Salaries in IT are double most other industries, is that sustainable or are programmers and other engineers overpaid

It is sustainable in the sense that a good programmer or engineer can design and build something that is many times as valuable as the effort put in.

You can kind of see this in farming. One person can plant and grow a certain amount of food, but there is a limit to how much they can maintain just by hand. A person with an ox can do a much larger farm. A person with a tractor much larger again. A person with an automated tractor can do huge tracts of land. This is why “factory farming” is driving small farmers to the poor house. It simply takes many fewer people to grow the same amount of food. You see this in many industries.

Moreover, the programmer who writes the program that makes the tractor automatable has probably put 100s of people out of work, but given us the same amount of things to eat. Paying them twice what you pay another person means the owner of the tractor manufacturing company has pocketed a huge profit. The pay to the programmer is insignificant.

You see the same thing in many industries, warehousing being another one I am aware of. People used to walk warehouse floors to gather goods, put them in boxes and load them in trucks. These days those people are being replaced by robots. In some places, there are still people that do the “pick and place”, but robots are beginning to take over that job too.

And, yet we have not reached the point of no scarcity. We still need some people to farm. Not as many as we used to. And far less doing unskilled “manual labor” jobs. So, we have to have people who work, we can’t simply let everyone just sit around watching Netflix all day. However, the productivity leverage for having a “skill” is much higher than it used to be. This makes for enormous upheavals in society.

The period of the industrial revolution was the same. However, during the change from an agrarian to an industrial society was devastating to many people, simply read Dickens. Even a Christmas Carol or Oliver Twist makes the point obvious.

However, eventually the changes in society slowed and the world adapted to the new order. That may happen to this upheaval also. Or, we may have reached a tipping point where we continue changing so fast that society is in constant flux. It is hard to see the future when you are in the middle of it coming about.

For today, the ability to automate and the deregulation of industries is driving a change where the owners of companies are reaping huge rewards at the expense of those who have no skills or whose skills are outdated. Paying a programmer to help do that even at 10x what you pay others is still phenomenally profitable.

And, you don’t have to do it perfectly. If the programmer can do a good enough job that you have eliminated some people, but still need an IT person to keep it working, you pay both the programmer and the IT person both 2x, but you sill have eliminated a bunch of other jobs.