I think the problem of ageism wasn't mentioned at all and it should be.
People who love the field have no problems keeping up to date. Sure some job posts will mention Hadoop or Kafka but whatever, a good dev will have no problem learning these in a few days.
Does he get a chance though if he's 50?
We will never have enough software developers (2020)
61–70 of 553 posts
Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#62Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The alternate is not owning the house and instead paying rent, which means your rent would have to be far lower than the appreciating asset (house) and the cost of servicing the debt (interest part of the mortgage)
That's certainly not the case in the UK. I'd be surprised if it were in the US
Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#64There 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…
Lawyers work on "discovery". Requesting and sifting through piles of documents. The jira ticket doesn't seem so bad.
In general to me the whole process of getting the degree, the bar and then the actually work and the pay unless you make it seems like rather bad compared to how easy SWE or related work can be.
The school is laughably expensive for something that should in reality be rather cheap. Read books, listen to lecturers? No laboratory work or practical experience and so on, clearly overpriced. And the studying to get approval of cartel? And then end up working for rather poor compensation for quite a long bit in career... As the pay is bi-modal, yes partners rake in money, but they also need to get the clients. But the people doing bulk of the work aren't that well paid.
Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#65There 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…
Cry me a river. Software development is some of the easiest, highest paid work in history. The majority of the population is grinding away in tough physical labor or abusive service jobs getting paid pennies while software devs moan about only making low six figures and getting a few boring jira tickets while they sit in their home office reading hacker news for half the day.
lol yes this is a good point. We should all volunteer in a hospital or police department for a few days to get some perspective...
And another thought: many jobs descriptions list any technical novelty under the sun even though only some small project in some small team somewhere in the company uses it. Why? To look more appealing to job seekers. It's much cooler to describe the job as PHP + Elixir + Kafka + Big data than simply PHP - which is mostly what the job is about.
I'm not denying the field is changing fast, it is. But there's other reasons why 50 year olds are pushed away besides some imagined inability to keep up.
Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#66I 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…
Most work going on is feature work in my experience. Not bug fixes.
A new feature will take longer to implement on top of a badly designed or misbehaving dependency.
Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
We can’t even push to a git repo unless it has a linked work item/story/task/bug. So, in order to say, upgrade packages or refactor difficult to read code, the work item needs to be approved by a non-tech PO. Guess how much gets done outside of planned/micromanaged? Answer: next to nothing.
That definitely sounds broken. I have a hard rule with my PO: 30% of the sprint is mine (read: the team's). He only gets to schedule 70% of the stories according to his priorities. I use that 30% for tech debt, primarily, but sometimes for spike projects and other things that interest us.
Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#68With 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
The problem space will just shift and the market will demand much more and much better software.
Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#69Many software positions do not account for the opportunity cost of learning job-specific knowledge, or soon-obsolete knowledge, making it hard to justify the investment in the long run. With pressure, the human capital will also erode faster, leading to a situation where more fresh blood is needed.
Consequently a smart software company need a mechanic to maximize learning RoI for its workers, else the best choice for them would be to leave (even a job they appreciate). So called "accidental complexity" is almost always low RoI.
Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#70I 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…
Most work going on is feature work in my experience. Not bug fixes.
Where do you work and are you hiring?