Ask HN: Is the modern software engineering industry turning into a cartel?

3 points by minionslave 7 years ago | 5 comments

Let's be honest with ourselves for a minute. We have a disdain for PHP, not because it's that terrible, but because too many people know it. The more people on the market, the cheaper our wages. So we move to something else, even if that something else if 10x harder to deploy.

We unknowingly restrict the supply of competent developers by constantly reinventing the wheel. Because once it becomes too popular, our wages go down.

Am I overthinking this, or is there some truth to this?

zzzzzzzza 7 years ago |

Basically untrue. Replacements for php are better than php. People coming up with those replacements aren't motivated by perpetuating a cartel. The cartel-like aspect is basically a side effect that helps new technologies pick up speed after a certain critical mass of early adopters has already been established. Another reason why people have to migrate to newer stuff is because that's where the good open source devs are, and lots of other people implicitly rely on their work, so once they move somewhere else, their previous ecosystem starts to die (it becomes harder to learn it on a deep level since it becomes much harder to participate deeply in the ecosystem, it doesn't get updated as frequently, etc.)

minionslave 7 years ago | |

That makes sense. There is some churn in the technologies but I would agree that python is far more consistent than PHP.

Maybe the evolving nature of the work requires new tools and technologies.

krapp 7 years ago |

>So we move to something else, even if that something else if 10x harder to deploy.

Developers might be creating that "something else" but they're not the ones making the decisions about what to deploy, or how much to pay someone to deploy it. As much as we might like to think otherwise, we don't have that much power.

nostrademons 7 years ago |

Cartel is probably the wrong word for this - a cartel usually involves a group of established producers that collude together to reduce the supply of the good they produce, thus driving up prices. If you're not an established producer (which someone just adopting a brand-new tech stack isn't, by definition), it's not a cartel.

I do think there's some truth to your observation, in that developers consciously or unconsciously try to differentiate in a way that limits the supply of developers of technologies they know and makes obsolete technologies they do not know. When there's a new hot technology that people want but few people can do, wages are really high, because of supply & demand. This makes everyone want to pile into the new emerging technologies and leave behind ones that have been commoditized. This in turn increases the supply of labor for that technology, which brings down prices, which makes workers seek out the next hot technology, and the cycle repeats.

This is just capitalism working as intended, though.

rajacombinator 7 years ago |

It’s closer to an anti-cartel according your definition. Software engineers are chronically underpaid relative to the value they create, due to poor social skills and confidence.