We will never have enough software developers (2020)
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We will never have enough software developers (2020)
1–10 of 553 posts
Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#2Just wait for gpt 42, it will be better than most of us at coding.
Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#3Ye no. The reason is not Javascript framework churn. I feel the notation that the software field change fast is a MBA take on it since the in fashion key words change name all the time.
I guess the underlying reason is that engineers wont be promoted to (real) chief engineers with agency. Being a boss requires reports for some reason. So experienced people leave sweetshops to escape the grind when they get fed up.
Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#4> Programming-related jobs have high rates of skill turnover
True, but there are fundamental patterns that remain the same. And if we are talking about the level-of-abstraction type of change, then having experience in the underlying techs certainly helps.
Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#5A fascinating premise, and matches what I saw as an engineering director. The best just get bored and move on.
I think many teams are unaware how much extra value is possible by retaining existing employees vs hiring new ones. Each year I'd try to make sure I was "making them an offer they couldn't refuse" with new interesting challenges, new tech, plenty of personal research time, as much pay increase as I could possibly give, etc. A lot of engineering managers think that it's no big deal to just hire new staff, but even going from average turnover of two years to three years is an massive improvement.
Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#6Just wait for gpt 42, it will be better than most of us at coding.
As a software developer, you are going to use gpt 42 to develop software. You will probably write a lot less code manually, but it’s not a bad thing.
Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#7A fascinating premise, and matches what I saw as an engineering director. The best just get bored and move on. I think many teams are unaware how much extra value is possible by retaining existing employees vs hiring new ones. Each year I'd try to make sure I was "making them an offer they couldn't refuse" with new interesting challenges, new tech, plenty of personal research time, as much pay increase as I could pos…
its not just the best ones. If you remove people from the grind for 1-2 days a week, give them a small budget and enough autonomy to do what they want, most people will fix shit that bugged them for a long time.
The main problem is how micromanage-y the current development processes are. Everything has to be a ticket/user story and has to be planned and approved by some people that never even wrote a single line of code. Everything has to have some immediate business impact. I even see scrum teams measuring for team utilization now. target is 90% atm and they wonder why productivity is down.
Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#8I read an article some time ago with the reasoning that went like this:
"The goal of software development is to automate things. So, in principle, with time there should be less demand for software development skills because most of the hard work has already been done, and we have better, more high level tools. The only reason we see demand for software developers growing is because we let the bad developers in :) Bad developer can easily generate 2 FTEs per year, by introducing subtle bugs in code that someone has to find and fix. "
Anyone here has the actual source ?
Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#9Just wait for gpt 42, it will be better than most of us at coding.
Even better, it is really good at PRs!
Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#10There isn't a shortage of software developers. The pay isn't great--the kids getting $300K packages out of Stanford are an exception; it's a marketing expense. In fact, if you control for the level of intelligence it takes to be any good, SWEs make less (and get far less autonomy--do you think lawyers work on Jira tickets?) than any other professional, and they hit a salary/challenge plateau quick... after which, they increasingly face ageism.
People leave because the job sucks. I don't mean that programming sucks; I quite enjoy it. Computer science is still an engaging field worth studying, and research programming isn't bad at all. Corporate SWE is pretty awful, though; you get paid far too little and treated far too shabbily to justify spending hours dealing with bugs and bad decisions that exist not because you're working on hard problems (after all, I've generated my share of bugs and bad decisions) but because of inadequate processes, mindless cost-cutting, generic incompetence, and an overall lack of care, especially at the top. All of this, to make a barely middle-class salary while people who are already rich and connected make millions off my work? No thanks. 2.25/5, would not do again.