Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We will never have enough software developers (2020)

whoisnnamdi.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 553 posts

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

#501

Post by highwaylights »

prewett wrote: post #356
mettamage wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need data for this. More importantly, we need data for how tough it is to get certain jobs. That means stuff like: * Time spent on finding a job * Time spent on studying in order to attain a job * Actual amount of hours worked (hard to get accurate data on it) * Actual amount of effort per hour (hard to operationalize) It's a very tough discussion to have, but I have a gut feeling that you're simplifying too much…

We can get statistics for some of the parent's claims: > On the other hand, saying that the majority of the population is grinding in tough physical labour is just not true. 10.3% of US jobs are classified as "physically demanding". [1] (I didn't see parent said "labour" until after my research, but I expect figures in the UK are similar). Assertion is TRUE, the majority is not doing "grinding" labor. > Most other jo…

I’m honestly impressed at the extent you’ve researched what I said to this level.

My guess (and it would only be a guess, as I don’t see how it would be possible to really know either way) is that for many of the respondents they could well be kidding themselves about how necessary their job actually is.

As an example, Bob might feel his job really matters, and it might within his company, but his whole company could be an also-ran or a quango that the world wouldn’t miss if it didn’t exist.

All of the above aside, how would you feel about coming to my house while I watch the news and subtly letting me know when I’m being fed alternative facts?

I’ll provide unlimited tea and biscuits. Don’t keep your gifts to yourself!

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

#502

Post by ozim »

Frost1x wrote: post #400
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you remove people from the grind for 1-2 days a week The modern office seems hellbent on killing every last bit of slack in their workers, then wondering why they leave or get burned out. I realized the other day that a big part of my drive to move towards self-employment is really just a way to carve out time to take adequate care of myself. I have significant doubts that it is possible to continue to advance i…

Pretty much. I often wonder where people find positions claimed on the internet where they're working 2-3 hours a day. I've increasingly throughout my career saw more and more slack evaporate to a point it's almost nonexistent. I always wondered why people complained about how much time certain aspects took up they could automate away and my question was always: well, once you automate away that nice simple task, wha…

I think you write about people who mention that they can get 2-3 hours of actual work, which in turn they count as "actually writing code in editor".

I can easily imagine how it goes - because pushing tickets over takes time, bunch of meetings during the day takes time, explaining stuff to junior devs takes time, reviewing pull requests and answering to comments takes time, clarifying things with QA/BA/PO, figuring out which libraries to use by googling takes time.

I saw devs that think these things that I have listed don't feel like "real work" but it is. There is also no way to automate meetings or discussions over PRs.

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

#503

Post by trashtester »

spicymaki wrote: post #118
Gigachad wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't get on the "It is a hard-knock life for Software developers" train. We are very-very well compensated, and we are insufferable. I do understand the issue. Humans are prone to complain about any slight whether real or imagined. Millionaires will complain about not having enough money, A-list celebrities will complain about not having enough visibility, sports stars will complain about every foul play. Money ju…

> I can't get on the "It is a hard-knock life for Software developers" train. We are very-very well compensated, and we are insufferable.

This. People don't feel sorry for people who are in the top 20% in terms of salaries, when they complain about not being in the top 5%.

About a decade ago, or a bit more, I noticed that the the crowd over at slashdot started complaining in similar ways, either that some MBA was compensated better, or that H1B holders were suppressing salaries.

Maybe I'm prejudiced, but it seems to me that this kind of thinking is common in mediocre developers who are disappointed that they are stuck in an average-or-below paying programming job from around the age of 35-40 on. Maybe their salary even went down a bit, in real terms, after the latest downturn.

I simply have trouble empathizing with people who have it better than most other poeple, but still complain like that. If they were industrial workers that started out low (at least for the country), but still lost their job to outsourcing to Asia, and were unable to get another, I would empathize a bit more.

I don't think it's the job of governments to protect top 20% earners from competition from abroad, and get fed up when entitled people demand such protectionism.

I stopped following slashdot because the discussions often turned into something I would expect in a labor union forum, instead focusing on fresh perspectives in tech an science.

But if it is a generational sort of thing, I suppose that is why it is becoming more common on HN about now.

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

#504

Post by weatherlite »

lakomen wrote: post #402
xwolfi wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but I interview for a role where we dont have set languages: we're a small optimisation team working across system when they reach capacity bottleneck and we do JS, C#, Java, C++, PL/SQL fixes completely transparently, we've slowly learned that languages really dont matter all that much for performance tuning as much as programmers mishandling which are identical in all of them (hash map loops, abusive recursion,…

Anything can be learned, but not necessarily in a reasonable amount of time. Some things are easier to pick up, some are just impossible. Example, I was doing PHP for 11 years then jumped to Go 9 years ago (wow it has already been 9 years), Go was good for me because it lifted a lot of mental burden of the OOP craze and wrong concepts applied back then. On the downside, it didn't have an ecosystem. But it was easy to…

I think some skills are more valuable than others because they don't change that much. Java is valuable. Go is valuable. PHP is valuable. C is amazing. JS frameworks...not thanks. I think of moving from full stack development to backend due to this..its a bit more sustainable.

