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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?

#391

Post by marcosdumay »

sdepablos wrote: post #175
josevalerio wrote: post #161

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…

We are used to the Jevon's paradox. It must end at some point, but AFAIK there is no way to tell if automatizing 80% of our work will put us out of jobs or increase our salaries.

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

#392

Post by krageon »

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". :(

The nice thing about anecdotes is that they don't say anything. For example: I have heard this for none of the programmers I've spoken with over a career of a little over half that time.

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

#393

Post by marcosdumay »

analog31 wrote: post #133
JohnBooty wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would expect layers of abstraction to continue to build up and programming to become something like using spreadsheets to do your actual task. But in general, people have been saying this for 50+ years. It hasn't happened yet for (at least) two reasons. 1. Increased demands on programmers have increased at least as quickly as their productivity has skyrocketed. 2. Non-trivial systems will require some non-trivial e…

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…

> Economic growth is close enough to 0%, that a decent rule of thumb is that whether any specific activity is an asset or a liability to the business that engages in it, is a coin toss.

Well, you completely forgot about depreciation.

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

#394

Post by codegrappler »

rightbyte wrote: post #361
sdepablos wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Was coming here to say this. Every time a more sophisticated system has been built to replace a simpler one, it requires MORE programmers, not less.

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

#395

Post by ozim »

brailsafe wrote: post #32
adamredwoods wrote: post #24

>> The CEO’s job is to make as much profit as possible. Higher salaries mean less profit. It’s just how the game works. I find this to be too simplified. The CEO's job is far beyond salaries alone. >> Even if we enter some new dotcom bubble and a good chunk of our startup ecosystem dies off, demand for tech is spreading across all industries, businesses everywhere are digitizing their operations and these systems wil…

What about when everyone becomes a programmer (now) and starts a race to the bottom?

I don't see it happening because I mostly see business people who don't even want to compete with me.

They just don't care about the same things I do care about.

I see people don't even care to spend 30mins on learning how to use their computer in a better way that would save them hours of clicking.

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

#396

Post by sam_lowry_ »

Programmers enable a lot of bullshit jobs indirectly. And it's easy to write software that serves no purpose whatsoever without everyone noticing.

The most famous business failures were hardware or offline companies like Juicero, WeWork or Theranos. Software companies tend to survive, grow and "produce".

The end of great times for programmers will be the end of bullshit jobs for everyone else, and that crisis will be much bigger.

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

#397

Post by KoftaBob »

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…

> It's nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this.

Physicians at hospitals know your pain, as their product manager equivalent is hospital administration micro managing how they can practice medicine.

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

#398

Post by ozim »

TameAntelope wrote: post #10

Is this actually true? Are CEOs lamenting their engineering labor costs like this? I feel like by now the cost of engineering labor has demonstrated its value over and over again, to the point where most CEOs accept the cost of engineering is more or less a shared expense across competition, and not really something to be reduced.

In eastern Europe they are lamenting because any dev that can speak english is getting rates that they cannot compete with.

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

#399

Post by Kye »

manigandham wrote: post #276
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…

Not exactly. All professions have similar communication. Subordinates report up to their supervisors and colleagues discuss laterally with themselves, especially when in a team focused on the same project. > "I mentioned how stand-ups ... might not be a bad idea" That's what the other professions are taking issue with: the way software teams communicate. Stand-ups are a terrible idea. Imposed superficial questions wi…

It seems like all the magic processes are a "Now you have n+1 problems" problem. Everyone who invented a new process thought they were fixing what was broken in the last process.

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

#400

Post by mucholove »

biztos wrote: post #354
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... 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…

Would love to know which countries don’t actually haze their doctors.

Here in DR docs get hazed out the Wazoo-being told they don’t have the status to look at the head surgeon in the eye or being tasked to get coffee.

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