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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?

#331

Post by hkt »

schwartzworld wrote: post #286
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…

> Every single one of them (all professionals, like I said) were adamant that they would leave any position that managed them no better than a burger-flipper. Such entitled garbage. Restaurants manage people much more tightly, and often with very abusive practices and wage theft added in. Stand-up is nothing compared to having an underpaid alcoholic yell at you because you leaned against the wall 2/3 of the way throu…

Wage theft is endemic in programming. Think of all those colleagues who have worked late on a deadline because somebody pressured them into it. They're reducing their own effective hourly rate and contributing to a long hours culture because of the daily ritual of humiliation at standup. It is very different to the restaurant analogy but wage theft and humiliation are still baked in for many of us.

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

#332

Post by logifail »

Dave3of5 wrote: post #282
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…

The DSU shouldn't be for non-technical people. They literally should not speak at all during this daily meeting if they are even there. It's for Devs only to make sure they are not blocked and they are communicating what they are working on. In my last company the non-tech people weren't allowed and the DSU was only for engineering. It is not a daily status meeting! If it has turned into this then it should be scrapp…

> It's for Devs only to make sure they are not blocked[..]

If in the course of one's work one becomes blocked, would one really wait until the following day's stand-up to tell anyone about this?

If so then I think both the worker and the company have bigger issues than whether the stand-up itself is a good use of time.

The mind boggles.

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

#333

Post by dom96 »

dystroy wrote: post #233
hooby wrote: post #212

Programmers are increasingly needed for *everything*. I mean, we've entered an age, where a farmer can't milk their cows, if the software of the milking robot has a hitch - can't plow their fields, when the gps-software that drives the tractor isn't working. Apart from that, programming is becoming every other job - as far as domain knowledge is concerned. I've personally experienced (multiple times!) professional ac…

For taxi drivers, the most important change was already done and it took decades: it wasn't replacing them with self driving vehicles. It was replacing very competent drivers having a perfect knowledge of the town and of the optimal paths with drivers with absolutely no competence needed. We don't have software driven vehicles, we have software driven humans.

> We don't have software driven vehicles, we have software driven humans.

Wow, this is a very prescient quote. I think we will hear this repeated often in the years to come.

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

#334

Post by OJFord »

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.

Are you referring to patient rounds? It seems pretty different to me - that's (usually/when well-staffed) multiple doctors (at various stages of training) working on a single bug (pun very much intended) before moving onto the next one. And it's (for all patients considered together) a significant chunk of the day: what's left of it is used to do the work that arose from the discussion (with some of that left to whoever's on overnight).

If we need to analogise it, I'd say it's more like sprint planning - discussing what's to do on each ticket (patient). Except it's longer and more detailed, and the work that's left is much more like grunt work in a way - book the scan, take the blood, chase results, etc.

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

#335

Post by hither_shores »

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?

All investment opportunities, to a first approximation, are competing with one another for capital. When interest rates drop, newly issued bonds become worse investments - but you've got to invest in something, so money flows into everything else. When interest rates go up, the opposite happens.

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

#336

Post by pietromenna »

streetcat1 wrote: post #96
mistrial9 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is true for certain activities like structured information retrieval; legal opinion and binding decisions are not what is on the line.

Right. But most lawyers and doctors work (let say 95%) is routine work. The problem with fields like law / medicine, is that you invest heavily one time (I.e. at school) in a fixed body of knowledge (law or medicine) in order to enjoy life time of protected earning. Note that the earning are protected mainly because you invested the time , and not because of some union. The Achilles heel of those professions, is that…

With law I believe it can happen, but with medicine, not really.

Most visits to doctors it is not about only about the sickness (or information about what medicine to get), but about socializing and somebody inspect you and discuss with you. This part, the machine cannot do. It is what is called the doctor-patient relationship. If you think this is not the important part, I cannot disagree more with you.

I go to doctors only when I really need, but the pattern I see around is that people have a real long lasting trust relationship with the doctors they see.

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

#337

Post by lm28469 »

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…

> non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor.

If these people weren't there half of the programmer population would be stuck in and endless refactoring loop.

Programmers are tools, tools need people to use them

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

#338

Post by OJFord »

logifail wrote: post #332
Dave3of5 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DSU shouldn't be for non-technical people. They literally should not speak at all during this daily meeting if they are even there. It's for Devs only to make sure they are not blocked and they are communicating what they are working on. In my last company the non-tech people weren't allowed and the DSU was only for engineering. It is not a daily status meeting! If it has turned into this then it should be scrapp…

> It's for Devs only to make sure they are not blocked[..] If in the course of one's work one becomes blocked, would one really wait until the following day's stand-up to tell anyone about this? If so then I think both the worker and the company have bigger issues than whether the stand-up itself is a good use of time. The mind boggles.

Agreed, and maybe this is more common than may impression & experience, but if that's the goal, wouldn't you prefer to do it in the afternoon? After you've spent some time on something, but perhaps still have some time left to shift approach or have a 1:1 call with someone who says they can help?

Sometimes stand-up for me means 'remind myself what I was doing'; if not that then I've certainly not got far past it, haven't had long to get much done or be stuck. I'm unlikely to say in a stand-up that I'm stuck on something, I'll have a(nother) crack at it and perhaps ask after lunch if necessary.

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

#339

Post by pid-1 »

dgb23 wrote: post #296
irrational wrote: post #83

> The markets are doing their thing. Everyone sees tech workers making money and just generally having a good time and they think: “Hey that sounds like a good career choice”. It seems like you could replace tech workers with any other profession that sounds like a good career choice. Can literally everyone (or even the majority) learn to code? Do they want to learn to code? In my experience, the answer to both quest…

In my opinion there is a huge market for teaching programming literacy. Learning to code as a means to an end that isn’t programming itself. Plenty of smart people who benefit from grounded computational thinking and communication that don’t necessarily need the nitty gritty detailed skills. Think designers, managers, sales etc.

> don’t necessarily need the nitty gritty detailed skills

I think that's the challenge.

Understanding computational thinking isn't very useful if you waste your afternoons fighting against crap like encoding, Windows paths, line endings, networking, setting up PostgreSQL correctly...

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

#340

Post by yobbo »

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 start operating like lawyers with partnerships

One analogy is; lawyering is like singing a never-ending song, whereas software is like a self-playing piano.

The lawyer is needed until the song is finished, which is partly up to himself.

A software consultant delivers a self-playing piano and must come back, cap in hand, asking for more work to improve it.

When software is working, it is assumed to be "finished" or "correct". Additional work is assumed to either fix bugs ("earlier mistakes"), or implement new features and improvements (which are optional and involves a sales process).

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