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

vaghetti.dev

401–410 of 611 posts

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

#402
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 agree and I don't think many people understand the implications. They complain that AI-driving is not good enough (it's not) but they hardly understand the consequence if it was (millions will need to pivot to something else).

I have a much better example: Invisalign -> https://www.invisalign.com

This is straight into doctors (orthodontists) territory. To explain the concept, a scanner will scan your jaw and then Invisalign will produce a series of aligners that you need to take in order. The orthodontist job? It's just to follow up on you in case something goes wrong. As they get better on this, the orthodontist job becomes less important and he can take multiple patients. The guy I consulted with told me that he can do some of the follow up remotely thanks to the iPhone camera.

It's these small things that are going to drive massive demand for software developers in the future. Software was limited to accounting/communication in the last decade. Now we are getting in a decade where software will apply to lots of other fields: Transportation, Medical, Tourism, Food, Banking, etc... The demand is about to go up by a LOT. The demand for skilled software developers is going to heat up beyond the wildest of our imagination.

ps: just my opinion.

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

#403

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.

On this same site you can read all day about developers complaining about interruptions. Now a company has big issues if someone puts a task aside to do something else until the following day where they will avoid interrupting someone?

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

#404

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…

While this seems intuitively true, it seems to me like the opposite is happening. Every advance or increase in technological efficiency creates exponentially _more_ demand for developers. Think about every tool and library that comes out; all the JavaScript front end tooling which made things “easy” has created literal armies of front end engineers. Even going farther back, think about Java, PHP, C++, all these came out to make developers lives’ easier and ended up creating more and more developers. We can even see it in the invention of the concept of high level languages over machine code, that’s also a human simplification.

Personally, I don’t see the train suddenly stopping and going in reverse anytime soon.

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

#405
post #356
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

No post body was provided.

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

#406
post #169

> No code / Low code > People have been trying this for decades and it never really worked out. 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. Every. Single. Squarespace. Website. You probably interacted with several today without even knowing it. They’re everywhere. No code solutions have almost entirely killed the need for develop…

Yeah but you won't build Squarespace competition on top of a low code platform.

This the way of thinking I expect author is following.

If you want to run a webshop they yes - you probably don't have to write a single line of code.

But then you get "wordpress developers" who are people that are configuring wordpress for others and this is where fun begins - because wordpress is mostly installing plugins + some configuration and business people should be able to configure it. Then still you get those "wordpress devs" and don't get me started on SAP consultants :D

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

#407
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…

>When I hear "programmers are in high demand", I don't see it applying to me. This is a very nuanced statement and depends highly on region. When you hear "programmers are in high demand" it actually means "senior/experienced programmers in the company's stack who can quickly solve the issues piling up on their desk, are in high demand". Juniors or devs with near zero experience in that particular stack are getting r…

Which countries you have in mind saying Eastern Europe?

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

#409

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 is always a status meeting, even if it is advocated as not being so.

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

#410

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…

The last part is why. The general stereotype of developers on the biz or design side is that they are smart but incredibly narrowly focused and refuse to comprehend anything outside their domain.
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