Your two data points don't mean much because we're talking about macro trends and whether a 'shortage' actually exists. Specifically I'm asking someone to justify the assertion that there is a shortage of good programmers with some numbers, and I pointed out that job openings is essentially just market 'bids' and therefore not a very good metric since all markets have lots of 'bids' at well below market price. For some reason in the world of programming we take those low bids more seriously than in other fields which is inconsistent. The best metric that I know of, market price, does not indicate a shortage relative to legal and medical work, since both doctors and lawyers both have higher averages, and yet you rarely hear about shortages in those fields and how we need to more aggressively train more. So your point about how you individually make a lot of money is a bit of non-sequitur.
As for legal work, the median starting salary for the top 14 schools (remember, there is a shortage of 'good' programmers) is still 160K+. How many good programmers start there? Sure lower-grade lawyers don't make much, but neither do lower-grade programmers. Facebook and Microsoft both have reasonably high hiring standards and are complaining about a shortage of people over their threshold. As for 'the rest of us', the average lawyer salary is higher than the average software engineer salary. There are a lot of low paid software engineers too, it's absurd to compare only the highest paid software engineers to all lawyers which it seems you tried to do.
The fact that you can see the average lawyer salary being higher than the average software engineer salary, and still claim there a meltdown in the former industry while the second is struggling for people, just shows how deeply ingrained our cultural perspective of what job markets and compensation for a given career 'should be', and how it skews our perspective away from the simple econ 101 supply and demand curves that tell the real story. Markets are a lot more honest than PR releases from billionare tech executives.
But on a side note I did like your blog post, I just think it's irrelevant to this conversation.
As for legal work, the median starting salary for the top 14 schools (remember, there is a shortage of 'good' programmers) is still 160K+. How many good programmers start there? Sure lower-grade lawyers don't make much, but neither do lower-grade programmers. Facebook and Microsoft both have reasonably high hiring standards and are complaining about a shortage of people over their threshold. As for 'the rest of us', the average lawyer salary is higher than the average software engineer salary. There are a lot of low paid software engineers too, it's absurd to compare only the highest paid software engineers to all lawyers which it seems you tried to do.
The fact that you can see the average lawyer salary being higher than the average software engineer salary, and still claim there a meltdown in the former industry while the second is struggling for people, just shows how deeply ingrained our cultural perspective of what job markets and compensation for a given career 'should be', and how it skews our perspective away from the simple econ 101 supply and demand curves that tell the real story. Markets are a lot more honest than PR releases from billionare tech executives.
But on a side note I did like your blog post, I just think it's irrelevant to this conversation.