They're paid in proportion to how much unique value they gatekeep.
Hence why Silicon Valley's masters were so keen on everybody learning to code in primary school and getting more women into the profession. They dream of making us more of a commodity, so that as the chief gatekeepers of the tech economic engine, they get to keep a larger slice of the pie we create.
Why is it bad that more people learn to code? I see this as a net benefit to humanity. Why do you want to gate-keep it?
It really was to put the prices down and benefit themselves, not to benefit humanity overall. They would never encourage people to learn mental health providing, physical therapy, exercises for their own health, they don't actually care about those.
A glut of coders only is good for the coders if there is enough overall business to keep them actually employed somehow. Otherwise you have a lot of people who don't spend time coding.
It was a positive statement. You're free to make whatever normative judgements about that that you please. I'm not here to stop you praising it.
We studies fairly advanced CS at school, without the 'tech oligarchy' making us (in Europe where this is non-existent anyway) and yet very few of us turned it into a career later in life because not everyone likes to do programing for a living and there's other lucrative jobs out there. Same at university, less than half of those who entered, managed to graduate in CS because it was tougher than people initially thought.
Cook, Zuckerberg, Musk and Bezos can't turn you into an productive CS if you don't have what it takes, they can't download CS theory into your brain like in 'The Matrix'. In fact, many of them are responsible for dumbing down the population when it comes to computers, so I guess we can actually "thank" them.
Only the last ~6-10 years saw an insanely large number of people get into the industry without CS background because of the super high demand driven by the mobile revolution, negative interest rates, crypto hype cycles and stuck-at-home pandemic, and not by the 'tech oligarchy'.
But that was potentially an once in a lifetime event which might never come back. The mobile market is now saturated, crypto is done, people are not stuck at home anymore and the negative rates are also over, plus a trade war and an actual war, meaning an industry slow down, but again, not dictated by the 'tech oligarchs' and more people choosing CS careers, but by market, geopolitics and financial circumstances.
You can argue with that or not but don't pretend you do not understand the capitalist ideal of an excess supply of labour so that salaries and benefits can be driven to legal minimums with desperate people still waiting to be hired no matter the indignity. Creating Labour surpluses to reduce Labour power and enable exploitation is not a "net benefit to humanity", it only benefits capital.
In our shitty world, you are only valued if you are in a position of more demand than the supply. You might get that by being lucky but most only get it by gatekeeping whether it's doctors or delivery drivers or companies buying up their competitors. If you stand idly by, the world will punish you.
Oh please, don't act so 'righteous-than-thou'. With this logic, aren't we all here who got into SW development responsible for increasing the labor supply and decreasing wages?
What's disingenuous, is people in traffic complaining there's traffic. It's sounds like you got "yours" and then you wanna kick down the ladder behind you.
Where does the buck stop? Who gets to decide who's deserving of getting into SW development without also being responsible for diluting wages, and who not?
