I don't think its low skill/high supply that's the problem here. The fact is a nanny is only servicing one family and so their entire economic input must be a fraction of that family's income. Same problem hair stylist faces compared to a software developer. You can only cut so many heads of hair in a single day which limits your total possible income to a fraction of mine because a billion people can buy my software. Its just the way it is and barring some major change in how society is structured, the way it will always be.
I don't think it's so clear cut. Baumol costs disease already goes a long way, and developers only receive exponential rewards if they have significant equity. Some can go solo or succeed at the startup route but they are a minority.
Furthermore, with AI becoming increasingly sophisticated, we might see a seachange in developer salaries with only the most talented and valuable devs getting massive increases and all the rest being made redundant. Leading us back to the low skill/high supply problem.
Very true. I see that bi-modal salary distribution is already happening in many places. In fact at lot of places even pretty good s/w skills might not matter. So there are run-of-the-mill Java/.net/PHP etc developer jobs which will get a low band salary irrespective of actual skill level. And then Reactive/Mobile/Kubernetes/Deep-learning developer jobs which by default are set in higher-band salary.
Another thing I think in cloud with pre-packaged solution (not just individual pieces of sw/hw) for most common situations and metered billing, providers are going to take major chunks of IT budgets. It would be similar to past when hardware cost was high so developer would get lower portion of overall budget.
In my mind the era of on-prem systems, custom solutions with high paying FTE jobs is coming to an end. And the myth developers are kings is going to go away along with that.
Yeah, 1-2 per cent of total IT workforce working for cloud providers will be compensated well. Remaining 95% will be either short term gigs or low pay FTE jobs called Cloud Connectivity Developer II and so on.
But different families have different levels of income, and there is a very long tail. If nannying paid better, it would just be a smaller fraction of families that could afford it. The fact is because it's a low skill/high supply labor pool, the equilibrium point is reasonably low, such that even many middle class households can afford nannies. For software yeah your cost could be borne by a billion people, but those billion people could instead bear the cost of a cheaper developer if they were available.
