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Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

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381–390 of 407 posts

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

#381

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…

Oddly enough, I think learning to program is easy, but only for a few people. And those are the people who are motivated to learn it as an end unto itself. I was motivated because my older brother, and my mom, had already learned how to program, and they were quite excited about it. After getting past a few familiar conceptual hurdles, it became very easy for me to learn programming myself. People who are only motiva…

"""I don't program for a living today, but my ability to program is definitely a force multiplier for my work. It has either improved my earnings, or improved the continuity and longevity of my career."""

may I ask what domain you are working in? Can you give some examples of how you've slipped in some programming knowledge into other job tasks? I love to hear people's anecdotal problem/solution approaches. Was the programming side of it actually slipping in some VBA/chrome extension/javascript or was it more of just an 'analytical' approach taken to a business decision.

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

#382
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did that once. It was great. Got me to my dream job (spoilers: I do not write code for a living).

curious, what do you now?

I work for a gaming/toy company managing RPG related miniatures (among other things). It's not a very technical role, but the tech background helps in a lot of ways.

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

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oddly enough, I think learning to program is easy, but only for a few people. And those are the people who are motivated to learn it as an end unto itself. I was motivated because my older brother, and my mom, had already learned how to program, and they were quite excited about it. After getting past a few familiar conceptual hurdles, it became very easy for me to learn programming myself. People who are only motiva…

"""I don't program for a living today, but my ability to program is definitely a force multiplier for my work. It has either improved my earnings, or improved the continuity and longevity of my career.""" may I ask what domain you are working in? Can you give some examples of how you've slipped in some programming knowledge into other job tasks? I love to hear people's anecdotal problem/solution approaches. Was the p…

My background is in math and physics. While studying those subjects in college, I learned programming on my own. Today, I develop technology for fancy measurement and control equipment. When I say I don't program for a living, I mean that it's not my job title, and my managers may actually be unaware of the role of programming in my work.

I use programming extensively as a problem solving tool, for things like data analysis, modeling, automation of experiments, and prototyping. Almost all modern equipment is electronic and computerized. To be capable of rolling out an MVP on my own, I program.

You will rarely see my computer without a Jupyter notebook on the desktop. ;-)

In addition to working in a computerized field, program code is just a super powerful way to express ideas. And the disciplines of good programming practices (yes, learn them) provide ways to organize the innards of complex things, so they actually have a fighting chance of working and being right. Plus, it's fun.

People who work as full time programmers may make more money than me, but I'm not sure that I can do their jobs. When thinking of any profession, a person should not only look at the cool, fun stuff, or the money, but what the actual daily grind looks like, because that's what you have to survive.

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

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And with anti-collusion labor protections, engineers stood to make even more. In the US, union workers make between 10% to 30% more than their non-union peers[1]. You're comparing pay across two different economies and only looking at unionization as a variable. It's like wondering why engineer rates in Omaha, Nebraska aren't on par with those in New York, and concluding that it has something to do with differing fir…

> And with anti-collusion labor protections, engineers stood to make even more. Correct, but these protections exist (and existed at the time) independent from a union. > In the US, union workers make between 10% to 30% more than their non-union peers There's very few high-skill jobs which are commonly unionized. In a market where supply is greater than demand, then yes unions have absolutely shown to improve worker…

> There's very few high-skill jobs which are commonly unionized.

Sure there are. Doctors and actors, to name just a couple. In both cases the "union" actively works to create barriers to entry.

The AMA colludes with medical schools to set artificially-low student body quotas. If you've ever wondered why teaching "XYZ for pre-meds" is such a miserable experience, this is why. You have to earn straight A's to get into med school because there are so many more qualified candidates than openings (but it's not clear to me how, say, art history or algebra-based physics makes you a better doctor).

SAG (the screen actors guild) requires actors to have already performed in a SAG production a a condition of membership. And they also strictly limit the number of non-SAG performers on SAG productions. That chicken-and-egg problem was very intentional

If you've ever taken a macro economics course, you know what effect these actions have on prices.

> I'm not aware of any evidence for markets where demand outstrips supply (like that for skilled software engineers). It's not immediately clear that union protections would be beneficial.

See above. Unions can create a market where demand outstrips supply.

> If unions are better for workers, why is it that a non-union area !!with a cartel depressing wages!! was still substantially better for workers than a unioned area with no such issue? Saying "oh the market is different" ignores the question of why the market is different.

So tell me why professional associations exist, then. Why do doctors form a union to increase wages, if as you say, they would be better off without it?

