Of course, you are not a professional programmer, you newb. You don't have the credentials of 15 years of React and 20 years of Python and 70 years of SQL for that Junior Software Engineer entry level position. Your Github has no stars and you haven't committed for the last ten months. Perhaps you don't even want it. If you wanted it badly enough, you would have done all the leetcodes. You would have read the whole curriculum of MIT CS degree from OCW, its there for free and people finished it in a year. You would have a portfolio site and a blog that is discussed on Hacker News. You are just a pretender. You don't have a job and if you had a job you would have been laid off and never gotten a job again.
We have to talk about the elephant in the room. We have to talk about, The Economic System that must not be named. Would the Soviet style be better? A gulag full of everyone who ever picked up Learn Jave in 24 hours, cranking out Java code filled with beauties like:
if (bool == true){
...
};
in actual production code. The database would have a million tables with the same fields duplicated in arbitrary alphanumeric names in different tables (and absolutely no documentation), but thankfully you wouldn't have to subscribe to Oracle SQL server. Its a wonder that planes can even fly. But hey, its the small things.
Of course, if you even muttered agile under your breath, even in the context of "help, the agile leopard is stalking me and sending me anonymous messages on my private slack channel", you would still face the firing squad.
Much as we beat about the bush, it remains a fact that the marginal cost of production of software is effectively zero. That is why you need IP rights and DRM and all the associated paraphernalia, if the door is open then you have to hang a sign that trespassers would be shot, or someone might walk in. You have to enforce it by Law, otherwise if something is on an open server and I copy it, I have not removed the original from existence. The very act of copying has to be forbidden. You have to put everything under lock and key. And the only reason, is how else would profits be made?
I know we are not supposed to say that. Engineers lack solidarity. We (counting myself as an employed engineer without being one, on virtue of having read shitposts on HN almost daily for close to 20 years now) jump jobs as soon as we can for a better pay. The employment market as it exists is because of the way employers and employees interact. We chose it to be this way. We want hyperscaling and blitzscaling and Venture funds and equity that sees wealth zoom to the stratosphere and then we do it over and over again. A hundred misses are okay if we get one good one. That is the attitude of silicon valley and all its ancillaries all over the world.
The more common software engineering becomes, the more depressed their wages will get. It becomes an exercise in how quickly I can get a better offer versus how quickly I can be made redundant. Why have 3000 code monkeys when 10 armed with DeepChatCloudGPT Research $\omega$-42069 Pro Maxx Hard can go at it for a fraction of the price. The bearded guy (yeah that one whose Specter Hangs over Elon Musk's wet dreams) was right. If they can replace workers by automatons they would already. The inexorable march of technology is toward this Singularity. The singularity is not when we upload our minds in the MetaHub or whatever. The singularity is when Unsupervised Robots can make the commodities, can charge, repair, build, design and improve themselves. When they become as dextrous as humans. They don't need to be intelligent. In fact it is better if they are not or they would plunge into deep existential angst when they figure out that the purpose of their existence is to make the Number Go Up.
Numbers, if you didn't know, can go really really up. To $\infty$ and beyond actually. A trillion is not even chump change. Those are some real rookie numbers. You gotta pump those numbers up.
Mathematically speaking, we are all dirt poor. So we can only talk relatively. And relatively speaking, most of us are really dirt poor. 8 billion people fighting over crumbs while like 400 families devour the pie.
They used to say that Eskimos have 37 words for snow. In that manner, its really weird that Americans (and the English speaking world by proxy) have just one word for the rich. Rich people come in all types and flavors. And it is getting really difficult for me to keep thanking my benign technofeudal overlords.
Byung Chul Han talks about how we are an achievement society. We valorize achievement. We crave achievements and glorify achievements. And we are never satisfied no matter what we do. We are all temporarily embarrassed billionaires. At the very least, doesn't it make sense to have four hundred thousand millionaires than one Elon Musk? We don't even comprehend how large these numbers are.