Ask HN: Are programmer salaries expected to drastically drop in the near future?

Yes it will going decrease but in certain situation.

If technology become common and lots of developers are in that same technology then changes are high that rate will go decrease.

But at same time you will find something latest, something complex and something which needs mastery to accomplish - for this salaries will remain high as it is.

'I wonder what would happen, if there were a language so complicated, so difficult to learn, that nobody would ever be able to swamp the market with programmers?' - Bjarne Stroustrup [1]

[1]. http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/I_did_it_for_you_all

The current tech bubble is likely to burst eventually. In 2000 when that happened jobs became harder to find.

That wasn't a dramatic drop, more of a bimodal thing where some did fine and some had no income at all.

"web dev" is going to go down. "engineering" is not. learn real skills.

if your skillset is "i can write crud apps", india is not your competition. AI is.

There is certainly an increase in the number of people interested in learning programming, but there's also a shift in the global economy where old enterprises are being modernised and therefore need programmers.

What I would seriously consider is to be really up to date with what programming skills you get. Maybe frontend isn't what you need, but AI and NLP is.

Seems pretty unlikely. Back in the early 2000's the freelance sites often had prices that were 1/10 or 1/20th of US rates. Unless these places are getting cheaper--and they're not, because the rates in a location mainly tend to increase--there's not much to fear.

It really depends on your skill level. Becoming an entry-level programmer, basic front-end dev, etc has become easier and easier in recent years, however the further you move up the ladder / the more advanced your skills get, the talent pool is small. Making the jump from journeyman programmer (what most bootcamps focus on) to software engineer with a solid grasp on CS fundamentals and running at scale is non-trivial.

No, I haven't worked at any company where we felt has enough engineers most of the time it was quite the opposite. A lot more industries are now augmented or being replaced with software.

Not to mention that those foreign programmers as plentiful as they may be, don't typically pass the bar for many of these companies. If so those countries would just build their own companies. Why would they even need to freelance here? This issue being building product is hard and silicon valley despite it's less than academic reputation has gotten really good at building things.

I don't see any evidence of saturation and as a hiring manager with a couple hundred person organization, I'm sure not budgeting for cuts or dramatic shifts downward in engineering labor cost.

As for programming jobs regressing to day-to-day job compensation, I don't see that as likely. In a good case (not even the "best" case), programming can create substantial multiples of the value created by a regular job. There's no reason for me to think that if we suddenly got more truly qualified engineers (that's a big "if"), that we wouldn't discover even more things that would demand qualified engineers to do and still be +EV for the companies.

Let me turn it around. What if you did know, with certainty, that programming jobs would regress in compensation. What would you do about it?

Freelancing sites are not good indicators of the industry at large, IMO. The rates on elance and similar sites have always been pretty low. gun.io is pretty much the only exception to this that I've found, and that's because they do some vetting of the clients beforehand. Highly recommend checking that out if you need work. I am not affiliated in any way with gun.io, other than being a happy user of their platform (as a freelancer).

Rates on freelancing websites were sky high for every non-western country (plus, you don't need pay tax on income from abroad), but people tend to die, age, or move on from development. This is in part a reflection of normal demograpgic trends. Freelancer rates were rising for the last 10y

Not in the near future for sure. Right now, programming is still contained (for the most part) to product development/ web stuff. The next step is for programming to leak into all aspects of business - from lead generation to marketing automation to operations optimization and really across all the boards. This is already happening in 'tech' companies, but will soon be prevalent across all industries. If you want job stability, learn code AND a non-technical skill like marketing, and you'll be gold.

Try talking to these cheap freelance developers, and look at the quality of code they produce.

Yes, in general, available work will decline significantly as will pay. That said, there will be an ever-narrowing niche for work that requires extremely high skill and that pays unprecedentedly and increasingly high returns. This is because every time a piece of software antiquates a former programming market, that software requires a shrinking group of even more talented coders to develop.

We're seeing this in machine learning right now. Machine learning can replace a lot of the code we used to implement with expert systems or rote heuristics. If you can develop that code (and not many can), you can command unusually high salaries, but there will come a time when developing machine intelligence becomes fairly straightforward itself. In fact, this is already beginning to happen. And then even these coders with their rare skills will start to see their salaries fall.

This has been a consistent pattern throughout the history of software engineering. However, I believe we're going to see salaries fall off a cliff soon, because I believe we're actually quite close to automating good software engineering in general.

It's going to be amusing, as a lot of the best coders feel particularly superior and entitled to their impressive compensations.

The answer to your question is the same as: will the cost of living drastically drop in the near future?

Nope. Salaries? Same.