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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?

#261

Post by namdnay »

jokoon wrote: post #247

I have depression issues, and have been coding for 10 years now. I don't know if I'm bad at programming, or if it's because I lack a degree, or because I have been chronically unemployed and lack experience, or because I'm too selective with the jobs I apply on (I can't bear php or js stuff like angular), or because I live in france or in the wrong city. I may have an atypical profile. Programming has not been very g…

Plumbers are in high demand too, but if you are a plumber with depression, lack of experience, that doesn't want to touch waste pipes or shower units, and live in the sticks, it won't apply to you either

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

#262

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

jokoon wrote: post #247

I have depression issues, and have been coding for 10 years now. I don't know if I'm bad at programming, or if it's because I lack a degree, or because I have been chronically unemployed and lack experience, or because I'm too selective with the jobs I apply on (I can't bear php or js stuff like angular), or because I live in france or in the wrong city. I may have an atypical profile. Programming has not been very g…

>When I hear "programmers are in high demand", I don't see it applying to me.

This is a very nuanced statement and depends highly on region.

When you hear "programmers are in high demand" it actually means "senior/experienced programmers in the company's stack who can quickly solve the issues piling up on their desk, are in high demand".

Juniors or devs with near zero experience in that particular stack are getting rejection letters as most companies never consider on how transferrable dev skills are and prefer to wait until the perfect dev shows up, instead of giving someone new to the stack a few weeks to ramp up.

At least that's how it is in my current country of Austria, but back in Eastern Europe, the demand for devs is so high due to US off-shoring and Western EU near-shoring, that companies will hire absolutely anyone who can write a for loop and even give them trainings to ramp them up quicker. It's literally impossible to be unemployed there even as an inexperienced slow learning coder. Sure you won't make six figure salaries, but you'll live far more comfortably than 90% of the population.

IMO, just like in dating and real-estate, the dev jobs market is very much about "location, location, location".

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

#263

Post by ggm »

lelanthran wrote: post #258
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. It's nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this. This is actually quite interesting as I was just talking to a few other professionals about this in a social setting. I was the only one in software development. I mentioned how stand-ups work briefl…

> No lawyer, accountant, doctor, engineer, scientist or other professional stands up each day to report *to their peers* on their progress

Doctors do something not far removed. It's really important to them to caucus on case management.

I think other professions may do the same.

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

#264

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?

#265

Post by himinlomax »

jokoon wrote: post #247

I have depression issues, and have been coding for 10 years now. I don't know if I'm bad at programming, or if it's because I lack a degree, or because I have been chronically unemployed and lack experience, or because I'm too selective with the jobs I apply on (I can't bear php or js stuff like angular), or because I live in france or in the wrong city. I may have an atypical profile. Programming has not been very g…

Depression will distort your vision of reality and make things look worse than they are. It will also make it much harder to take even small risks for greater gains.

In all likelihood, you're stuck in your position because you're limiting yourself in some ways. I'm not saying it's easy to get out of, I've been there, it's not.

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

#266

Post by Dave3of5 »

> Higher salaries mean less profit. It’s just how the game works.

Software is sold at massive markup. No sane tech company is complaining about profits at the moment. Sure they'd pay less but if they bump our salaries they're still making insane profits. At the moment it's COGS for any CEO and they've already accepted it's high for software.

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

#267

Post by himinlomax »

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 think it ends with everyone becoming a developer.

Unless we get genetic modification tech to improve abstract thinking skills and other traits, it's as likely as everyone being able to become a painter, a musician, a diplomat or a mathematician.

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

#268

Post by jug »

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…

Yes, at least at scale, BASIC is hard!

It's a wolf in disguise due to all the "easy" English words, words that of course need to be put in the correct, often grammar-violating order so that nothing is won anyway, for the compiler to make sense of the instructions and intent. You end up getting a language design that places more importance on a bastardized form of English like a text-based adventure game, rather than being a good map to the problem space that doesn't get in the way like a bumbling fool.

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

#269

Post by hnbad »

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…

> turn bosses into customers

Congratulations, you just invented software consulting agencies.

But jokes aside, what you want sounds a lot like developer anarchy (which in practical terms means replacing technical management with direct communication between all developers in a team) but there are two problems that are apparently easy to overlook with this approach:

1. Teams still exist in a company that is likely larger than just a single development team. You can use direct democracy to appoint representatives and delegate political power, but unless the entire company is a worker coop, there are limitations to the team's autonomy and there is ultimately a monopoly of violence at the top (i.e. the CEO can fire you, you can't fire the CEO) crushing down on you when a conflict can't be settled.

2. Companies still exist within capitalism and need to make a profit to be sustainable. The ugly truth about turning bosses into customers (i.e. going freelance or becoming an agency) is that customers are still your boss, there's just a chance you'll eventually have enough of them to be able to fire them and not kill your company. But to have any shot at getting there you'll need to rake in cash, not just to cover your expenses but also to build up a runway.

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

#270

Post by Juliate »

ggm wrote: post #263
lelanthran wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is actually quite interesting as I was just talking to a few other professionals about this in a social setting. I was the only one in software development. I mentioned how stand-ups work briefl…

> No lawyer, accountant, doctor, engineer, scientist or other professional stands up each day to report *to their peers* on their progress Doctors do something not far removed. It's really important to them to caucus on case management. I think other professions may do the same.

You do it daily when you're managing life/death-impacting operations (ER, hospitals, factories with team shifts).

Software engineering/IT RUN and SUPPORT activities MAY fit there too, but that does not even mandate a daily review. BUILD activities definitely don't.

And worse, teams mixing RUN and BUILD roles... definitely don't.

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