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Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

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Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#21

Post by AdrianB1 »

TameAntelope wrote: post #10

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.

Unfortunately yes, especially companies that are not IT but have a fair percentage of IT employees and salary bands; they don't like to have different salary bands between functions, like finance, marketing, IT, logistics, HR, etc. so there is a pressure to keep IT salaries in line with the other functions. Even if the IT guy with 2 years in the company brings 10 times more value than the 2 year bean counter, "equality, diversity and inclusion" is interpreted like "pay all people on the same salary band the same", especially when in finance/accounting you have mostly women* and in IT mostly men and you want, as a company CEO, to eliminate the "gender wage gap".

* At least in my country for most, if not all companies.

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#22

Post by ses1984 »

commandlinefan wrote: post #14

Lawyers and doctors have always enjoyed “good times” and there’s no reason to think they’ll stop. Why not programmers, too?

Programmers don’t have to go to expensive law school or medical school. Programmers don’t have to pass the bar. Programmers don’t have to work 80+ hours a week for years in residency. Programmers don’t have to work face to face with infected people and put themselves in harm’s way.

Times are, imo, much better for programmers than doctors or lawyers right now.

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#24

Post by adamredwoods »

>> The CEO’s job is to make as much profit as possible. Higher salaries mean less profit. It’s just how the game works.

I find this to be too simplified. The CEO's job is far beyond salaries alone.

>> Even if we enter some new dotcom bubble and a good chunk of our startup ecosystem dies off, demand for tech is spreading across all industries, businesses everywhere are digitizing their operations and these systems will need to be maintained somehow.

We're not in a bubble. We are in the information era, and cloud computing is helping drive this. The demand for programmers will go away when the human population saturates on robots and AI. We've barely scratched the surface.

The only other possible downturn I can think of is a social reaction to reject technology, and enter another type of 'dark age'.

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#25

Post by nostromo »

commandlinefan wrote: post #14

Lawyers and doctors have always enjoyed “good times” and there’s no reason to think they’ll stop. Why not programmers, too?

Lawyers and doctors in the US effectively have union-style control on the supply of lawyers and doctors, via the Bar Association and AMA.

Developers have no such labor association. We also have headwinds like H1-Bs, that push down our wages.

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#26

Post by 300bps »

mrtksn wrote: post #17

I think it ends with everyone becoming a developer. 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 int…

I think it ends with everyone becoming a developer

Not in a million years. When I was 10 I got my first computer and spent 12-16 hours per day on it every day learning BASIC, 6502 Assembly and many other languages.

All the adults at the time thought, “this is how all kids will be from now on!”

Except none of my peers did it. The generation after me only had a small percentage of people truly interested in computers and it hasn’t grown much since then.

I’ve interviewed a couple hundred computer science graduates from top schools for jobs and the vast majority of them didn’t touch their first programming language until college.

And these are computer science graduates! A large percentage of the total population is outright technology hostile and proud of it.

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#29

Post by wbl »

commandlinefan wrote: post #14

Lawyers and doctors have always enjoyed “good times” and there’s no reason to think they’ll stop. Why not programmers, too?

Lawyers have not had good times since the GFC. Biglaw stopped being as lucrative and no longer needs legions of associates to grep dead trees.

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#30

Post by notduncansmith »

ta78373764 wrote: post #13

Right now developer salaries have greatly risen at the top end - the max has risen much faster than the median. Much of the top end growth has been at companies benefitting from easy investor capital. 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. Redu…

> 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 respectfully disagree. I don’t think those productivity gains will be evenly distributed throughout the industry, but I think AI and developer tooling will evolve radically over the next decade and programming in 2032 will look quite different for some. Things like Github Copilot are just the beginning. Once programming becomes a matter of operating the AI, there will probably be very different hiring strategies and incentive structures for developers.

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