Digital Transformation and Economic Inequality in the IT Workforce: Task Displacement, Firm Rents, and the Narrowing of Entry Pathways.

The paper reports no causal estimates. The qualitative component is documentary rather than interview-based, which means it captures how the phenomenon is discussed rather than how it is experienced; a study drawing on interviews with junior developers, hiring managers, and capability centre leads would test the archetypes in Section 4.2 far more directly. The corpus was assembled purposefully and coded by one analyst without inter-rater checks, so the theme salience recorded in Figure 2 should be read as a structured reading rather than as a measurement. The framework has no dynamic supply response. If computing enrolment falls in response to visible entry difficulty, junior supply tightens and the long-run predictions change, possibly substantially. Building an equilibrium version with endogenous entry is the most important extension. The geographic analysis rests on industry sources with commercial interests in the trends they report. Consultancies selling capability centre services and staffing platforms selling contractor placement are not disinterested observers of capability centre growth or contractor share. Academic replication using firm filings and national statistics is needed before P3 should carry much weight. The distributional composition of the affected workforce is described but not modelled. Gender, ethnicity, disability, institutional pedigree, and immigration status all shape access to entry-level positions and to high-premium employers, and a framework about who loses from entry-level compression that does not model who was obtaining entry-level positions in the first place is incomplete in a way that matters. Digital transformation is no longer a process that happens to other occupations while IT workers collect the returns. It is restructuring the IT workforce internally, through at least four mechanisms that current designs cannot separate, and the resulting inequality is generated as much by employer identity and entry timing as by anything a worker knows how to do. The qualitative analysis adds a specific reason for the measurement gap: the two mechanisms most likely to determine who captures the returns are each visible to only one community of observers, and neither is positioned to measure the other's variable. Closing that gap requires data access that mostly sits inside firms, and the research community has not yet made a serious collective case for it.

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