mental capacities. I'm not surprised a lot of unemployed americans are scared of trying something intimidating, but I think you'll see more and more young un(der)employed americans start learning code, especially as the learning resources become more and more available and more and more accessible.
I don't know about how other schools approached programming careers, but I know my school tried to make it out like you had to be some crazy math genius in order to do basic programming. Compound that with the fact that my school didn't offer any programming classes for people to even see if it was something they would be interested in, and we're left with me being the lone software engineer in from my school for the past several years. They scared everyone else away.
Because businesses want to cut corners and ignore the good practices and disciplines of software. Then they complain that it's the software engineers' fault.
I am left to wonder how everyone could have been so wrong in predicting that the world would be glutted with good programmers and sysadmins by now
I stopped reading the article at this point. Seriously. I've been programming for nearly 30 years and in that time no one ever thought there was a risk of our having a glut of good programmers. Ever.
Hell, finding good talent back then was much more difficult than it is now. So stop your whining.
There is another force in the market that the author is missing; there are a lot of quality engineers doing their own thing or starting their own company.
There is a tremendous difference between being able to "program" (the ability to type out syntax that will execute) and being able to design large, complex systems. Stop and think for a moment about the complexity in interaction between components in a modestly complex software product. I know plenty of people who can write code competently, but cannot design software very well.
The advantage older coders bring to the table is full-stack understanding, at least at the moment. Sure, maybe not as useful to bring your site off the ground, but MUCH more useful for any kind of optimization.
Because people great and small are afraid of programming. It is the big hidden terror inside of a circus box that grown-ups use to terrify children and village idiots.
Serious applications seem so complex with their millions of lines of code that people are simply scared off.
I know that the industry is now trying to entice youth and professionals to begin learning code with things like http://code.org, but they need to focus more on the rewards (i.e. like how much money you can make, and job stability even during economic crises).
Learning to code is hard, and you need to commit your brain to 3 years of serious edumacation, and then 5 years of industry experience if you want it to succeed.
"As Google hires all of the world’s good software engineers" - probably an exaggeration, but definitely not true. At least in UK salaries there are lagging, only good for experience and to have it on your CV. Any company is only hiring the best people they could identify of those who applied.
So the pool of great programmers is generally limited to those who love the job _so much_ that they’re willing to forgo income to do it. Someone with a “125 IQ” and strong math abilities could get a job on Wall Street, or as an actuary, etc and make more money for less frustration.
At Amazon, they target 75th percentile comp – but I really doubt they also target hiring 75th percentile developers on average. So they’re basically trying to hire 90th percentile employees for 75th percentile comp. I’d argue the entire industry does that in comparison to non-engineering industries.
The next time a CEO complains they can’t hire enough engineers, ask them how much over market they’re offering.