I'm sure the absolute number of software engineers who have a background in CS is increasing. However, because of the massive increase in developers without a solid background in engineering or CS is increasing, the feeling in the industry matches the OP's sentiment, (which I've shared for a while now.) The ratio of quality developer to unskilled developer is worse than ever. This is what I've been referring to as the Blue-collarization of Software Development. I believe that building software is going to become much more similar to being an auto mechanic in the decades to come. There is absolutely a need and an availability of very skilled software developers, but the day to day work is going to be much more accessible to those without the rigorous CS background that one needed 10 years ago.
Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
61–70 of 97 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
#62I'd say it's the quality of SW Engineers has stayed roughly the same, but the quality of SW Engineering has gone up. I worked at eBay back in 2000ish when it was all C++ and there were still plenty of kids that didn't understand pointers very well etc. Now at least they don't have to as much.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
#63Just on your last point, I think that when we have the next economic crash some of these people, and also talented engineers as well, won't stick around in software engineering. Careers in technology have stages and not everyone stays a developer their whole career. It will be impossible to measure what exactly percentage what people without "a good CS background" leave.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
#64I honestly can't remember a time in my career when I've looked at a codebase and thought to myself "what this dev really needs is a more thorough understanding of CPU pipelines and virtual memory". Ed Yourdon once wrote something like "No project was ever cancelled because the developer couldn't address the serial bus". I'm much more concerned with bootcamp graduates not understanding good class design or appropriate…
I don't know of any project that was ever cancelled because of poor class design or lack of unit tests either. Sure they were hack jobs but if they met the needs of the customer then they were successful. Likely successful enough to be worth hiring you to fix those shortcuts. And allow you the free time to complain about craftsmanship on a public forum.
It depends on the industry vertical. If you have heisenbugs in your software, let alone poor design / lack of unit and functional tests in one industry, it may not matter. But it may end up killing someone in another industry.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
#65No, not at all, quite the opposite, actually.
It's also much easier today to write good high quality code than it was when I started professionally, which was ~15 years ago.
However, I never worked with a boot camp grad, only people with degrees.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
#66Yes. The quality of software has definitely gone down. Then again, so has the quality of everything else, from engineering to urban planning to infrastructure maintenance. A possible explanation for this phenomena is that the global mean IQ has also fallen quite a bit over the last 50 years and continues to fall[0]. [0]: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/IQ/1950-2050/
That's quite curious, because previously I thought the average intelligence was rising, to the point where the IQ had to be renormalized regularly for the mean to stay at 100.
This source [0] seems to agree with that view. What's the deal here?
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
#67The need to do good bold things has gone way down. The need to understand the machine has gone way down.
I'm way more concerned with that. Longer term, how SWE is supposed to maintain itself & train new generations when the field looks so homogenous & we are so well served is a prospect that does keep me up some nights.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
#68No, I don't think the quality has gone down. I think this outlook is a way of gatekeeping engineers who don't have a formal CS background. I happen to be one of them. Most people who go to a bootcamp (I did not, but have hired a developer who did) do not end up working in a role that requires understanding of the 5 topics above you mentioned, with the exception of cache and maybe algorithms. It's just not what most b…
I think you can get that knowledge from anywhere, and university education is only one path. That being said, that knowledge is REALLY important. I don't care if you come from a boot camp or not, but I wouldn't want to hire a developer that doesn't understand those 5 things (plus a lot more). I mean, you're using "gate keeping" as a pejorative, but, gate keeping is super important in any profession. Doctors and lawye…
Yes, clearly I am not advocating that anyone of any experience should be allowed to do any job. OP is positing that there is a decline in software quality because of developers who don't know those CS concepts. I don't agree.
If you're saying you wouldn't hire a developer who didn't know those concepts in your domain, OK.. I don't know what your domain is. Software is a huge field as I'm sure you know and there are many domains in which the requirements include understanding these CS concepts.
If you're saying you wouldn't hire a developer who didn't understand CPU pipelines in ANY software engineering context, I strongly believe you would be missing out on some highly skilled & capable people.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
#69I honestly can't remember a time in my career when I've looked at a codebase and thought to myself "what this dev really needs is a more thorough understanding of CPU pipelines and virtual memory". Ed Yourdon once wrote something like "No project was ever cancelled because the developer couldn't address the serial bus". I'm much more concerned with bootcamp graduates not understanding good class design or appropriate…
I'm in computer graphics, and find myself thinking "this dev really needs to better understand memory layout and computer architecture" all the time when I look at even basic code. A perfect example of this is looping over some range of pixels, and many will just go ahead and do for (x) for (y) setPixel(x, y, f(x, y)). There's no logic error here but it's still terrible when dealing with images in the usual memory or…
I'm currently studying EE and would like to get into embedded programming/semiconductor design, could you explain the optimal way to loop over the pixels if not with two nested for loops? Would it be something related to how in memory it's effectively a 1-D array?
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in computer graphics, and find myself thinking "this dev really needs to better understand memory layout and computer architecture" all the time when I look at even basic code. A perfect example of this is looping over some range of pixels, and many will just go ahead and do for (x) for (y) setPixel(x, y, f(x, y)). There's no logic error here but it's still terrible when dealing with images in the usual memory or…
I'm currently studying EE and would like to get into embedded programming/semiconductor design, could you explain the optimal way to loop over the pixels if not with two nested for loops? Would it be something related to how in memory it's effectively a 1-D array?
At the very least, the inner loop should be over X, since that is how the pixels are packed.