>In 2008, the world turned against bankers, because many profited by exploiting their expertise in a rapidly accelerating field (financial instruments) over others’ ignorance of even basic concepts (adjustable-rate mortgages). How long before we software engineers find our profession in a similar position?
How long until doctors find themselves in a similar position? Medical bills are, after all, the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US, and US doctors are the highest paid on Earth.
Meanwhile, software gets ever more cheap and plentiful, and programmers literally give away much of the fruits of their labor for free under permissive licenses. Yet it's supposedly programmers that are in need of reflection and humbling.
Programmers are effectively being punished--by the anti-tech worker protests in the Bay Area, a hostile media (Gawker, Mother Jones, to name a few), and by the incessant push for more cheap, indentured labor in the form of H-1Bs--all because we have not yet organized ourselves into a protectionist racket to gouge the citizenry in the same way doctors have.
Unlike doctors, we have little prestige, yet we are still able to earn high-ish salaries, and that makes us an easy target for resentment: "How dare these 'coders' earn $100k when a lot of them don't even have degrees! I have an MA in Journalism, and yet I struggle to pay my bills!"
The backlash the author predicts is already underway, but not for the reasons he cites.
> How long until doctors find themselves in a similar position? Medical bills are, after all, the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US, and US doctors are the highest paid on Earth.
Blame medical insurance companies. Physicians must charge 10x what something actually costs because insurance companies will only pay 1/10 of the bill. This insurance company bullshit works all fine and dandy, until it lands on a poor uninsured bloke.
Ask yourself: "why the hell should a medical insurance company be for-profit?" Why should the top 5 medical insurance companies make _billions_ of dollars in _profit_ _every_ _month_ ?
Responses like this demonstrate just how well doctors have, with their high-prestige, managed to near-completely insulate themselves from just criticism.
"A clearer way to think about this is profits -- and insurers aren’t where the big profits in the health-care system go. In 2009, Forbes ranked health insurance as the 35th most profitable industry, with an anemic 2.2 percent return on revenue. To understand why the U.S. health-care system is so expensive, you need to travel higher up the Forbes list. The pharmaceutical industry was in third place, with a 19.9 percent return, and the medical products and equipment industry was right behind it, with a 16.3 percent return. Meanwhile, doctors are more likely than members of any other profession to have incomes in the top 1 percent."
Don't the physicians' associations artificially limit the number of students/graduates in a specific field? I had dinner with one urologist and he was boasting how great it was that there were no other urologists around and about his new house etc. I asked him how that surely wouldn't be corrected shortly by another doc serving the same area. He found it to be rather humorous, and explained there was very little new competition, even as many of his current colleagues were retiring.
> How long until doctors find themselves in a similar position? Medical bills are, after all, the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US, and US doctors are the highest paid on Earth.
Physician salaries are not the reason why average health care costs in the US are higher than the average in other developed countries—physician compensation is a very small part of the total overhead.
>As a physician and, prior to that, military officer, I have been struck by the fierce non-ethics of many software folks.
Yes! Compared to the noble physician, programmers like like Linus Torvalds (Linux, Git) and Richard Stallman (Emacs, GCC) who freely give away the fruits of their labor, even when it generates billions of dollars in value of which they reap only a tiny fraction, are nowhere near as ethical.
Physicians are so ethical, in fact, that medical bills are number one cause of bankruptcy in the US!
As a regular donor to FSF, I don't disagree with you. But very fundamental ethics are shoved in front of us constantly by the nature of the work.
You can definitely make solid arguments for or against the ethics of medicine, particularly as a business, and you can definitely make solid arguments for or against the ethics of the military.
My point is more that it's quite difficult to make a lot of arguments at all about software engineering ethics. Find me a book on ethical network administration at Barnes and Noble.
Does it make sense that doctors have to charge 10x just to even-out the insurance companies only paying 1/10 the price? Nope. You should direct your anger at for-profit medical insurance companies, which make billions of dollars in profit every month.
To your ethical claim: can engineers go to prison for being unethical? No. Can physicians? Yes.
"But that’s not remotely true. The last time the OECD looked at this (PDF), they found that, adjusted for local purchasing power, America has the highest-paid general practitioners in the world. And our specialists make more than specialists in every other country except the Netherlands. What’s even more striking, as the Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff observed last week, these highly paid doctors don’t buy us more doctors’ visits. Canada has about 25 percent more doctors’ consultations per capita than we do, and the average rich country has 50 percent more. This doctor compensation gap is hardly the only issue in overpriced American health care—overpriced medical equipment, pharmaceuticals, prescription drugs, and administrative overhead are all problems—but it’s a huge deal.
Doctors aren’t as politically attractive a target as insurance companies, hospital administrators, or big pharma, but there’s no rational basis for leaving their interests unscathed when tackling unduly expensive medicine."
I am pretty sure an engineer can face some kind of serious charges if they were negligent in part of a system that ended up killing people, like a faulty airplane
How long until doctors find themselves in a similar position? Medical bills are, after all, the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US, and US doctors are the highest paid on Earth.
Meanwhile, software gets ever more cheap and plentiful, and programmers literally give away much of the fruits of their labor for free under permissive licenses. Yet it's supposedly programmers that are in need of reflection and humbling.
Programmers are effectively being punished--by the anti-tech worker protests in the Bay Area, a hostile media (Gawker, Mother Jones, to name a few), and by the incessant push for more cheap, indentured labor in the form of H-1Bs--all because we have not yet organized ourselves into a protectionist racket to gouge the citizenry in the same way doctors have.
Unlike doctors, we have little prestige, yet we are still able to earn high-ish salaries, and that makes us an easy target for resentment: "How dare these 'coders' earn $100k when a lot of them don't even have degrees! I have an MA in Journalism, and yet I struggle to pay my bills!"
The backlash the author predicts is already underway, but not for the reasons he cites.