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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?

#71

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 have 1) Very stringent standards, particularly in Medicine 2) Doctors guilds control how many people get medical education 3) It's often 'nationally dependent' wherein skills are not always transferrable. 'Software Developer' can mean anything which has advantages and drawbacks. I for one, wish there were some kind of 'basic general certification' frankly. There are so many 'not very good devs' I…

Don't forget both lawyers and doctors also pay huge liability insurance premiums to practice.

And the licensure bars and boards also ensure some level of customer safety by having an independent agency to turn to in malpractice cases.

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

#72
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 would expect layers of abstraction to continue 
    to build up and programming to become something 
    like using spreadsheets to do your actual task.
But in general, people have been saying this for 50+ years.

It hasn't happened yet for (at least) two reasons.

1. Increased demands on programmers have increased at least as quickly as their productivity has skyrocketed.

2. Non-trivial systems will require some non-trivial encoding of business and data logic. You can simplify the tools all you like, but at some point the tools are no longer the limiting factor and some complex logic has got to be dictated to the dang computer, somehow, by somebody. It is then going to need to be tested and deployed. It is also going to have to be built in ways that are maintainable. Most programmers struggle with these things in 2022; we are nowhere near making this easy for laypeople. If anything I feel that infrastructure has gotten way more complicated in the last 10 years.

Something does need to change. The current situation is unsustainable, with programmers commanding insane salaries. At some point it becomes a limiting factor on the economy.

But our tools are decades away from being usable by non-programmers. I see no possible solution besides increasing the supply of programmers.

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

#73
post #66

Author seems to have a zero-sum world view, and think that everything that goes up must come down. I personally don't believe in either. Tech workers will continue to be in increasingly high demand, and automation, AI and "no-code" or "low-code" will only intensify that trend, not diminish it.

Agreed. Especially around three to ten years after the no code solution is implemented when it needs a full rewrite in order to do one of: decrease vendor lock-in, satisfy audit requirements (i.e. meaningful peer review), incorporate professional change management, or scale beyond what the relevant no code framework was designed for.

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

#74
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

How is not touching a programming language until college a bad thing? Some people just want to make a living out of software engineering and then go home and they aren't sweating over Web 4.0 or whatever we are on now.

There are exceptions to the rule. I know good engineers who started quite late in life.

But in general, I don't see a deluge of kids eager to become developers. Still seems very niche just like it always has been.

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

#75
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 this tends to overestimate the amount of time folks who aren't developers want to spend developing. Most spreadsheets, even of the complex variety, exist as steps in a chain of human decisions -- they basically replace notepaper and calculators. (Spreadsheets that act as inputs to software chains are usually created by developers.)

Having previously been involved in architecting and building enterprise low-code/no-code solutions, and then working as a strategy consultant thereafter (including partnering with other major low-code/no-code vendors), I can say that what the business wants to do is sketch out the rough plan of how a process works (with a couple of exception states) and have someone else go through not only the implementation, but the hard work of dealing with all the error states, data cleansing and ETL, deployment, and monitoring, while they get on with the hard work of actually doing their jobs. There just isn't an appetite for people to do two jobs at once.

What the article seems to miss is that companies are currently being much more aggressive in nearshoring work -- there's a huge boom in Mexico and LATAM development that's pushing up salaries there (as has happened in Eastern and Central European states). One thing that's distinct from the offshore boom is that, if you weren't a major consulting org, your offshore folks probably weren't colleagues, whereas with nearshore you're much more likely to see them integrated into the organization (again, due to TZ and the ability to fly someone in at the last minute for meetings). It'll be interesting to see what this does to the Mexican/LATAM economies -- Costa Rica, for example, with only $5mm people, punches way above its weight in software services exports.

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

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is not touching a programming language until college a bad thing? Some people just want to make a living out of software engineering and then go home and they aren't sweating over Web 4.0 or whatever we are on now.

18 is awfully old to start learning something for the first time. Imagine saying the same thing about math, reading, or history. It's harder to pick things up when you're older, and it leaves fewer people capable of it. See also: learning human languages.

This is the saddest thing I've read on this website. I hope for your own sake you allow yourself to learn new things in the future.

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

#77
Talking specifically about the web: We're still not there with no code tools and I don't know if there's a future where the very specific needs of businesses could be met with building blocks. Sure, designs, basic features--but there always seems to be the one feature that is outside of the scope of what the tool can provide and it can send the project tumbling down trying to shoehorn it in. The tools are getting better, but I think we're a long way away from where developers, at least strong backend or full stack developers need to worry about their job security.

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

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is not touching a programming language until college a bad thing? Some people just want to make a living out of software engineering and then go home and they aren't sweating over Web 4.0 or whatever we are on now.

18 is awfully old to start learning something for the first time. Imagine saying the same thing about math, reading, or history. It's harder to pick things up when you're older, and it leaves fewer people capable of it. See also: learning human languages.

No post body was provided.

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

#79

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

Actually AI will catch up to doctors and lawyers much faster than to programmers. In addition, programmers have many more domains that they can switch into, however, once the AI lawyer or AI doctor will rise, it would practically replace 90% of the lawyers/doctors.

this is true for certain activities like structured information retrieval; legal opinion and binding decisions are not what is on the line.

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

#80

> Developers are expensive. If a new IDE shows up and they can deliver stuff 5% faster, that means you can have 5% less programmers! Of course the IDE has a price, but it is almost certainly cheaper than 5% of a developer. Dev work is nebulous enough that very few companies seem willing to invest in dev tooling. I've heard nothing but good things about JRebel for example and how it keeps people focused instead of swo…

I’m aloud to pretty much expense any tool at work as long as I can justify it. I’ve never been asked to justify it, but that’s the rule. I think I probably expense a hundred bucks a month on tools.

Please make a list for the rest of us and post about it.
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