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Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

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Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#281

Post by bradenb »

booleandilemma wrote: post #235

Yes. I’ve met people in marketing calling themselves programmers because they once wrote a PHP script. I’ve overheard high school-aged kids at the Starbucks talking about the differences between a developer and a designer. I’ve interviewed self-described “programmers” who struggle to write a for loop and “DBA”s who don’t know what the normal forms are. My family, none of whom are the least bit technical, casually thr…

To add another data point: I've never experienced any of these things, not even close. The closest I've come is a DBA brother-in-law that wanted to code full time asking me how I liked a particular language. Outside of work, I rarely even encounter other software developers.

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#283

Post by jyounker »

WilliamEdward wrote: post #91
rch wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lawyers have been around for a while, there doesn't seem to be a shortage of them, and the average salary is still relatively high. However the distribution of starting salaries has trended towards being bimodal ( https://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib ). I could imagine the same thing happening for programmers over time, if it hasn't already.

How is law anything like programming? the potential is endless in software and tech... Law careers have extreme limitations.

I think we in tech get rather full of ourselves.

Lawyers are specialists in negotiation, mediation, organizational procedures, persuasion, analysis of edge-cases of language and rule sets, evaluating the motives and thoughts of other humans and predicting their actions in ambiguous contexts, and quickly consuming and producing textual information under high pressure.

That seems like a pretty impressive toolbox that has broad applications across great swaths of human endeavor.

As it stands, many of my lawyer friends have contributed far more to humanity's greater good than I think any of my fellow techies have.

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#284

Post by CraneWorm »

zackmorris wrote: post #257
cheez wrote: post #2

As someone who hires programmers, no. It is difficult to hire good people. The only way I can successfully hire low-cost programmers is by building a system/machine for creating and releasing software that does not require a high level of intelligence/creativity. The only people that can make high margins in programming-heavy industries are those who can do this or some sort of defensible moat. As a programmer myself…

I am still basically an entry-level developer even though I've been doing it for 30 years (20 for money). The way I see this playing out is, something like behavior-driven development (BDD) where the business folks describe the functionality they desire, and programmers write up the backend logic. Then as AI progresses to AGI, a higher and higher percentage of that backend code will be generated by machine learning.…

How is this maintainable? What do you use to describe the inputs and the outputs (if it resembles a programing language then we're basically pushing people around, don't we)? Is AI supposed to design the interfaces as well as the plumbing?

Let's say, a bug appears. If the internals are produced by machine learning, chances are it's basically un-freakin-fixable from the high mountains of the spreadsheet/lisp interface. So someone has to dive in, and do it by hand. I doubt the business folk will do it, they won't know where to look!

The result, seems to me, is a metric-ton of machine generated code that now someone has to rewrite. Better hire a team to do it...

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#285

Post by dtech »

zrobotics wrote: post #278
hopler wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Games in 1985 shipped with bugs baked in that people were just stuck with. Civilization had a broken Gandhi, and still shipped 4 different bugfix versions.

No game (or any large software project) is ever bug-free, but the standards were higher than they are now. Fallout 76 was literally unplayable on launch-a fairly early mainline quest was broken, so it wasn't possible to reach the endgame. Was civ unbeatable on release? Sure, ghandi was bugged, but that was entertaining enough they kept the bug in the sequels.

There were plenty of bad and buggy games in the 80's, it even crashed the market [1]. We just don't remember them.

Also modern non-indie games are orders of magnitude larger and intricate than 80's games, and have about the same distrubution of quality/bugs. They're now made by teams of size 10-1000 rather than 1-10 though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#286

Post by rch »

jenscow wrote: post #196
peteradio wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think barrier to entry for lawyers is way higher than for programming.

Can you imagine hiring a self-taught lawyer?

I believe some states will let you simply take the bar exam and start practicing.

Of course, one would probably get started by clerking or working into a paralegal position, both of which would require independent study and coursework.

Sometimes people just need a cheap lawyer to take a look at a simple will or divorce papers, etc.

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#287

Post by sjg007 »

stickfigure wrote: post #71
shantanubala wrote: post #9

I think programmers tend to underestimate the difficulties involved with becoming a good programmer because once you're good, you only see the even steeper learning curve ahead of you. Some of the smartest people I know work in other domains: biology, chemistry, and even physics. They are sometimes baffled by tasks that seem trivial to me, and I'm under no impression that I'm more intelligent than them. I simply spec…

I think the comparison to biology/chemistry/physics is interesting. Perhaps even more than software, there's a huge spread between the value of low and high performers - the best scientists make new discoveries that can be worth billions. On the other hand, if you think the software industry has a hard time figuring out (at hiring time) who the high performers are... science is driven by serendipity. Nobody can predi…

I think they expect to not have to face another Google or Facebook to compete with by hiring everyone at 3-4x. Then employees just rotate among the big techs. The big techs then decide where they want to compete with each other... e.g Netflix and amazon video/prime... so if stocks decline I’d expect a rise in bonus or base pay or more stock.

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#288

Post by sjg007 »

criddell wrote: post #270
shantanubala wrote: post #9

I think programmers tend to underestimate the difficulties involved with becoming a good programmer because once you're good, you only see the even steeper learning curve ahead of you. Some of the smartest people I know work in other domains: biology, chemistry, and even physics. They are sometimes baffled by tasks that seem trivial to me, and I'm under no impression that I'm more intelligent than them. I simply spec…

> they program to accomplish other tasks in their domain of expertise My kids have mentioned that they might be interested in a degree in computer science because and I've encouraged them to combine that with a second area of specialization. Programmers are everywhere, but a programmer that also knows chemistry or biology or economics or art history or just about anything stands out.

Maybe. I studied CS and bioinformatics. You end up competing with both pure CS folks and also the bio folks that are bioinformaticians. Still I generally agree that some domain expertise is helpful.

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#289

Post by duderific »

empath75 wrote: post #245
duderific wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dot com bubble caused a salary bust because so many companies that were employing lots of people went out of business. This put a glut of programmers on the market with nowhere to work, which predictably pushed salary levels down. This is nothing like the current environment, where there is a consistent demand for programming talent which outstrips the supply, and the industry as a whole is far more stable. Of co…

If the current tech bubble bursts, it’s going to absolutely wreck amazon, fb and google—the three companies that actually gain most of the benefit from all these tech companies blowing their funding on ads and AWS spend. Those are the companies driving up salaries — once that rollercoast ride stops I imagine that there are going to be mass layoffs and salary readjustments for years afterwards.

What is the current tech bubble, exactly? Those companies you mentioned have absolutely massive revenues and profits, and plenty of non-tech people and companies are responsible for those revenues and profits. This was not the case in the earlier bubble (lots of overvalued companies with little or no revenues).

What seems more likely is that the little startups will get crushed as VC funding dries up.

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#290

Post by muzani »

Bubbles happen when prices are much higher than the actual value. Usually they're propped up by someone trying to resell the thing to a higher buyer, or package it as an investment.

Real estate bubble is visible when the apartment ads say "good ROI" instead of "nice place to live". Crypto bubbles appear when people are talking about market cap more than they use it.

But right now programming is in an optimal situation. It's hard to do, making supply low. Demand is very high; while we have all kinds of startups there are more to do. That creates high prices. IIRC FAANG makes about $400k per employee. In those situations paying $200k for a senior is far more sustainable than other tech fields which operate at a much smaller margin.

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