A few days ago, a post entitled Autoworkers of Our Generation appeared, comparing the automobile industry of fifty years ago to software development today. In his post, Greg Baugues argues that 50 years ago, autoworkers enjoyed the same demand and perks that software developers receive today. Autoworkers held a job that didn’t require a degree and paid handsomely enough to sustain a single-income household.

The key aspect of Baugues’ post is a comparison of the analogous demand of the 1980s Detroit auto worker to the developer of the new millennium. Baugues argues that autoworkers were paid a higher salary for several decades because their work could not yet be automated to a significant degree. That perception was later changed by manufacturing approaches, competition and automation. Baugues contends that software development will not suffer such a fate because developers perform highly skilled work that cannot be automated.

Software developers don’t build the same system again and again for less money, and development leans toward creating new and exciting systems with more features and customization, often resulting in higher incentives. At this particular moment in history, the demand for developers outpaces supply. Without enough staff to go around, companies fight for talent, offering huge salaries, cool offices, flexible hours, and even in-house chefs.

“Today, you can accomplish with $30/month on Shopify what took $500,000 in custom development ten years ago. WordPress does in fifteen minutes what once kept a freelancer busy for two months. Stripe dropped the cost of credit card integration by five-figures,” Baugues said.

Kingdom of Programming?

A few disagreements were provided and a few agreements appeared as well on Hacker News in a debate on whether software developers are the autoworkers of our generation.

One user stated that comparing software automation to automobile automation is apples-and-oranges. With automobiles, workers had a union which artificially inflated wages. People kept their jobs for life because of the union, which did not allow supply and demand to reflect proper economics. Additionally, automation only works well for mass production.

In the heyday of the automotive industry, the best auto worker in the world produced about the same output as the average auto worker. In reality, the market pays for long-term productivity.

Software development, on the other hand, is much more customizable, with many little tweaks offering an edge to the software. There is no way to automate this. As technology changes, software must adapt and change with it.

Another respondent commented that the amount of data we digitize is growing at an astonishing rate and someone has to write code to deal with it. The demand for technology is to provide a competitive advantage, likewise. As soon as a process category becomes commoditized the attention moves up the chain to something more complex that provides new capability.

If the need for the developer market ever ceases, innovation would die and the industry would go stale. Luckily, tech savants continue creating new markets–from the smartphone market to tablets, to cloud computing, business platforms, wearable technology, and well, just about everything.