Times are great for programmers now. How does it end? • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by JohnBooty » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 3:53 AM UTC

czbond wrote: post #39

300bps wrote: 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…

>A large percentage of the total population is outright technology hostile and proud of it. Can you expand on this? I was one of the CompSci because I loved it people - and find it hard to fathom this - and could use some insight.

I'm not the parent poster, but I see this as well.

I think the majority of folks are comfortable with Netflix and smartphones and social media, but these are dead-simple and mostly passive experiences explicitly designed for the lowest common denominator in terms of technical proficiency.

Beyond that, a lot of people kind of hate technology.

And why shouldn't they? It's fucking horrible. Stuff breaks easy and gets obsoleted. Social media is a hellscape and actively makes them feel bad, a steep price to pay for seeing pics from their nieces and grandsons. Everybody hates the shitty touch controls in their cars that require you to click through a bunch of screens instead of just twisting a physical knob. Tons of consumer tech is literally spying on you. Most of it is user-hostile in some way or another, and at a minimum everything is trying to get you to sign up to some subscription service and will also stop working as soon as the manufacturer loses interest in keeping those servers running so you never feel like you actually own everything. You can't even enjoy Christmas morning any more; it's five hours of software updates.

Oh, and Slack and other communication tools are the thing their manager uses to harass them every five minutes. I bet a significant portion of the American population experiences a literal spike in blood pressure and cortisol levels when they hear that Slack notification SFX.

There's a lot of cool tech out there, but consumer technology is a fucking nightmare.

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

#82

Post by shiryel » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 3:57 AM UTC

ses1984 wrote: post #22

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.

That makes me think, doctors and lawyers have intensive training to minimize risk for other persons, each day our field has more impact on other's life, I wonder if we are heading to something similar...

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

#83

Post by irrational » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 3:59 AM UTC

> The markets are doing their thing. Everyone sees tech workers making money and just generally having a good time and they think: “Hey that sounds like a good career choice”.

It seems like you could replace tech workers with any other profession that sounds like a good career choice.

Can literally everyone (or even the majority) learn to code? Do they want to learn to code? In my experience, the answer to both questions is no.

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

#84

Post by polski-g » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 4:00 AM UTC

brailsafe wrote: post #32

adamredwoods wrote: post #24

>> 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 wil…

What about when everyone becomes a programmer (now) and starts a race to the bottom?

Not everyone has the cognitive ability to become a programmer.

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

#85

Post by strken » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 4:05 AM UTC

Kaze404 wrote: post #76

CydeWeys wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not about what you're allowed to do, it's about what professionals in a field need to do to get to the top.

I've been programming since I was 8. I've been drawing since I was 29. I will probably never reach the same percentile of drawing ability that I have with programming ability. That's okay for me because I enjoy it anyway, but from the perspective of training people to do their best work, starting younger can lead to higher ability.

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

#86

Post by beckingz » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 4:07 AM UTC

irrational wrote: post #83

> The markets are doing their thing. Everyone sees tech workers making money and just generally having a good time and they think: “Hey that sounds like a good career choice”. It seems like you could replace tech workers with any other profession that sounds like a good career choice. Can literally everyone (or even the majority) learn to code? Do they want to learn to code? In my experience, the answer to both quest…

The system works!

In reality, we will likely see some aspects of software development become less well compensated, while other aspects will continue to be rare and highly valued.

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

#87

Post by est31 » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 4:08 AM UTC

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?

Compared to law and medicine, programming is still a young profession. The field is evolving rapidly, and a lot of people are joining it. If the incentives remain as high as now, supply might eventually outstrip demand.

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

#88

Post by Apocryphon » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 4:10 AM UTC

jollybean wrote: post #38

Everyone in the US or a wealthy country pushing for 'remote work' is outsourcing themselves, ultimately. In the short term we get 'remote work' which some see as a benefit. In the medium term, absent the apparent advantage/willingness of people to be 'on prem' (in the minds of employers), it's just as easy to hire someone at 3/4 price from Europe, 1/2 price from E. Europe, 1/4 the price from India. While 'language an…

You're completely ignoring Canada and Latin America. Good luck dealing with timezones and language barriers.

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

#89

Post by Apocryphon » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 4:14 AM UTC

singron wrote: post #58

nostromo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that's true, but the interview process for a SWE is (I think) unusually rigorous. I'm often surprised when I talk to my friends in other fields who get hired after 1-2 hours of get-to-know-you interviews. Meanwhile, almost every SWE job has 4-6 hours of technical evaluation proctored by the incumbents. It's true that if someone has done 12+ years of college, med school, and residency, you can trust a little m…

It's just a more inefficient way of gatekeeping because instead of doing the Leetcode gauntlet once and you get a license or credential that actually means something, you have to run it at every single company you apply to.

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

#90

Post by mrtksn » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 4:17 AM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #72

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 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 e…

Just because it has not completed doesn't mean it isn't happening. These days very small number of people know how computers actually work(how many know assembly or even C?) but there's a huge number of people building their businesses by programming machines do things.

In the last 20 years, people were using languages close to English to express their ideas to a computer and make it do work. You touch computer science stuff only when you dive deep in something that hasn't been commercialised completely and when the market is large enough it quickly develops into services where you tell the computer do things in "plain English". The cloud is a good example where 20 years ago you would have to understand the architecture of server systems and networking, these days it's just a form you have to fill and express some rules about accessing the resources in "plain English".

Similar abstractions have been happening everywhere, from AI to game development or graphics generation everything is so abstracted that all you need is to learn the tool through a few tutorials to be productive.

Many people start from the high level abstractions and dive deeper later on since many years. You first build your multiplayer game, make some money and then maybe you learn about stuff like DNS, TCP/IP. That's only possible because networking and server management is completely abstracted and the game developers only interact with the cloud provider's SDK that handles all kind of edge cases and optimisations.