I believe we are vastly underestimating the number of programmers needed, as some companies reap unusually high rewards from hiring programmers. Companies like Google can pay huge sums of money to programmers because they make even higher sums of money from the programmer's work.
This means that they inflate programmer salaries, which makes it impossible for most companies that could benefit from software development to hire developers.
We could probably have five times as many software developers as we have now, and they would not be out of work; they would only decrease average salaries for programmers.
But if only Google or similarly sized companies can pay that well, and there’s tons of programmers, obviously the average salary will balance out lower than what Google pay but will still be competitive to the thousands of programmers who didn’t get hired at Google.
>but will still be competitive to the thousands of programmers who didn’t get hired at Google
Why would this be the case? Many programmers join Google or Meta (or similar tier companies) and immediately double or triple their income. Software salaries are famously bimodal and people often transition from the lower mode to the higher mode practically overnight.
In fact (and I'm not an economist) I conjecture that the lower mode exists because the upper mode exists. That is, people purposefully don't really care what their salary is (i.e. don't put upward wage pressure) when they're at lower-mode companies because they know one day they'll make the leap to the upper-mode. In other words, the fact that Google-tier companies pay well allows other companies to pay poorly because those guys are just padding their resumes to get a 350k job at Google and don't really care whether Bank of Nowhere pays them $90k or $110k.
If a company could benefit from software developers but can’t afford them, then they can purchase Saas offerings written by companies that can afford developers. I don’t think we’ve run out of opportunities to improve the business world with software quite yet.
This means that they inflate programmer salaries, which makes it impossible for most companies that could benefit from software development to hire developers.
We could probably have five times as many software developers as we have now, and they would not be out of work; they would only decrease average salaries for programmers.