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Comment by greenhouse_gas | Hacker News Reader

If you think about it, how many web designers were knocked out by WordPress?

How many programmers were knocked out by C?

If you think about it, how many web designers were knocked out by WordPress?

Are you assuming it's a small number? It seems reasonable to assume that without WordPress we might have another 10,000 web designers. Or 100,000. Or 0. Or -10,000 if WP theme design increased the size of the web industry. We don't know.

These sorts of notionally statistical questions breakdown when you try to use "common sense" or logic-but-without-data to answer them. We have no way of knowing what might have happened without WordPress.

No I don't. I think it's a huge number. Think about all those diners, souvenir shops, whatever, who need websites no longer go to mom-and-pop website designers but click, click, click and they have a decent WordPress installation.

Remember those "website for $100” ads? All gone.

But my point is that this was going on for a while.

How many code-monkeys (who are real humans with real needs) can't find a job now because modern high level languages take out so much of the monotony of programming in the 50s?

How big would MS have to be if all code was written in Assembly?

For that matter: computer used to be a job description, not a piece of hardware.

I think because its so easy & cheap to create websites using wordpress, we have so many websites. Without that I think a lot of demand will disappear. So while there is some impact on web designers, it will be at the low end and unlikely to be huge.

The C programming language undoubtedly reduced the cost of making software. However, an increase in efficiency (in this by reducing labor costs) can often actually increase overall demand, as new use cases become economically viable. There's a term for this phenomenon, but I can't remember it at the moment.

I think the increase in prevalence of software since C was created provides some empirical evidence that this dynamic was occurring (and perhaps still is).

WordPress is a bit trickier as it allows non-technical people to implement working software. However, isn't there a booming market of WordPress devs who do more complex customizations? Such work is different than being a full stack engineer at Google, but it is still a technical role that produces software.

It probably affected the DMV and grocery hiring pools more. Not that WP is for dummies, but it absorbed many people who back in the day were underemployed, intellectually and creatively.

But you don't need to be a programmer to install (and keep up to date) WordPress.

In fact, you can be a business owner, set aside a Sunday, and you're done. You don't need to hire anyone

But you don't need to be a programmer to install (and keep up to date) WordPress.

That was essentially my point.

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