Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

vaghetti.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 611 posts

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

#181

Post by jokethrowaway »

joe5150 wrote: post #125
strken wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

people don’t generally tend to feel this way about training to work in medicine or hvac or law. or even language, really. obviously children learn how to use language, but training for a professional job as a teacher or a translator (or whatever) doesn’t start at age 8.

I'd argue learning programming is a different skill compared to memorising laws or biology, it's math more than anything else (especially logic, set theory).

Lawyers and doctors basically need to memorise facts, apply rules and make deductions. Developers need to do that + math, hence why starting early helps you out, exactly like kids who did math or chess early on are better than their peers who started later.

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

#182

Post by jokethrowaway »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #158
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.

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…

That's just incorrect. Children have increased neuroplasticity and will always outperform an adult in terms of language learning - not to mention you lose the ability to learn to make certain sounds after a certain age.

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

#183

Post by gieksosz »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #176

I 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, a…

There are such partnerships, they are called dev agencies. Usually good for partners themselves, less so for rank and file employees.

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

#184

Post by jokethrowaway »

pech0rin wrote: post #111
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 absolutely false. I became fluent in Japanese in my 30s. Learned guitar in my late 20s. This is so wrong. You can continue learning until you are dead.

Of course, but you are not likely to speak like a Japanese person - maybe you will, after practicing for a lot of time and assuming your native language had matching sounds to Japanese (I don't know about Japanese but there are some guttural sounds in Greek you won't be able to learn as an adult unless you've been exposed to them as a child). Meanwhile a newborn would learn to speak like a native Japanese speaker in 3-5 years.

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

#185

Post by [deleted] »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #176

I 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, a…

[deleted]

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

#186

Post by DarkCrusader2 »

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…

> rising interest rates making capital much more difficult too secure.

Can someone please explain this to me or point me to some reading material. How does interest rates and investment in tech companies are related? How do we know that interest rates are going to rise soon?

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

#187

Post by AitchEmArsey »

analog31 wrote: post #133
JohnBooty wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> "I don't know why we're doing this, it's going to cost a lot of money and make things worse."

I'm a step outside the domain so not totally confident in my own cynicism, but I feel like this phrase could be applied to practically every B2B startup I hear about these days. Selling CRM, project management and time tracking tools to (mostly) other VC-funded companies is just a way to skim more cream out of the economy without adding any true value.

I try not to judge individuals for working in these places; working at AWS I'm hardly in a position to throw stones. Increasingly though I am dismayed by the lack of real, society-enhancing jobs available to highly skilled tech workers in the sea of mediocrity and rent-seeking.

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

#188

Post by dahart »

> 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.

I don’t know if this is just wildly ignorant or intentionally misleading, but thousands (maybe millions?) of businesses and organizations run low code platforms to develop their internal DBs and inventory and POS systems, among other things. Access and FileMaker are well known examples that lots of small businesses have used over the years. Bigger corps use all kinds of form generators, DB query systems, RAD tools, and low-code environments. These days devs are now using low code game engines to make games that have hit the top-10 lists on your favorite App Store.

Demand for devs is still going up, and low code platforms aren’t going to suddenly change that, but this story point should probably have been left out because low code platforms are hugely successful and are growing, and devs are still in demand despite the success and increasing market for low code platforms. It’d be interesting to explore why, but it’s just wrong to claim low code isn’t successful.

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

#189

Post by postexitus »

mrtksn wrote: post #144
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.

18 or any age is alright. In college we had a class coded IS100, which stands for "Information Systems 100". It was so basic that unlike the other 1st year courses that were coded 101, this one was coded with 100. In this class people will be learning how to operate a mouse, close a computer, navigate to a website etc. Extremely basic stuff that was completely new to kids that grew up in a poor family that couldn't a…

Hocam?

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

#190

Post by sakoht »

ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #47
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…

The problem is, at the end of the day, business logic needs to get encoded in the program. So all the abstractions cant abstract away the domain specific "if else" statements. Infrastructure itself will be a solved problem, and we will implement interfaces like serverless lambas, but it still remains, the logic of the business needs to go in the code. OOP itself is meant for building relationships between sets of bus…

Fred Brooks' classic "No Silver Bullet" outlines this fundamental principle of software engineering physics. Written in 1986, the paper has its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet
Post reply on HN