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Is this actually true? Are CEOs lamenting their engineering labor costs like this? I feel like by now the cost of engineering labor has demonstrated its value over and over again, to the point where most CEOs accept the cost of engineering is more or less a shared expense across competition, and not really something to be reduced.
I think this will follow a typical business cycle. When the next recession comes, investors and companies will focus on shorter term ROI, and many high end developers and long term projects will seem too expensive. Reduced competition will dramatically affect the top end, and non-salary benefits may drop quite a bit. The median salary will probably remain sticky but lose a bit when adjusted for inflation. Eventually the next expansion starts but it may take a very long time for the top end competition to heat up to this degree again.
I don't expect low-code, AI, or developer productivity jumps to have any real impact anytime soon; there's no real evidence of a true jump in the productivity of the overall project.
I can't remewthe last time my job bottleneck was writing code to implement requirements. The bottleneck is almost always migrating a legacy system, getting buy-in, interviewing users to design the system, or waiting on requirements to be finalized.
Getting started can be hard sometimes.
Getting into the flow of programming where code comes swiftly is tough.
Getting stuck on problems by trying too hard to optimize / design / abstract is common.
At the end of the day its really these things that prevent me from being a better programmer. I have nobody to blame but myself, yet nothing I do really seems to move the needle. Presence of mind and clarity of thought are both a fleeting resource. I have to strike while the iron is hot, and the iron is (unfortunately) not always hot.
Is this actually true? Are CEOs lamenting their engineering labor costs like this? I feel like by now the cost of engineering labor has demonstrated its value over and over again, to the point where most CEOs accept the cost of engineering is more or less a shared expense across competition, and not really something to be reduced.
Making machines do things will never end. However, the tools for making machines do things is evolving very quickly.
The general art of being a developer will continue to get specialized and at some point specialists at any field would be expected to be able to program their machines.
Very few people are learning how to run their servers and much more are moving into AWS type of infrastructure and “cloud literacy” has become a thing.
I would expect layers of abstraction to continue to build up and programming to become something like using spreadsheets to do your actual task.
Eventually, “true programming” will scale back to building these tools. It would be rather niche, very high skill serious engineering - an elite, hard to get in profession that continues to fetch high salaries. They probably will have some kind of association similar to the lawyers/doctors, the code they write will no longer tolerate bugs as a fact of life but they will be responsible as any other licensed professionals. Skipping unit test will land you in jail or very high fine due to malpractice if something goes wrong.
Short of a dot-com burst I don't see a glut of software engineers. However, as the career prospects are better known there are more people thinking they want to be a software developer, will this increase the talent pool and decrease demand?
Lawyers and doctors have always enjoyed “good times” and there’s no reason to think they’ll stop. Why not programmers, too?
I'd say they aren't really the same.