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

#505

Post by ornornor »

_fat_santa wrote: post #220
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…

> The pay isn't great--the kids getting $300K packages out of Stanford are an exception; it's a marketing expense. You don't have to make 300k for the pay to be great. Even if you fall short of that and land at a company that only pays you $120k, you're still making a killing compared to most other professions. > Corporate SWE is pretty awful Then get out of Corporate. I work for an SMB, make about as much as I used…

> SMB

I think the signal:noise ratio isn’t great in this sector. Although corporate is 100% guaranteed misery, I have yet to come up with a reliable way to find SMBs where IT (because that’s how they call it, a SWE is the same as the help desk in their view) isn’t considered as “the geeks working the cost center in the basement”.

Do you have a method or did you rely on blind luck like the rest of us?

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

#506

Post by DantesKite »

madhadron wrote: post #454

We need a #badstatistics tag or something. The turnover problems saying that relative wage advantage declines? Their chart on a log scale shows that the wages are still really high compared to non-CS jobs. A more likely interpretation is that junior programmers are for whatever reason highly paid in their sample. Those error bars are suspiciously tight, so there's a good chance their sample is biased. The selection p…

Are there any books/courses you recommend for learning statistics at a rudimentary level?

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

#507

Post by mmarq »

trashtester wrote: post #471
mmarq wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am going to say that you sound a bit confused. > But as we consider the inflation we are seeing today, try to imagine how it would be if the inflation is not 5-10% but 29500% Hitler took power 10 years after the hyperinflation. People didn’t vote for the NSDAP because of hyperinflation, nor they started hating the Jews more than before because of it. > You are absolutely right that antisemmitism didn't suddenly pop…

> deeper roots that the hyperinflation or some temporary unemployment. Oh, and about this part, I think you underestimate the hyperinflation in 22-23 in Germany. Over a period of about 2-3 years, people who had been comfortably part of the upper middle class would lose EVERYTHING, and in many cases end up starving to death. That's not "temporary unemployment". Read this quote: - One particularly arresting story is th…

> people who had been comfortably part of the upper middle class would lose EVERYTHING, and in many cases end up starving to death

The upper middle class own non-monetary assets, they are probably the least affected by inflation.

> For the Germans, this left an impression that resembled the Shoah for the jews.

No, not really and not even close. At least because the Weimar hyperinflation hasn’t caused mass starvation. Second because losing your savings is not even close to being stripped naked and beaten once a week and then being put on a cattle wagon to be slaughtered 1000 kilometres from home.

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

#508

Post by leoedin »

doctor_lollipop wrote: post #83
leoedin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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++.

How does the language matter? I write software (mostly) in C for a living (the simple man's "embedded" as in "Linux on an ARM board", not the "bits on a micro controller" kind) and I made sure we use test-driven development with proper version control and CI. We have been trying to use Rust for some new projects but cross-compiling is still much more hit-and-miss with Rust (i.e. third-party libraries) than it is with…

My comment wasn't saying that modern development practices only exist in newer languages - I agree that all those things are possible with C.

But the language does bring benefits. In my experience modern strongly typed languages with large standard libraries and nice tooling are more productive than C (and probably more than C++, although writing idiomatic modern C++ is quite nice). C's simplicity is nice, but it still exists in a world where your only option for 3rd party libraries are zips downloaded from some random Sourceforge. Trying to write a C program with effective string handling is an absolute nightmare. All those things are solved many times over in other languages.

As a tool for writing very low level routines handling fixed length data, C is pretty good. But embedded development is moving away from that - every project seems to have some sort of web API, and that's when the downsides of C really start to show themselves.

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

#509

Post by rainboOow9 »

weatherlite wrote: post #170
rainboOow9 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironic thing here is that Hadoop is mostly already outdated. Which is btw one of the depressing thing for a lot of data engineers: we used to play with those cool distributed processing frameworks, and now? We are mostly writing some terraform to deploy cloud resources, most of the distributed part being handled by those cloud providers.

> Which is btw one of the depressing thing for a lot of data engineers: we used to play with those cool distributed processing frameworks, and now? We are mostly writing some terraform to deploy cloud resources, most of the distributed part being handled by those cloud providers. Sounds to me like switching one provider/tool by another - or are data engineers feeling bummed because the job has become too trivial / le…

I am only speaking for myself here, but I am really feeling the switch from "data engineering" to "data ops", for whatever that means.

In short, 5-10 years ago, writing mapreduce / spark jobs (or even debugging / optimizing hive jobs) was complex enough that it was often the job of the data engineer (and not the data analyst / scientist). And I do not only mean writing the data processing logic, but more importantly, properly configuring it so that the resource footprint was acceptable. This required a good understanding of the underlying framework, analyzing the job execution plan, tweaking the resource configuration, etc.

Now, writing distributed jobs is pretty trivial with most cloud providers, hence it is now purely done by data analysts and scientists. And the data engineers have switched to doing more of a devops kind of work, doing the plumbing between the various cloud components and the IaC required to provide those cloud resources to other data users. In short, you can be a data engineer and have absolutely no clue on how distributed systems are actually working, this will not be an issue in your daily job.

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

#510

Post by rainboOow9 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #217
rainboOow9 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironic thing here is that Hadoop is mostly already outdated. Which is btw one of the depressing thing for a lot of data engineers: we used to play with those cool distributed processing frameworks, and now? We are mostly writing some terraform to deploy cloud resources, most of the distributed part being handled by those cloud providers.

The Hadoop ecosystem is still very much ongoing. You must work in small tech/startups if you think that these are being replaced by managed services.

It is still ongoing, but the trend is really on managed services. Most shops that are still running hadoop distribution are doing it for legacy reasons (and I used to work in one). I mean, just look at job offers: how many offers do you see where hadoop experience is a plus VS cloud experience?
Post reply on HN