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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?

#151

Post by Apocryphon »

echelon wrote: post #130
twblalock wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offices are still "happening" and will not go away. The current optimism about remote work is overly exuberant, and many people will be disappointed about the pullback of remote work over the next few years. Also, people are dreaming if they think Silicon Valley companies will continue to pay Silicon Valley salaries to workers in other locations, even if remote work continues to be broadly accepted. Furthermore, Indi…

> The current optimism about remote work is overly exuberant, and many people will be disappointed about the pullback of remote work over the next few years. Mostly anecdotal evidence follows. At my company, - Most teams have two or more remote ICs - A large percentage of teams have the majority of their ICs in a different location than their manager. - A large percentage of ICs are now no longer near an office (or i…

And it remains to be seen how well cross-organizational coordination in tech will fare across such disparate time zones.

And surely some of that funding would be going to local tech companies in those areas, and not simply branches of North American multinationals. All of these regions have their own businesses too, you know. Not everyone is raring to work remotely for Silicon Valley.

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

#152

Post by jasongi »

dehrmann wrote: post #137

> No code / Low code...But hey, deep learning was in a similar spot in the 90s and now we have real products that use it and it mostly works. The major difference is deep learning because viable because parallel computing became 3+ orders of magnitude cheaper. Low-code isn't limited by technical limitations, so I don't see anything changing anytime soon.

Don't really see low code replacing developers. You'll just see low code specialists like you do right like with CRMs and things like mulesoft.

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

#153

Post by Apocryphon »

bedobi wrote: post #150
Apocryphon wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have been living at the sufferance of zero interest rate policies for the last dozen years. It's hard to say what happens when the music starts slowing down. It just sounds like an extremely hubristic statement, mocking the very fates themselves, to claim that unlimited economic growth will continue indefinitely, that this era of cheap capital will continue indefinitely, and there wouldn't even be one economic dow…

Literally no one is saying there can't or won't be downturns or hiccups - eg, two world wars definitely qualify as both. But even they couldn't stop the overwhelming, hundreds-year long global trend towards simultaneously increasing population AND prosperity. (which, btw, definitely did not have zero interest rates) But hey, don't take my word for it, see for yourself at eg https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty

Then I simply disagree with your framing of "everything that goes up must come down", which seems to ignore the existence of downturns and hiccups, and "tech workers will continue to be in increasingly high demand", which would be a much more questionable statement during such a downturn or hiccup. Such an economic slump would not be a pleasant time for anyone, even tech workers. It is good to be on guard against such an eventuality.

It’s also quite the fallacy to compare overall economic growth with one sector, or even one region. Ask how the Rust Belt has been doing these days in comparison to when Detroit was at its acme.

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

#154

Post by seanmcdirmid »

tupac_speedrap wrote: post #45
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…

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.

It is not bad for the individual (one can become a decent programmer without playing around with programming in childhood), but it is bad for society and our education system in general. Programming early can add a lot of color and value to a child’s development.

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

#156

Post by hackerfromthefu »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #21
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, "equali…

These are the kinds of companies that can't keep good talent.

Then then go to consulting companies and pay above market to get someone like me in when they need new systems built.

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

#157

Post by lambdasquirrel »

vparikh wrote: post #128

All it takes is two things: 1. The investor bubble to bust - and I think this will happen due to the soon to be rising interest rates making capital much more difficult too secure. 2. One of the big employers dumps devs into the market - say one of the FAANG companies has a sever downturn and lays of thousands of devs. Don't think it can happen - Facebook and Google are just a few regulations away from mass lay offs…

I think the answer is closer to this, and also a lot scarier. There are vast swaths of the economy that have got to be over-leveraged and just weird from all these years of low-to-negative interest rates. We really don't know where things will be at until we have to turn up those rates, and the Fed is walking on a precarious tightrope. If interest rates go back to where they were in the 80s, it could be a bloodbath in the streets.

That is why rates may end up going slower (in the grand scheme of things) than we might expect. There is a plausible scenario of the entire economy being in the VC heat-death scenario in the 80s that older tech folks had previously been expecting, but has been pushed out hitherto because of the combination of easy returns and easy money.

Then of course there's how it will play out in tech. Historically, returns in tech have indeed been driven by VC capital, which is one of the more speculative areas of the economy. But speaking as someone working at a company that isn't a FANG, it seems that there's a chunk of tech that has become more like traditional finance in terms of its microeconomic structure. You have highly leveraged workers whose labor is being amplified by a combination of machines and capital, but the capital isn't so much speculative as it is boring and predictable.

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

#158

Post by seanmcdirmid »

CydeWeys wrote: post #63
tupac_speedrap wrote: post #45

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.

One can learn a human language later in life, you just need to have a reason to do it. Kids are better at language acquisition because they have strong desire to communicate with people in their environment. There is no magical LAD that makes it easier for children, they are just extremely motivated.

Adults can be motivated also, but the situations for such motivations necessarily decrease as they are able to do what they want without learning new things. They aren’t less capable of learning, just less motivated to learn. That is easy enough to fix (extreme interest is a good motivator, for example).

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

#159

Post by lanstin »

hackerfromthefu wrote: post #119
mrtksn wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 scien…

This seems perhaps an idealistic take on how effective the layers of abstraction are. To examine just one of the examples >> these days it's just a form you hav to fill and express some rules about accessing the resources in "plain English". I'm of the opinion getting the cloud to run your systems effectively, and without blowing a large hole in your budget, may be a little harder than it seems from that sentence.

Because when you configure your AWS like this, you get public buckets and so on. With private datacenters, Dev Ops can mean Dev can be responsible for their own stuff; with AWS, DevOps is there to keep dev from sending all the company data to the whole world.

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

#160

Post by dehrmann »

JohnBooty wrote: post #74
tupac_speedrap wrote: post #45

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.

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.

The other thing that gets missed is people who start young are so interested in computing they have lots of adjacent knowledge.
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