Yes, this industry is pretty much a race to the bottom (when it comes to wages) by adding methodologies and micromanagement at every corner to make people more “productive”. It’s just sad to see that most people don’t realize that they’re in the race to the bottom just because IT is still paying more than average and/or doesn’t require as many certificates as other fields to get into. The downside of the lack of professionalization is that people abuse developers everyday and the benefits like having more freedom to negotiate your higher than average salary are quickly vanishing in the fact of ever more complex software and big consulting companies taking over internal development teams and departments companies used to have.

To make things worse cloud / SaaS providers keep profiting from this mess by reconfiguring the entire development industry in a way that favors the sell of their services and takes away all the required knowledge developers used to have when it came to development and deploying solutions. Companies such as Microsoft and GitHub are all about re-creating and reconfiguring the way people develop software so everyone will be hostage of their platforms. We now have a generation of developers that doesn’t understand the basic of their tech stack, about networking, about DNS, about how to deploy a simple thing into a server that doesn’t use some orchestration with service x or isn’t a 3rd party cloud xyz deploy-from-github service.

Consulting companies who make software for others also benefit from this “reconfiguration” as they are able to hire more junior or less competent developers and transfer the complexities to those cloud services. The “experts” who work in consulting companies are part of this as they usually don’t even know how to do things without the property solutions. Let me give you an example, once I had to work with E&Y, one of those big consulting companies, and I realized some awkward things while having conversations with both low level employees and partners / middle management, they weren’t aware that there are alternatives most of the time. A manager of a digital transformation and cloud solutions team that started his career E&Y, wasn’t aware that there was open-source alternatives to Google Workplace and Microsoft 365 for e-mail. I probed a TON around that and the guy, a software engineer with an university degree, didn’t even know that was Postfix was and the history of email.

All those new technologies keep pushing this “develop and deploy” quickly and commoditizing development - it’s a negative feedback loop that never ends. Yes I say commoditizing development because if you look at it those techs only make it easier for the entry level developer and companies instead of hiring developers for their knowledge and ability to develop they’re just hiring “cheap monkeys” that are able to configure those technologies and cloud platforms to deliver something. At the end of the they the business of those cloud companies is transforming developer knowledge into products/services that companies can buy with a click.