Note 05 Software careers · 3 min read
Why do IT jobs pay so much?
On the effort of staying employable when the skills you spent years developing can lose their market value surprisingly quickly.
Have you ever wondered why IT jobs pay so much?
I used to think it was because you spend years learning the basics, gaining commercial experience, building a reputation, and eventually becoming someone companies are willing to pay well.
But eventually I came to a different conclusion, and AI becoming widespread has only made that feeling stronger.
In software engineering, especially frontend development, skills you spent years developing can lose a lot of their market value surprisingly quickly. You can become really good at something, build actual products with it, and then discover that it’s barely relevant to the jobs you want next.
Just look at a few examples from my own career:
jQuery: dead
CoffeeScript: dead
WordPress: kind of alive, but good luck finding a job unless you want to work for $3 an hour
Joomla: dead
Ember: dead
Webpack: dead (for good), replaced with Vite and esbuild
React: changed a ton of times from class components and lifecycle methods to functions and hooks, and from carefully managing memoization ourselves to having a compiler handle much of it.
HTML/CSS: changed enormously over the past decade.
And those are just the examples off the top of my head!
Of course, that knowledge doesn’t all disappear. Understanding JavaScript, debugging difficult problems, and making sensible architecture decisions carries over. But it can still feel like a considerable part of your learning effort goes into maintaining your employability rather than moving forward.
Sometimes I envy people working in fields like carpentry. I know their tools and techniques evolve too, but I envy the idea of practicing a craft for twenty years and having more of that experience remain directly useful.
I enjoy learning, I really do. But every day I’m less and less enthusiastic. I feel like I am doing something that goes straight to the trash can.
How do you deal with it? Do you ever feel like your knowledge is becoming outdated faster than you can update it?