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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?

#601

Post by usrbinbash »

rdevsrex wrote: post #543
usrbinbash wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you figure that tech will mean very little? What cannot continue is economic growth, for the simple reasons that the planets (and its biospheres) resources are finite. What will continue however, is technological growth, as in technology will grow ever more complex, and solve more difficult tasks. Techn development is not inherently tied to economic growth.

Collapse is a complex topic, but essentially if the thesis is true, then we are on a downward spiral in complexity and in population. At some point, high tech will be replaced with low-tech solutions that take less energy and less maintenance. To me that means that there will be programmers, but far fewer, focused on only vital areas, like climate change adaptation. I don't think it's an immediate concern, but if I w…

> At some point, high tech will be replaced with low-tech solutions that take less energy and less maintenance.

Low-Tech does not automatically lead to a reduction in maintenance and energy required.

Example: The electrical train systems of today are safer, more energy efficient and require less maintenance than their steam driven ancestors.

Another example; Todays circuits require orders of magnitude less energy and maintenance than those built with electromechanical relais or vacuum tubes.

Technology declines as a result of major catostrophes, be they socio-economic (like the fall of ancient empires) or as a result of natural catastrophes.

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

#602

Post by moritonal »

jjav wrote: post #586
moritonal wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perspective might be key here. "Yet we literally have outside people dictating to _you_ when they think it's appropriate for refactoring to happen. Or when it's time to update a dependency." You work in a place where this happens. You could not.

> You work in a place where this happens. You could not. You could, if lucky, but such sane places are becoming more and more rare. In the 90s (and probably earlier but I don't know) developers were viewed much more highly than now in all aspects except salary. There was a lot of autonomy and authority, the role was respected as a professional. With the rise of agile in the last ~15 years it has been transformed into…

I guess the closest feeling I've had to what you're describing is someone being condescending around matters that are considered non-technical? A PO or Manager essentially treating dev's like entitled children who can't focus on getting the job done.

My only counter however, is that this often is the case, and the manager is right that the very overpaid engineer essentially sucks at self-management.

Or maybe management as a whole has simply realised that they need to gaslight engineers into thinking their required, or maybe a generation of engineers have been promoted into a role they're unsuitable for. All possibilities, all likely.

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

#603

Post by honkycat »

rubicon33 wrote: post #15
honkycat wrote: post #6

I can't remewthe last time my job bottleneck was writing code to implement requirements. The bottleneck is almost always migrating a legacy system, getting buy-in, interviewing users to design the system, or waiting on requirements to be finalized.

The bottleneck for me is always myself. Getting started can be hard sometimes. Getting into the flow of programming where code comes swiftly is tough. Getting stuck on problems by trying too hard to optimize / design / abstract is common. At the end of the day its really these things that prevent me from being a better programmer. I have nobody to blame but myself, yet nothing I do really seems to move the needle. Pr…

I used to struggle greatly with ADHD, but recently got on Vyvanse and that was a HUGE help for me.

My older brother also struggled, but he got on Prozac for his anxiety and he has suddenly become a freaking SUPER HUMAN. I've considered dropping the Vyvanse and switching to Prozac because I have multiple friends and family on it, and the switch from before and after is STARK. And POSITIVE.

It is amazing to see someone who previously struggled with anxiety, to the point that I thought this friend DESPISED ME, to becoming a friendly pal of mine after he found a way to manage his anxiety (prozac).

Our brains are not designed to sit in an office and coax functionality out of a computer. We used to be hunters and prey creatures, and that lizard brain still lives in our bodies constantly reminding us of that a sabre-tooth tiger could be lurking nearby. Or that the other human across from you may try to steal your chance at successfully breeding etc...

Point being, humans have a lot of emotions in modern life that are not always helpful for the way we now have to live.

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

#604

Post by mibollma »

cudgy wrote: post #290
mibollma wrote: post #236

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. I don't think either devlopers or managers can estimate future savings in most cases, but I still think it's necessary to refactor just to not drown in complexity an…

Why 20%? Just curious how you arrived at that percentage.

Thats why I said "about" 20%, so it differs based on project and situation.

Enough to get useful stuff done, small enough to keep most capacity for feature development. Also depends on the amount of technical tickets deemed relevant by the team

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

#605

Post by brailsafe »

polski-g wrote: post #84
brailsafe wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not everyone has the cognitive ability to become a programmer.

You don't need to be a genius to be a programmer. Yes, some people aren't capable of it, but there's a lot of middle ground. Being capable of being a programmer is more about disposition imo than intellect. I've had at least 2 people I don't regularly talk to ask me about getting into it as a career switch, and I say that it's fine, but more miserable than you'd expect.

