Times are great for programmers now. How does it end? • Hacker News Board

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

#521

Post by blindmute » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 4:25 PM UTC

As far as I'm concerned, the ride stops when the masses realize how easy the profession actually is. You can take any office worker and train them to an entry level competency in 3-5 months, when they will get a job for at least $75k. They are then in a new career path and will soon make 100k. I find it impossible to convince non devs that being a developer is easy. They can't fathom why we get paid so much if it's easy. They think I must be lying, or lucky, or too smart. No! It's fucking easy!

As soon as people catch on to this, and start doing bootcamps with the same frequency that they do weird "side hustles", it's over. The current scarcity is mainly because people don't realize they can become developers.

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

#522

Post by sulam » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 4:27 PM UTC

maxwell wrote: post #418

schwartzworld wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? I was responding to someone saying that stand-ups === being managed "no better than a burger flipper". I don't agree with that point, especially since food service has the most toxic management of any industry.

What restaurant(s) have you worked for or are you citing?

Seriously? Do you think working at a McJob is unicorns and rainbows? Getting paid minimum wage, being on your feet all day, entitled customers constantly up your ass, a management team that literally thinks of you as a fully replaceable work unit (and you are !!)…

Yes I’ve done it. It’s not the worst job I’ve had but my current job affords me the opportunity to type this from a vacation house on the beach in Hawaii. When I told the people making my lunch last week that I was headed to Hawaii they said they always wanted to go there and hoped to do it in a couple years, like it was a once in a lifetime trip for them. And it probably is.

People need to actually pay more attention to the world around them and have some conversations to realize how well we’ve got it.

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

#523

Post by mirchibajji » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 4:28 PM UTC

lm28469 wrote: post #446

JackMorgan wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't care for the dehumanization in this comment. Sounds like the thinking that calls employees "resources" and considers them fungible cogs.

There is no dehumanisation intended. Everyone has a place and a function. You don't let a car mechanic drive during the race, or a jet pilot do the maintenance of his plane, well same for a programmer, you don't let them make project/business related decisions, because it's neither their job nor their responsibility and most of them are inept at making decision out of their little world, that's why we have project ma…

Your analogies are not helping your point :) Programmers are not the ones driving the plane or flying the car - they are the mechanics and engineers.

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

#524

Post by JohnBooty » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 4:31 PM UTC

AitchEmArsey wrote: post #187

analog31 wrote: post #133

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…

   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

I think it's OK to an extent. Not all of those apps are good, but the best of them do enable businesses.

   I am dismayed by the lack of real, society-enhancing 
   jobs available to highly skilled tech workers

I think the root problem is a lack of developers. The resulting crazy high developer pay scale prices smaller orgs completely out of the game.

We need to increase the supply of capable developers.

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

#525

Post by blaser-waffle » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 4:32 PM UTC

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #492

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…

> 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. 100%. It is completely absurd to watch. This sort of subordinate attitude pulls us all down. I think the issue boils down to: * new devs are not going to rock the boat * lots of people see software dev as as way to be successful within existing cor…

> There's also the thing of most people seem to need hierarchies to feel secure. I don't quite understand it but I'm probably just weird.

Social organisms usually have some sort of ordering hierarchy. While most of the 'alpha' and 'sigma-grindset' nonsense is just that -- nonsense -- people are hierarchical animals.

It also means you don't need to give a damn about stuff that's above or below your paygrade. You do your hours on X, and other teams can worry about Y.

> a lot of devs have very little experience of what life looks like with engineers at the helm

A lot of devs have very little experience in a lot of fields. The best programmers I've met started coding at 15, went to MIT, and have been in software their whole lives; they have no paradigm outside of what they've been exposed to during their college-intern-jr.dev phases. Most of em that I know haven't ever worked a job flipping burgers or washing cars, either.

Makes it hard to break out of that mentality, and also means that a lot of very smart coders do piss-poor jobs managing & leading. Inevitably the shitty engineer-managers fail, and the business types are dragged back in.

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

#526

Post by anubiskhan » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 4:32 PM UTC

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.

> 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

So the drivers were replaced with organic hardware (other, non-knowledgable humans) and their knowledge was replaced with software (google maps, or whatever Lyft/Uber use for maps)?

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

#527

Post by fennecfoxy » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 4:35 PM UTC

dom96 wrote: post #333

dystroy wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If someone following satnav is a software driven human, what's someone following a paper map?

The quote takes a very dystopian view of the augmenting of humans with technology, sure there are people who will blindly follow the directions/"knowledge" of a machine, but just as many will be consciously and intelligently using the machine as a tool to further their own goals.

As above, so below. The comment mentioning people above/below the API doesn't remember how much background stuff us developers use every day to be capable of so much more (and also less) than the developers of yore.

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

#528

Post by seanmcdirmid » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 4:38 PM UTC

sulam wrote: post #522

maxwell wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What restaurant(s) have you worked for or are you citing?

Seriously? Do you think working at a McJob is unicorns and rainbows? Getting paid minimum wage, being on your feet all day, entitled customers constantly up your ass, a management team that literally thinks of you as a fully replaceable work unit (and you are !!)… Yes I’ve done it. It’s not the worst job I’ve had but my current job affords me the opportunity to type this from a vacation house on the beach in Hawaii.…

I worked a McJob (actually the McJob) from 16-20, and it was probably my main motivation in getting into the CS department at UW (it helped that I was interested in computers and seemed to have a talent for the field). Sometimes I wonder if any of my colleagues had to go through that, but many did. Surely not all of us programmers came from stable upper middle class or better backgrounds.

I did have some really good managers though, people I couldn’t believe weren’t doing better things (and some real bad ones, too, of course).

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

#529

Post by blindmute » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 4:39 PM UTC

Dave3of5 wrote: post #420

nikau wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it always is. They go around the room and everyone has to say something and it ends up being a status update.

To be honest I would just throw SCRUM into the trash if I could I think it's garbage but following some not quite SCRUM method which is what most companies do is actually insane. The whole process becomes a micromanagers wet dream.

I used to work at a company where the standup meeting was once per week, and we would pre write everything in a shared doc. The meeting was then just silently reading, only saying something if necessary. A great place of sanity, that was.

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

#530

Post by blaser-waffle » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 4:39 PM UTC

blindmute wrote: post #521

As far as I'm concerned, the ride stops when the masses realize how easy the profession actually is. You can take any office worker and train them to an entry level competency in 3-5 months, when they will get a job for at least $75k. They are then in a new career path and will soon make 100k. I find it impossible to convince non devs that being a developer is easy. They can't fathom why we get paid so much if it's e…

I don't know if I buy that. The better bootcamps now have a screening process -- I don't know if they'll just take any office worker. And the crappy ones just churn out schmucks who can't get hired.

Statistics for boot camps are kept pretty tight, and a lot of the "we can get you a job!" claims only come true if/when the bootcamp hires you to teach after you graduate, thus allowing them to puff their numbers.

Anecdote: I know 3 bootcamp grads, and only 1 of them is working as a coder. She had a BA from a good school in Econ before doing the BC, and is now a senior dev. The other two weren't technical or math-y, though at least one was able to turn the BC into a STEM Recruiter job since he had an HR background. The 3rd, a Sales guy trying to change careers, is, as of today, still not a coder; I think he's doing some sort of IT support, and could have gotten an A+ and Net+ and been as competitive for that gig -- at a fraction of the price of a bootcamp.