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

vaghetti.dev

361–370 of 611 posts

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

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn’t agree more with your second paragraph. A phrase that’s been drilled into me in the past year is “undifferentiated heavy lifting that’s not core to your business”. The things you listed just don’t matter from the business point of view. They don’t care how the app works, who runs it, what cloud provider is hosting it, what tools were used to build it, only that it works when it needs to and they will happily…

We humans reject the concept of exponential growth, specially when it can kill our way of life, and in that sense developers don't realize that 80% of our work could be automatize in the next few years. I've been in the industry for more than 20 years now, and what's clear to me is that a lot of time is spent coding and debugging things that have been done previously plenty of times (Non Invented Here syndrome) and t…

You don't need fancy AI to make us unemployed. Just back to basic would do. You list complex solutions which would just need even more programmers to maintain.

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

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something that I think about, is that we live in the greatest tech driven economy in the history of humanity, and it grows at a rate of about 2% per year. What I don't believe is that every programming activity contributes equally to that growth. By "activity" I loosely mean anything from a solo programmer to a large software business. Some are assets to the economy, others are liabilities, yet they pay the same sala…

> "I don't know why we're doing this, it's going to cost a lot of money and make things worse." I'm a step outside the domain so not totally confident in my own cynicism, but I feel like this phrase could be applied to practically every B2B startup I hear about these days. Selling CRM, project management and time tracking tools to (mostly) other VC-funded companies is just a way to skim more cream out of the economy…

You better not look too closely at the rest of the economy then because most of it looks like that.

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

#363
post #354

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... 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…

> to pair programming and on and on.

Glad someone else is mentioning this, about 10 years ago it seemed like it was the hottest trend and that anyone (meaning any programmer) not willing to adopt it was either too lazy or had something to hide, or, most probably, both.

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

#364
post #344
post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why does the height of day rates affect it? (Honest question.)

Your willingness to try new ways is probably inverse proportional to your current wage.

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

#365

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…

The way those professions work is, generally, completely different to how programmers work.

A lawyer, accounting, or doctor will typically have their own clients that they focus on. They may ask for advice on occation but generally one of those professionals will handle many customers completely unique needs.

Lets look at an accountant for example, they will have multiple clients each of which take up a small portion of their day / month. Each has individual needs and rarely will they have any real relation or crossover in their work. It'll be even less rare that your client has anything to do with another client of your business which may be handled by another accountant. The same is the case for doctors, and lawyers as well. You have one professional serving a multitude of clients.

Programmers work differently, typically we have multiple programmers to a single client. That client may be internal or external. If your particular case needed 7 accountants, or 7 lawyers you'd be damn upset if they weren't in regular communication about the work they're doing towards your case. If they all came back with totally different suggestions that completely clashed you'd be shouting at them for not communicating together properly.

Engineers are the only ones where I think there's a stronger relation. You might only work with one engineer for a small change to your house, but on big infrastructure projects there had better be regular communication between related groups or you end up with your designs failing ragulation.

Daily standups are for the programmers in the team to get together, to de-conflict, and understand what's changing around them. If Janet is about to make a big change to the auth system and you're working on a new api endpoint you probably want to know and make sure you're not causing problems for each other.

If your daily standups are actually just 15 minutes each day where only 1-2 managers are benefiting from a statud update from everyone, then sure that's micro-management and probably wasting a hell of a lot of time. Suggest changing it to a weekly call, or having everyone email a summary each week. It's important to report status on a regular basis just as you'd be pissed if your accountant didn't let you know once they'd filed your tax returns or if your doctor had your blood test results back a week ago.

Conflating a daily standup with a daily status report though would be frustrating and probably does need challenging, but it's not easy to compare across professions like that. Their workloads are completely different to ours, and so need a different approach.

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

#366
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…

To be fair when it comes to France, any job being in high demand generally wouldn't apply there. That country is the capital of unemployment from my experience, and I don't see it getting any better. But yes, lacking a degree is a big part of your problem. Fortunately, it's purely specific to France and you'll get better luck elsewhere in Europe. In my case I made my escape into the UK back when it was still possible…

Thanks, this comment really helps. Seems like it's a lot of wrong place, wrong time.

It's true that not having degrees is like being a leper for some reason.

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

#367
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think we're definitely better at non-developers at software development. Yet we literally have outside people dictating to us when they think it's appropriate for refactoring to happen. Or when it's time to update a dependency. This is a lot different from than "no on besides them can have any insight on timelines, or budget, on which features are or aren't important.". I definitely value the input of other profess…

counter point... doctors do face something like this in most cases. If you work at a large hospital, you cant just do whatever you want to a patient whenever you want.

you follow guidelines and rules for the most part, if you performed surgery before a patient had scans same day, youd be reprimanded by peers. that seems analogous to "don't do major refactor on release day".

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

#368
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…

In what city do you live and what languages are you seeking?

South of france, neither toulouse or Marseille. I'd prefer lower level languages, and as it was said in another comment, they're in lower demand.

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

#369
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…

To be fair when it comes to France, any job being in high demand generally wouldn't apply there. That country is the capital of unemployment from my experience, and I don't see it getting any better. But yes, lacking a degree is a big part of your problem. Fortunately, it's purely specific to France and you'll get better luck elsewhere in Europe. In my case I made my escape into the UK back when it was still possible…

Salaries in Europe are definitely subpar compared to other locations.OP should try moving to Australia. Lots of jobs and the salaries are very good even for junior/mid.

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

#370
post #203

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 most of them interact with the public, who can override their expert opinions.

Does the law office receptionist get to tell a lawyer which pieces of evidence should be brought to trial, and which shouldn't? What are the parameters and limits around 'managing' attorneys? I worked in a couple law offices (office stuff and deliveries) and while there was some 'management', it was generally 'top down', and had to do with billable time and court deadlines. Coordination between lawyers to help each other or work on a specific case together happened, but even then the deadlines were generally based on external dates, and were generally not company-imposed ("gotta get all these items done by Q3 for the Q4 launch!")

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