times are great? why?
Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?
171–180 of 611 posts
Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?
#172If you look at the data, software jobs are growing far faster than new graduates in computer science. A quick google search just found well over 250,000 open positions in the US, with about 50,000 new graduates per year. I'd bet we have decades more of high demand and high salaries for people with CS degrees. I wouldn't be surprised if low-code tools get good enough to power many websites though, so I wouldn't be qui…
the question is, how many of these jobs pay enough o comfortably provide for a family, buy a house and retire, and have enough in the bank to not have to worry about money.
Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?
#173If you look at the data, software jobs are growing far faster than new graduates in computer science. A quick google search just found well over 250,000 open positions in the US, with about 50,000 new graduates per year. I'd bet we have decades more of high demand and high salaries for people with CS degrees. I wouldn't be surprised if low-code tools get good enough to power many websites though, so I wouldn't be qui…
Maybe if we didn't make "Teaching Computer Science" such a worse job than "Being a Software Engineer" in so many ways. Of course, then we might accidentally start making "Teaching" a good job for folks, and that apparently is completely counter to the American ideal.
Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?
#174If you look at the data, software jobs are growing far faster than new graduates in computer science. A quick google search just found well over 250,000 open positions in the US, with about 50,000 new graduates per year. I'd bet we have decades more of high demand and high salaries for people with CS degrees. I wouldn't be surprised if low-code tools get good enough to power many websites though, so I wouldn't be qui…
the question is, how many of these jobs pay enough o comfortably provide for a family, buy a house and retire, and have enough in the bank to not have to worry about money.
not many jobs will offer those end results - CS related or not.
Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-co…
Couldn’t agree more with your second paragraph. A phrase that’s been drilled into me in the past year is “undifferentiated heavy lifting that’s not core to your business”. The things you listed just don’t matter from the business point of view. They don’t care how the app works, who runs it, what cloud provider is hosting it, what tools were used to build it, only that it works when it needs to and they will happily…
We humans reject the concept of exponential growth, specially when it can kill our way of life, and in that sense developers don't realize that 80% of our work could be automatize in the next few years.
I've been in the industry for more than 20 years now, and what's clear to me is that a lot of time is spent coding and debugging things that have been done previously plenty of times (Non Invented Here syndrome) and that in most cases are not core to our companies.
What I expect it's not so much things like Copilot or AlphaCode (that of course will be used) but serverless services that we'd plug into our solution (how many more login services do you want to implement AGAIN?), like we do right now with APIs, but at a higher level, with a standardized communication protocol between these services.
The same will happen the infra level, with only a few people creating and mantaining "low level" solutions while the rest of us will use abstracted services on top of that, like using Cloud Run instead of learning a massive APIs like k8s (I'm not saying that they're comparable right now, but at some point something evolved from Cloud Run will make learning k8s unnecessary)
What will happen once developers are freed from the most time intensive aspects of their job? Probably and for a few years the unmet demand for developers will cover our increase in productivity, but at some point I expect this job will face some of the problems you can see in other sectors.
Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?
#176I feel like we have so much leverage and don't use it at all.
We're still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor. It's nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this.
If anyone has read Developer Hegemony, I'm fully on board with that general premise - we start operating like lawyers with partnerships, and turn bosses into customers. Though that does require us to think of ourselves as professionals not nerds who are too smart for business.
Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nothing is different now. 1. Venture capital is making major investments in India, Europe, Latin America, and Asia. At a scale never before seen. 2. Offices will never happen again. Now employees could be in Antarctica for all you're concerned -- as long as they're on a relatively friendly time zone with the rest of their team, it'll work. This time is different.
From the USA, there aren’t very many friendly time zones. Both Europe and India are absolutely terrible time zone wise. I absolutely hate having very early and very late meetings (i.e., anything before 9 and after 5 Pacific time). Central and South America on the other hand…
It's somewhat OK if you're in the Eastern timezone. I work from Serbia with a NYC team and it's bearable.
Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?
#178> 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…
If you just made all your programers 5% faster, they are each more productive. Now you should hire more programmers because there's a wider range of things they can profitably work on.
Yes, this.
There are a lot of engineers out there that spend a most of their time in meetings, or writing design docs, or reviewing code, or a few dozen other thing that are not actually writing code. Much of that can’t be automated away. If you could get a machine to do much of the programming, that just leaves you with more time to work on the harder problems the business has to deal with, which likely means you’re able to deliver more value, and thus deserve more money.
And just think about it, what were Cobol and Fortran developers paid way back in the day? Not nearly as much as an engineer with comparable experience and education as someone today. They were also far rarer in breed. Engineers are paid much more today because the better tools we have now make us more productive and more capable of unlocking business value. Paying an engineer $500K today is worth it if they’re able to unlock $5 million in profits.
Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?
#179> No code / Low code > People have been trying this for decades and it never really worked out. I can’t think of a single product that was able to get to any meaningful degree of success running on top of some low code platform. Every. Single. Squarespace. Website. You probably interacted with several today without even knowing it. They’re everywhere. No code solutions have almost entirely killed the need for develop…
My impression is that low-code/no-code fails when it tries to be a generic, domain-agnostic solution for everything. People then realize that programming languages are complex for a reason.
However, when it is applied in a highly domain-specific way, like the shopping carts you mentioned, it's quite good. Basically, when that happens, actual programmers are solving the programming-related part of the problem and the product people have actually invested time to think about what parts must be customizable through low-code/no-code. The smaller problem space means better opportunities for simple tools.
Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something that I think about, is that we live in the greatest tech driven economy in the history of humanity, and it grows at a rate of about 2% per year. What I don't believe is that every programming activity contributes equally to that growth. By "activity" I loosely mean anything from a solo programmer to a large software business. Some are assets to the economy, others are liabilities, yet they pay the same sala…
Could also be that much of the work is zero-sum. For example ads to some extent just shift consumers from one company to another without actually creating anything (although, some might cause new demand). The stock market is exists to allocate resources more efficiently, but some of the shorter-term stuff looks more like pouring a ton of math and software work into coming up with better gambling strategies...
> coming up with better gambling strategies...
"better gambling" means better predictions of the future. this means making use of all available information, which means higher market efficiency.
It's not useless to do better in the stock market.