Today, I ran across this quote, which I will surgically alter at first.

Nowadays one often encounters the opinion that __ ___ _______ programming has been an overpaid profession, and that in the coming years programmer salaries may be expected to go down.

You might think this quote can be found in a discussion written today. But no. The words missing from the quote are "in the sixties". This quote is from a 1972 lecture entitled The Humble Programmer given by Edsger W. Dijkstra when he accepted the ACM Turing Award.

It is interesting to note that the lecture's speculation of hardware costs going down has come to pass, and almost unimaginably so when you consider cost relative to computing power. But the cost of software development has not seemed to decrease. It seems the opposite in fact, that devs are compensated better today than back then, and even more of us are needed. And that the tech industry has mostly accepted the cost paradigm flip -- that (custom) software now costs significantly more than hardware.

Thoughts?