I think we're the new independent professionals. Nobody has required a license to "practice technology" (yet, but I suspect California will find a way eventually...) and so we can do our job anywhere, for any hours, for any pay. Until bureaucracy swallows us up(as it does all professions ultimately) we'll have our golden age too.
It won't be bureaucracy that kills us but rather the inevitable grind of economics. Once our industry stops growing and the supply of programmers has a chance to catch up with demand, our bargaining position weakens and the impact will be felt across the board. Those in corporations will find higher expectations (even longer hours), less respect, lower pay, and fewer benefits. Those who are "independent" will find it more difficult to acquire funding, a higher probability of failure on launch, and lower returns even when they do manage to "crush it."
This has already happened to older engineering professions and it has already happened to sectors of the software engineering world that have a different supply/demand balance than the mainstream (see: game developers). It will happen to us too. Hopefully not in the near future.
The supply isn't growing that fast, given how the demographics are going and how poor most teaching is. And demand continues to grow very rapidly. If software really does eat the world, I can easily see a future where the number of available programming jobs exceeds the total population.
Damn, that was depressing, but after you say that I now agree with you. That's why we save aggressively...except for this year. This year, all my savings go to pay for a wedding I have very little choice about. This is the price of love. :(
I work in game development and the issue isn't that there aren't enough work, the issue is that there are too few people willing to buy games.
However I seriously doubt we will run out of work for programmers across all sectors - if we can code some business app to do something ten times as fast as a normal person takes to do it (likely a low bar) then there will always be businesses willing to pay for that.
Demand is too low, supply is too high... potato potahto.
We won't run out of work across all sectors. EEs still have work. Chemists and Biologists still have work. Aerospace engineers still have work. And lots of it! But the supply/demand balance has shifted enough in their respective sectors to have a very concrete impact on their compensation.
