
Ask HN: Is the modern software engineering industry turning into a cartel? - minionslave
Let&#x27;s be honest with ourselves for a minute. 
We have a disdain for PHP, not because it&#x27;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.<p>We unknowingly restrict the supply of competent developers by constantly reinventing the wheel. Because once it becomes too popular, our wages go down.<p>Am I overthinking this, or is there some truth to this?
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zzzzzzzza
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.)

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minionslave
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.

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krapp
>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.

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nostrademons
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.

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rajacombinator
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.

