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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?

#201

Post by galaxyLogic »

JohnBooty wrote: post #135
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…

Oh yeah, I remember people saying that about SQL a long time ago. People wouldn't need database engineers any more. Same with Visual Basic. No more application developers. Just drag and drop! You might ask yourself why VB6 or Delphi didn't simply rule the world forever. We had those ~25 years ago and with those tools, non-engineers could drag and drop their client/server database-CRUD apps together. Hell, you could d…

I much agree with that the complexity is the limiting factor and you probably will need specialized people to model and design not only what the computer does but how the humans and computer co-operate. When you're programming you are not only programming the computer but also the people who use your application(s).

Describing and designing and validating asynchronous processes is especially complicated.

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

#202

Post by jamil7 »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #182
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Critical period hypothesis is somewhat debated in linguistics. Children and Adults just learn differently. Children have far less inhibitions and more time. The second part of your comment sounds like pseudoscience. I learned German in my late 20s and speak to native speakers every day, where I live bilingual is the norm and a whole lot of people acquire second, third or forth languages as adults.

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

#203

Post by edanm »

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…

> We're still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor.

I highly disagree with this.

For some reason, many devs seem to think they are somehow better than everyone else, that they are the most important part of any team, that no on besides them can have any insight on timelines, or budget, on which features are or aren't important.

News flash - all of the above is none-sense. Developers are a profession that provides a specific skill, a highly valued one, but one that is a part of building things in most cases. There's nothing demeaning or wrong about devs having managers, whether or not they happen to also have been developers themselves. Some great software managers were never developers, and some great developers are horrible managers, just like in every other profession.

> It's nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this.

Every skilled profession has people who are managed. Doctors, lawyers, they all have managers, and most of them interact with the public, who can override their expert opinions.

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

#204

Post by galaxyLogic »

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…

It's not only that we need to code the business logic in a programming language. To a degree we must also design those business processes. That is programming too, programming your people.

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

#205

Post by sakoht »

DarkCrusader2 wrote: post #186
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?

Regarding interest rates, they are already up. I got a house 4 months ago at 2.85%, and now they are 4.2%. I can't speak to whether investment in tech will drop. Lately, there is so much spare money floating around investors can't find homes for it. Inflation suggests to me _more_ desperation to have the money invested, not less. And the net cause seems to be a steady stream of wealth consolidation allows a smaller subset of the economy to hold more and more wealth.

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

#206

Post by chii »

edanm wrote: post #203
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…

> We're still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor. I highly disagree with this. For some reason, many devs seem to think they are somehow better than everyone else, that they are the most important part of any team, that no on besides them can have any insight on timelines, or budget, on which features are or aren't important. News flash - all of the above is…

and yet i don't tell my plumbers to give me a standup for the day.

I tell them what i wanted achieved, and i pay. it gets done. If there's a delay, i expect the plumber to tell me promptly, and i re-evaluate the work.

Some programmers do get treated this way - consultants and such. But the majority is not - they are considered a cog in a machine.

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

#207

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

5% speed improvement in my tooling would result in about 0.0000001% improvement in my productivity. first of all, so little of what we do is about the tooling. yes, it's very helpful, but no tool, no matter how good, can tell you how to migrate a monolithic service into microseconds microservices with no downtime and no data loss. maybe if we didn't fuck up the original implementation such things wouldn't be needed but there's still trillions of lines of code out there and they aren't going to rewrite themselves. Google and Facebook aren't going to be overthrown by some hot new IDE with autocode built in.

secondly.. 5% is nothing. our tooling is so effing slow it needs a 1000x improvement. not in how fast we can write code, just to compile and test the damn stuff.

speaking of, amazons reasoning tech sounds interesting.

at best this tech will cut out some L3 maybe L4 jobs, but L5+ isn't writing code anymore. which in itself will be interesting because new grads are hired at L3.. how will they ever get hired if those slots are tightened up?

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

#208

Post by 8note »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #207

5% speed improvement in my tooling would result in about 0.0000001% improvement in my productivity. first of all, so little of what we do is about the tooling. yes, it's very helpful, but no tool, no matter how good, can tell you how to migrate a monolithic service into microseconds microservices with no downtime and no data loss. maybe if we didn't fuck up the original implementation such things wouldn't be needed b…

I think of interns as L3 and new grads as L4.

I love having L4s around. They don't have distractions so they can get stuff done

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

#209

Post by no_time »

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 question is, how? Computer literacy has already peaked and the body of knowledge one needs to understand to make a difference is steadily going up.

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

#210

Post by can16358p »

It won't end for anyone who can stay relevant and adopt to the new tech.

It will end for everyone who is stuck at current tech which will be "past" in the future, both for tooling/tech and most importantly mindset.

For example, React Native and Solidity pays well nowadays. I know they will probably be replaced with something else (in terms of demand, not necessarily an immediate technical successor). If I don't start learning whatever-comes-next-in-my-field, I'd stay in the past, no matter how good I get on React Native or Solidity.

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