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

vaghetti.dev

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

#321

Post by cudgy »

dahart wrote: post #188

> 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 example…

The low code examples listed are not code. They are forms that essentially pull data from a database and display it with little if any interaction, validation, and/or processing. These tools have been available for decades.

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

#322

Post by shubb »

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.

It's interesting to consider the difference between project and event driven (ops) work.

Engineering project teams doing Scrum struggle when tasks need to be initiated and completed at a faster cadence than their sprint cycle - for instance an engineer doing development work planned monthly gets 3 calls a day asking him to reboot a server.

There are apparently better ways of managing operational work - for kanban (with or without a board), ticket systems and queues and processes and dashboards for managers to spot bottlenecks live and re-alocate workers to solve them.

I know (from TV docs) that ERs here generally have a "morning meeting" where the manager briefs people and talks through throughput statistics and demand estimates.

I don't know how to manage an ER department, but I'd understand a lot of work has been done in that area. What I could say is that it isn't project work you could plan on a monthly sprint cadence.

Burger bar workers will also generally be executing operational work according to a clear process that involves tickets and ownership of a problems (tables). I've also seen IT help desks run like this.

What I'm saying is, Scrum is one possible way of running things, but it isn't one size fits all for all kinds of work. But just people are not doing Scrum does not mean they are not working within a detailed process where they may potentially be micromanaged to the same degree.

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

#323

Post by hkt »

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…

Amen - I tried I convince a group of people I'd been contracting with to set up a partnership model along these lines, specifically so we could carve out that kind of control. No such luck, people were happy because day rates in the UK were (and are) ludicrously high.

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

#324

Post by pid-1 »

notduncansmith wrote: post #30
ta78373764 wrote: post #13

Right now developer salaries have greatly risen at the top end - the max has risen much faster than the median. Much of the top end growth has been at companies benefitting from easy investor capital. I think this will follow a typical business cycle. When the next recession comes, investors and companies will focus on shorter term ROI, and many high end developers and long term projects will seem too expensive. Redu…

> I don't expect low-code, AI, or developer productivity jumps to have any real impact anytime soon; there's no real evidence of a true jump in the productivity of the overall project I respectfully disagree. I don’t think those productivity gains will be evenly distributed throughout the industry, but I think AI and developer tooling will evolve radically over the next decade and programming in 2032 will look quite…

Agreed, I see junior devs in their first job every semester. Some people with CS backgrounds, other with engineering backgrounds.

Software development sucks so much, folks waste ungodly amounts of time with trivial stuff like setting up their programming language correctly* or figuring out how to use undocumented libs.

I'm confident AI and investiment in dev tools will make programming much more accessible.

However, senior devs are another story. They are generally paid to make architectural decisions and solve weird problems. I don't see their salary bring affected to much by said technologies.

* Using dev containers made that A LOT better

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

#325

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#326

Post by pietromenna »

namdnay wrote: post #261
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

Ditto!

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

#327

Post by ants_a »

machiaweliczny wrote: post #230
ta78373764 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly possible, I just don't see any real evidence for it yet. AI has a history of promising demos and then very long (decades) stalls in progress. I could be wrong, but I'm skeptical of the current round of AI as well. It will generate code in the same way as AI generates online articles or music - not very well.

I think that by 2030 we should have conversations that produce most of business software. Think of CLI + AI. There are already people working on this. My bet is on Microsoft or them buying winning startup

My experience is that the problem with producing business software is not the lack of programming knowledge. Rather it's a lack of people who understand the business and are capable of abstract thought and formalizing processes. I don't see AI helping with that any time soon.

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

#328

Post by hkt »

pdimitar wrote: post #318
ggm wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not entirely sure this is more than a matter of degree. I liked most of your point but I think you devalue aspects of this mode of work discussion. It's important to discuss work and holding yourself to account in a shared endeavour is not of itself bad. I have little doubt it's also used as passive aggressive bullying sometimes.

That's the problem. Anecdotally, for many programmers I spoke with over a 20 years of career, it's not "can be used as passive aggressive bullying sometimes"; it's "almost always". :(

Likewise. Pretty much everywhere I've worked uses standup as a way of bullying people into working more hours, with a couple of unusually relaxed exceptions. It is a far cry from the origins of agile as a means of programmers defending themselves against a hostile organisation, as it was originally. Now agile is the hostile organisation.

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

#329

Post by aembleton »

randomsearch wrote: post #234

I think the current bubble is very short-term. It has been caused by 10 years of low interest rates pushing a lot of capital into startups. The recent "next level" hysteria in the market has been caused by stimulus packages in the US and elsewhere. A lot of what we're seeing is very reminiscent of the .com bubble. That said, I do think underlying the froth is a genuine increased societal demand for tech and programme…

What's so awful about SquareSpace? I've recommended it to a few people who were after a website.

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

#330

Post by dom96 »

lelanthran wrote: post #272
ggm wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Doctors do something not far removed. It's really important to them to caucus on case management. Maybe, but it is removed. From my recollection, doctors don't standup each day to report on what they have or have not done and their individual progress, they report on purely on problematic patients that could do with expertise from a different expert, and it's not a daily progress report. If software development fol…

> From my recollection, doctors don't standup each day to report on what they have or have not done and their individual progress, they report on purely on problematic patients that could do with expertise from a different expert, and it's not a daily progress report.

Isn't this what standups should be for developers too? It's not supposed to be a daily status report, but a discussion about blockers and an exchange of knowledge from other devs that might be able to unblock you.

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