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

#606

Post by rubicon33 »

honkycat wrote: post #603
rubicon33 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bottleneck for me is always myself. Getting started can be hard sometimes. Getting into the flow of programming where code comes swiftly is tough. Getting stuck on problems by trying too hard to optimize / design / abstract is common. At the end of the day its really these things that prevent me from being a better programmer. I have nobody to blame but myself, yet nothing I do really seems to move the needle. Pr…

I used to struggle greatly with ADHD, but recently got on Vyvanse and that was a HUGE help for me. My older brother also struggled, but he got on Prozac for his anxiety and he has suddenly become a freaking SUPER HUMAN. I've considered dropping the Vyvanse and switching to Prozac because I have multiple friends and family on it, and the switch from before and after is STARK. And POSITIVE. It is amazing to see someone…

Interesting. I took prozac a view years back and it didn't do much for me, but I wonder if I was on too low of a dose (20mg). Can I ask what strength your brother is on? Also, I'll consider asking my Dr. about Vyvanse. I was diagnosed a long time ago with ADHD but haven't been taking meds because I don't like Adderall... something about taking an amphetamine for the rest of my life doesn't fit well with my generally sports / physically active lifestyle.

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

#607

Post by Nextgrid »

Majestic121 wrote: post #423
Nextgrid wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That does not match my experience at all, devs are in a very high demand in France, and once you have some dev experience on your resume you start getting a lot of Linkedin spam. As for unemployment rate in general, France is not amazing but it's far from being 'the capital of unemployment' (0.4% above the EU mean rate) : https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/unemployment-rate?... Did you have anything specific i…

> Did you have anything specific in your experience that could explain why you did not succeed there ?

I didn't have much besides self-employed/freelance experience back then (which was enough to get me a job in the UK) however even low-skill, non-tech jobs were impossible to get.

Maybe it's improved since then and if so I'm glad. I might out of curiosity apply to a couple jobs with my current profile (now having ~7 years of work experience) and see what kind of offer they come back with.

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

#608

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

jstanley wrote: post #378
8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #207

5% speed improvement in my tooling would result in about 0.0000001% improvement in my productivity. first of all, so little of what we do is about the tooling. yes, it's very helpful, but no tool, no matter how good, can tell you how to migrate a monolithic service into microseconds microservices with no downtime and no data loss. maybe if we didn't fuck up the original implementation such things wouldn't be needed b…

If a 5% speed improvement represents 0.0000001% of your time, then isn't 1000x speed improvement still only 0.002%? I don't understand how you can simultaneously argue that almost 0 of your time is spent waiting on tooling, and also that your tooling is so slow that it needs to be 1000x faster.

Alright, let's do some legit math here. Compile times are often about 15 minutes, so a 5% improvement would shave off 45 seconds. That's not too bad. But because that's still a very long wait, I'm not gonna twiddle my thumbs for 14 minutes and 15 seconds, I'm going to go do something else. Probably some social site to kill a few minutes, maybe check some emails, who knows what. Then I'll come back 20-30 minutes later to check if my tests passed or failed. So that 45 seconds isn't really saving me anything because I've already moved onto other things. We have to get that down to a few seconds to avoid distractions. 15 minute / 1000 brings it down to less than a second.

And then my other point was that depending on my day, I might not be writing any code at all. For the past few weeks I've just been reading and writing documents. So no amount of speed improvements will help me.

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

#609

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

8note wrote: post #208
8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #207

5% speed improvement in my tooling would result in about 0.0000001% improvement in my productivity. first of all, so little of what we do is about the tooling. yes, it's very helpful, but no tool, no matter how good, can tell you how to migrate a monolithic service into microseconds microservices with no downtime and no data loss. maybe if we didn't fuck up the original implementation such things wouldn't be needed b…

I think of interns as L3 and new grads as L4. I love having L4s around. They don't have distractions so they can get stuff done

Maybe it's different at my company. I don't know what interns are classed as... not sure if they're L2 or L3-intern. But people that are fresh out of uni are always L3. A few years of industry experience is L4.

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

#610

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

gravypod wrote: post #472
8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #207

5% speed improvement in my tooling would result in about 0.0000001% improvement in my productivity. first of all, so little of what we do is about the tooling. yes, it's very helpful, but no tool, no matter how good, can tell you how to migrate a monolithic service into microseconds microservices with no downtime and no data loss. maybe if we didn't fuck up the original implementation such things wouldn't be needed b…

> our tooling is so effing slow it needs a 1000x improvement. not in how fast we can write code, just to compile and test the damn stuff Not just that. Why do we have 30 tools for 30 programming languages. JetBrains has one IDE per language (approximately). What happens when I have a project with two languages? It is a mess. Don't get me started about build systems. Something like Bazel is greatly needed which would…

Ya.. I wasn't so sure about 'Bazel' at first but it really is great having one build system for every language that mostly just works once you get used to it.
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