alt Hacker News> My tinfoil hat says that this is what tech CEOs want. They want workers that are low skilled and can be paid less.
I think it's useful to divide companies doing software development, as well as specific jobs within a company, into two groups:
1) Companies where software is the product - where what you are working on is directly what is making the company money, and differentiating what they sell from what other companies are selling. These are the jobs you want, and where you will be valued.
2) Companies where software is only a component of the product, regarded as non-critical, or not product related at all - just internal IT systems. These are NOT the jobs you want!
In a type 1) job the company (unless it is run by idiots) recognizes that better developers = better product = more profits. They will seek out experienced skilled developers and pay them what the market demands.
In a type 2) job you are not regarded as a profit-generating asset, but rather as overhead - an expense to be minimized. The company will be looking for the cheapest, least experienced people they think can do the job. Maybe they will outsource, and/or nowadays try to use LLMs as a way to avoid needing to hire better quality developers. The development work may still in fact be demanding and require skilled developers to be done well, but if the company mindset is that developers are an expense not an asset, then they will try to get the job done with the cheapest labor regardless.
So, yeah, if at all possible don't work on things like IT systems or on products where it is not blindingly obvious to management that software quality is directly related to profitability.
this is useful and thx for that, but there are more layers and variations. In some companies, marketing CxO has the budgets and therefore the power, while minions execute the vision. In other companies, there are capital assets, physical assets and historical non-public relationships.. In those companies, the security of control, and the power of those that do the control, guide the boardroom. Software is involved in basically all of these, but common goods software from a vendor plays a large role. Just these examples from imagination lead to many permutations of "how software devs are treated in the company"