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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?

#351

Post by [deleted] »

iSnow wrote: post #315
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…

I wish I could get this across to my PMs, bosses and other non-technical stake-holders. Current PM is an nice guy but first of all, he absolutely loves to talk and second, he believes the "daily status meeting" format is what Scrum is all about.

[deleted]

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

#352

Post by _fizz_buzz_ »

CydeWeys wrote: post #63
tupac_speedrap wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is not touching a programming language until college a bad thing? Some people just want to make a living out of software engineering and then go home and they aren't sweating over Web 4.0 or whatever we are on now.

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.

I started learning to program in college. I am an EE, so maybe CS is a bit different. But I remember how intimidating it was to be in a my first programming class with the kids that already knew "everything". So, I bought a C++ book and worked through it cover to cover. Honestly, I had caught up with most the kids that already knew how to program after a couple of semesters or so and helped a bunch of them with our programming lab. I am sure there are some exceptional prodigies that are way better than I am, but it is quite impressive what one can learn even at an older age if one puts time and effort in.

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

#353

Post by tonyedgecombe »

nokcha wrote: post #227
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…

> 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. Seems like quite a dangerous situation, if something like the Carrington Event knocks the grid offline for an extended period of time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event

Seeing how we coped with Covid has made me wonder how well we would manage an event like that. Supposedly we are well prepared in the UK but that was also the case for Covid and we know how that turned out.

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

#354

Post by biztos »

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...

I think this has a lot to do with the office culture of software being figured out at the same time as the professionalization of Management and the trend of "methodologies" to give a veneer of objectivity to the managerial class. Combined with FOMO about the fortunes being made at certain other companies, whose whims and experiments are then followed.

Whereas the other professions you mention had their office cultures defined in very different times. Once defined, these tend to be sticky.

For example the extended hazing ritual by which we mint medical doctors in the USA is completely insane and would not be tolerated by doctors in most other countries, much less by non-doctors. Or for scientists, the amount of time many of them have to spend on acquiring funding for their employers instead of doing actual science, not to mention the very broken world of peer review.

The thing that makes our situation special -- and which these people were probably reacting too -- is how transparently ridiculous, toxic, and demeaning a lot of it is. From open-plan offices to stand-ups to pair programming and on and on.

I think we put up with this stuff because we are convinced we should be thankful for our fat paychecks and fear the Barbarian Hordes waiting to take our jobs for cheap in Elbonia.[0] That both of these things are objectively false has not made much difference in the last decade, but the salaries have gone up, so...

[0]: https://dilbert.fandom.com/wiki/Elbonia

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

#355

Post by pdimitar »

hkt wrote: post #328
pdimitar wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think at this point it should be common wisdom that anything and everything can and will be adapted to yet again introduce a power imbalance. The people who supposedly rule people -- a-hem, sorry, they manage them (heh) -- don't like it when the worker has influence of the process and especially the costs and schedules.

So they'll co-opt any newfangled trend into plain old serfdom. And they do.

As another commenter said, we should take page from the lawyers. A lot of them manage to convert bosses into paying subscribing customers.

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

#356

Post by jd115 »

sage76 wrote: post #341
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…

> I don't see it applying to me. It only applies to a small set of people from top unis or those who have the FAANG brand names on their resumes. Otherwise, I know several people who tried for months to switch jobs and finally gave up due to exhaustion.

I have NO university degree and ZERO affiliation with anything remotely FAANG (I'm based in Europe, where relatively few people work for FAANG). There are no globally recognisable names on my CV.

I am still the highest paid person I personally know - by a rather high margin, because of my experience as a software engineer.

Since I dropped out of university almost 20 years ago, I have been consulting and contracting, focusing almost exclusively on Python, PostgreSQL and, more recently, AWS. This simple combination (I usually refuse to learn anything new - I don't think there have been many noteworthy new technologies in the past couple of decades) has made me millions over the years and I have never been left without work for any significant period of time.

Since the pandemic began, I have actually found myself contracting multiple roles concurrently, from my home, each paying significantly above the average developer rate. I've found I can do up to 3 - 4 at a time and still deliver results for each (declining to attend regular meetings helps).

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

#357

Post by pdimitar »

bob1029 wrote: post #320
pdimitar wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the developer giving an analysis of the cost and benefit of a refactoring (it will take X time, but will save Y work in the future). And the manager factoring that into all the other circumstances, and deciding whether it's worth the current cost. This has been the ideal theory for decades and I really wish people finally stopped to think for two minutes, look around, read some history and finally understand t…

I think the key point for me is that once you control for all common human flaws, the developer is still far better suited to make an executive decision regarding a technology concern than anyone else on the team. I recently made the mistake of deferring to the anxieties and fears of non-developers for so long that I almost forgot how we got to where we are today or what my true capabilities are. You know exactly wha…

> I recently made the mistake of deferring to the anxieties and fears of non-developers for so long that I almost forgot how we got to where we are today or what my true capabilities are.

Ouch, dude, you didn't have to stab me in the heart. But yeah, 100% same. I am just now, at the age of almost 42, starting to finally crawl out of that. I am ashamed that it took me most of my life and career but oh well.

> I think the key point for me is that once you control for all common human flaws, the developer is still far better suited to make an executive decision regarding a technology concern than anyone else on the team.

True, but then you get blamed for "not understanding business realities". I got super tired of being hinted that I "don't get it" or whatever, especially having in mind that I launched products whose launch date I was not consulted about, repeatedly, and still get treated like dirt. I started pushing back on micro-management, fiercely and sometimes rudely.

You know what's the funniest part? It works. People start looking at you very differently and suddenly negotiations are an option. I guess it was possible all along and the business people are like "push him, he's a tech nerd, he'll fold".

We should start getting aware how are others viewing us and integrate this knowledge into our negotiation strategy.

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

#358

Post by lowercased »

hkt wrote: post #331
schwartzworld wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> but wage theft and humiliation are still baked in for many of us

It's harder to get much sympathy from others as well if/when you're paid much higher than many other averages. Using the term 'wage theft' - normally used in discussions around minimum wage job abuses - for someone who's making $80/hr, (and may get some stock/bonus) doesn't get the same sort of reaction. The term doesn't even feel quite right, but that may be just because I've heard it so often relating to the lower end. I'd imagine it's not even about money so much for many folks as much as it is about time.

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

#359

Post by dunefox »

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…

So because some professions have it worse developers need to have it worse as well? What a garbage point.

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

#360

Post by jokoon »

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

I know, but it's not like employers are begging people to work for them either.

The job market has always been a market that favors employers, not candidates, whatever the domain of work.

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