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

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And with anti-collusion labor protections, engineers stood to make even more. Correct, but these protections exist (and existed at the time) independent from a union. > In the US, union workers make between 10% to 30% more than their non-union peers There's very few high-skill jobs which are commonly unionized. In a market where supply is greater than demand, then yes unions have absolutely shown to improve worker…

> There's very few high-skill jobs which are commonly unionized. Sure there are. Doctors and actors, to name just a couple. In both cases the "union" actively works to create barriers to entry. The AMA colludes with medical schools to set artificially-low student body quotas. If you've ever wondered why teaching "XYZ for pre-meds" is such a miserable experience, this is why. You have to earn straight A's to get into…

> Sure there are. Doctors and actors, to name just a couple. In both cases the "union" actively works to create barriers to entry.

Neither the SAG nor the AMA are unions in the traditional sense. In many ways, the AMA actively works against worker quality of life (consider that the horrible conditions for med students/residents and the high suicide rate among MDs) to artificially reduce supply.

>Why do doctors form a union to increase wages, if as you say, they would be better off without it?

The AMA is mainly a lobbying organization, not a union. Since a significant percentage of doctors are in private practices or small practices, they don't have representation with the government. So sure, the AMA does collectively bargain with the US Government. But by that same token, since 53% of MDs are self employed, the AMA can't do "normal" union things like set wages, because there's no one to bargain with except the doctors themselves.

And interestingly, the AMA actually admitted that its intentional supply-reduction is hurting the medical industry as a whole. To answer your question, "because they thought it would be better". But in hindsight, they probably weren't.

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

#386

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…

Most programmers are not that well compensated. I never made more than 120k a year tops, I'm almost 50 years old. Not everyone is young and pretty and attractive to the Googles. The number of employers who compensate like this are tiny you can count them on one or two hands. 98% of programmers never make more than 100k. With nearly 30 years experience I build things that would bill out to $160,000 a month for an outs…

Do you live in a really high LOC area? Or are you exaggerating?

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

#387
Another factor is our tools are becoming more complex than necessary. I do a lot of "internal CRUD" programming, and the GUI IDE's of the latter half of the 90's took far less key-and-mouse-strokes to use, had more UI options, and used screen real-estate better. (They were clunky at first, but got better with time.) One could spend more time on analysis; you didn't need an army of coders.

The Web bleeped that up. Everyone hoped HTML5 would fill in the CRUD gaps, but it didn't. Thus, we still waste lots of time because the Web was not designed for CRUD and shoehorning CRUD into it is like backing an 18-wheeler truck into a parking slot. In the old days you just pointed your sadan steering wheel into the parking slot and DONE. JavaScript-centric UI's have proven too fragile. It's great for eye-candy, but not reliability.

Yes, I know there are some good Web stacks out there that can mostly overcome this, but they are rare and/or hard for managers to recognize. Their urge is to "keep up with the Joneses" even if the Joneses are doing something that doesn't help typical CRUD. Nobody can tell fads from good stuff.

One good invention and/or new standard could wipe out half of CRUD coders. I propose the industry experiment with a standard GUI Markup Language designed to do desktop-ish things out of the box and be more stateful. Mobile-friendly UI's are nice for mobile devices, but not good for regular office productivity. Desktops and mice still rule work.

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

#388
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I really love your storytelling even if I'm not sure I believe one whit! You should try your hand at writing books/blog posts/short stories if you haven't already.

Hah thanks, ya I don't even know what's real and what's not anymore. Someday we'll live in a society where grandma married a guy she met on the internet and the grandkids have to fill in their pre-learning questionnaire with all the stuff they've already learned on the internet so that the teacher can move on to the really important stuff that prepares them for getting their degree from Silicon Valley online university, where they'll major in pre-K robot childhood education. The year is 2029.

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

#389
post #307
post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fundamental CS tech was arguably better in the 1970s and 1980s, because it moved more slowly and you had time to get the details right. That doesn't matter if you're building say a mobile Ethereum wallet in 2018, because you're building for the user expectations of today, they don't care about data integrity or security as long as it doesn't fail during the period where they're deciding which tech to use, and softw…

I agree, back then there was not a mindset of move fast and break things. It was foundational research, a lot results and learnings from then are still applicable today.

> It was foundational research

In the 1980s there was a lot of "foundational research" (poorly re-inventing the wheel) for microcomputer people who did not know about the work done on large computers in the 1960s. Move fast and break things was also very much a thing for microcomputer manufacturers and most microcomputer software vendors. Look at how many releases software packages went through, and at what rate.

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

#390
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why you get downvoted, I'll upvote you. The "modern" database systems are now going back to the exact design principles that the books you refer to solved long time ago. There is tons of research, dissertations,.. that focuses on this from decades ago. Its just now that the new systems realize that these problems actually exist. If you dont know the history of a certain field and what came out, you repea…

I can assure you that the major theories behind modern big distributed databases were not written in decades old books.

Yes, some of those theories were also applied in decades old systems. Look up Tandem Computers and Teradata.
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