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We will never have enough software developers (2020)

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Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#41

Post by psychoslave »

trashtester wrote: post #23
cs137 wrote: post #10

There 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, the…

SWE's are not the only ones that think that their pay is low compared to their intelligence level, their education level, how tough, inconvenient or important their work is or what they feel they deserve for some other reason. For instance, I'm sure there are plenty of HR managers in various companies that are secretly furious about all the young young mostly males, mostly white or asian, still in their 20s, join the…

>SWE's are not the only ones that think that their pay is low compared to their intelligence level, their education level, how tough, inconvenient or important their work is or what they feel they deserve for some other reason.

Sure, but it doesn’t mean some or all of them are not right, especially when the unequal distribution of wealth is well known and documented to evolve for the worst.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth#Global_...

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#42

Post by adrianN »

cabraca wrote: post #7
JackMorgan wrote: post #5

A 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 c…

Shit that bugged them for a long time might have a lot less value to the business than a tedious task that nobody wants.

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#43

Post by tome »

pojzon wrote: post #18

Brother is teaching at the University among other things and from the stories he sometimes tells me: I do not worry about agism or work at all. Lets just say that when we were studing, most ppl were not the brightest tool in the shed. Now its supposedly many many times worse.

Do you mean students are less intelligent these days?

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#44

Post by Vinnl »

988747 wrote: post #8

I 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 :) Ba…

If you believe in the Jevons paradox [1], you can explain it without reaching for "bad developers".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#45

Post by reidjs »

itsmemattchung wrote: post #32

With OpenAi (and other comparable technologies) able to semantically understand "write fast and efficient C code for a prime sieve" and generate fairly impressive C code, I'm no longer sure I agree that we will never have enough software developers (after watching this, made me get just a little nervous as well as excited about the future of our industry): https://youtu.be/k_EF42H2ZC0?t=187

How often in your career has the problem been that well articulated?

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#46

Post by bruce343434 »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #30
www_harka_com wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you make money from owning and living in a house?

It goes up in value. Also interests rates decreasing means more immediate money in lower living costs.

You can't pay for groceries with those unrealized gains. You'd have to sell your house. Wait, where will you live?

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#47

Post by Victerius »

tialaramex wrote: post #39
cs137 wrote: post #10

There 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, the…

Many lawyers have to religiously time track everything. Because hours attributable to a specific client are billed and billable hours are where the revenue comes from.

On the other hand, lawyers knowledge of the law and legal procedures doesn't become stale after a few years.

"Requires 20 years experience in the Affordable Care Act" - Said no law firm ever

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#48

Post by matt321 »

leoedin wrote: post #36
willjp wrote: post #15

Re: skill churn I got the impression that there is much less of this in lower level languages. It seems like there is a fairly stable foundation of C, Cpp that everything else is built on top of. I wonder if embedded programmers have this problem.

In my experience it's the opposite problem. Advocating for modern development practices or languages (even unit testing, let alone Rust) for embedded projects is hard work. Most new embedded projects, even today, are written in C or C++.

I have the same experience. I cant event get people onto github. We spend thousands a month trying to keep our international teams connected to our local servers and they still have to zip up the project and send it to me over teams.

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#49

Post by ur-whale »

itsmemattchung wrote: post #32

With OpenAi (and other comparable technologies) able to semantically understand "write fast and efficient C code for a prime sieve" and generate fairly impressive C code, I'm no longer sure I agree that we will never have enough software developers (after watching this, made me get just a little nervous as well as excited about the future of our industry): https://youtu.be/k_EF42H2ZC0?t=187

What OpenAI does is regurgitate stuff it's seen on the internet.

These things are basically a glorified hashtable (with compression).

Much like what a google query does when it leads you to a chunk of code in stack overflow.

Luckily, there's much more to what SWE does, and it's high time people stop believing that AI is at the level where it can do the job of a SWE, it's ridiculous.

Or to put it in a way that's perhaps more clear: Go ask OpenAI to rewrite to GUI of FreeCAD to be usable, see what it comes up with.

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#50

Post by zarzavat »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #30
www_harka_com wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you make money from owning and living in a house?

It goes up in value. Also interests rates decreasing means more immediate money in lower living costs.

It’s a rather abstract view of making money. Other houses also go up in value. You only make money from the difference between how much houses in your area are going up, and how much houses in the area you want to move to are going up. And that difference may well be negative.
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