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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)

#541

Post by eropple »

mwcampbell wrote: post #524
eropple wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really important. At my first job, in 2010 or so, we were using Servlets. Not just Servlets, but Servlets with some home-rolled shims to make it act like Servlets 1.0 in a distinctly post-1.0 world. Doing pretty much anything in there was slow, and I realized it at the time. So during a hack week I built an MVC layer on top, with routing that didn't involve XML files and just--made it generally better . Or so…

Where do you think your understanding went wrong initially? You said you realized that doing anything in the old system was slow. Was it not actually slow? Was the slowness not relevant because there weren't actually that many routes? Were your coworkers resigned to having some minimum level of tedium in web development? Or something else?

Oh no, it was slow--but it was slow and they were used to it. (And there were plenty of routes--probably somewhere close to a thousand at the time, in 2011?)

The problem I hadn't fully understood was a mix of the last point you suggested--tedium's just how it is--and a set of libraries built up as coping mechanisms that were intrinsically tied to the servlets process. Not really written to be able to be shimmed into a better world without dragging the whole thing there, and not enough appetite to try for it.

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

#542

Post by eropple »

jacobyoder wrote: post #522
eropple wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really important. At my first job, in 2010 or so, we were using Servlets. Not just Servlets, but Servlets with some home-rolled shims to make it act like Servlets 1.0 in a distinctly post-1.0 world. Doing pretty much anything in there was slow, and I realized it at the time. So during a hack week I built an MVC layer on top, with routing that didn't involve XML files and just--made it generally better . Or so…

> I hadn't understood how the people on the team thought about web development and it wasn't a better fit for them. They didn't feel like there was a problem, so a solution didn't make sense. There's got to be a limit to this line of justification though. Lots of people have just plain wrong ideas about 'web development', so catering to their ideas doesn't serve anyone well (except, perhaps, those people, who in the…

Oh totally! I firmly agree that at some point you have to pull the ripcord.

The question becomes--where?

This company was incredibly successful up until COVID and is still ticking along, so it's hard to argue. I gather they've done significant work to rebuild the universe in that time, though. I might've just been early.

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

#543

Post by madhadron »

DantesKite wrote: post #506
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?

I really wish that I had something comprehensive to suggest. There are some things that I think everyone who deals with statistics should read, such as Freedman's 'Statistical Models and Shoe Leather'[^1] and Tukey's 'Exploratory Data Analysis'[^2]. Pearl's 'Causal Inference in Statistics' is the best introduction I know of to issues of causality as we understand them today. For actual inference, the basis is one player game theory (aka, decision theory). I learned it from Kiefer's 'Introduction to Statistical Inference,' which sets out the theory very nicely in the first few chapters. That's a starting point at least. There are some interesting courses[^3] that try to teach statistics via resampling that seem pedagogically very valuable. Resampling does build intuition nicely and using it gets people over their squeamishness around using randomized procedures.

[^1]: http://psychology.okstate.edu/faculty/jgrice/psyc5314/Freedm...

[^2]: Sadly really hard to find. We need a cheap reprint of this.

[^3]: https://resample.statistics.com/intro-text-online/

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

#544

Post by kcplate »

anonporridge wrote: post #534
kcplate wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I would be young now, I'd say fuck it and go install solar panels or heat pumps Amen. For me the advice I give the young—-go for a trade. HVAC (especially if you live where it’s hot) and plumbing to me are the most future and recession proof jobs there are. Literally by the time other folks are graduating with CS degrees and massive college debt, you have been making 70k a year for 3 years and are about to clip…

Unfortunately, this is also a low cost skill to acquire, so the barrier to entry is low. As all the mid level white collar jobs keep getting automated away, there's going to be a glut of people in need of income who are more than capable of learning a trade if their ego can handle it.

> Unfortunately, this is also a low cost skill to acquire, so the barrier to entry is low.

Why is this “unfortunate”?

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

#545

Post by willjp »

trashtester wrote: post #496
willjp wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I had no idea. I wonder why all of the resistance - if not github then even the git protocol over ssh or a samba share.

Or zip up the git repo and send it over teams :)

Hahaha fair enough

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

#546

Post by selcuka »

z3t4 wrote: post #540
selcuka wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I once "optimised" an in-house software that took minutes to process a single report, down to seconds, just by adding an index to the database (Microsoft Access, mind you) table. Not all developers know what they are doing [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339

Had a coworker that just indexed everything, and it worked too.

To be fair knowing what to index is hard [1], but one would at least expect a developer to know that indexes are a thing.

[1] https://use-the-index-luke.com/3-minute-test

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

#547

Post by throwaway43583 »

bradlys wrote: post #270
hellohowareu wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the skill depreciation concept is a bit exaggerated. Especially in the context of the newness of computers relative to the engineering field in general, the latter which has been around, arguably, for thousands of years. For example, SQL & Unix have been around since the 1970s. Linux since late 1991. Javascript: The end of 1995. NodeJS: 2009. Sure, there's a ton of churn in the JS Ecosystem, but all it takes…

The issue is that every job I’ve had requires learning a bunch of new shit. Rarely am I just transferring over to the same languages or frameworks. Add on that each company decides different design patterns that they want to utilize and has a different interpretation of what REST is and what HTTP status codes are… it’s a pain in the ass to be an expert in any good amount of time. Expert being one that can dive into t…

I stopped being full stack for this reason. It's too much effort to keep up with the entire stack and companies don't compensate great full stack devs more than great front end or back end devs. I think it's just a marketing ploy to get unassuming youngsters to spend more time at work being full stack so they can try to pay one person to do two jobs.

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

#548

Post by jnash »

goldenshale wrote: post #240

I think this article hits on some truths and gets a handful of things wrong. First, they are correct that we are in a dynamic profession that requires constant learning and expanding. No doubt the people who choose to stay in software are likely to be people who are curious, life-long learners where this is a benefit of the profession rather than a drawback. That said, one thing I noticed from teaching computer scien…

> they are correct that we are in a dynamic profession that requires constant learning and expanding

Not true. I have met many developers who haven't learned anything new for 15+ years and are still doing just fine developing software. A lot of Java developers come to mind. They have pretty much done the same thing their whole career and have no need or desire to learn anything new.

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

#549

Post by jnash »

onion2k wrote: post #308
plutonorm wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like needing to ask to go to the toilet. It's degrading. Utterly disrespectful. You expect people to stick around?

Updating a dependency, refactoring some code, or just making a 'simple' change sets off a chain of events that affect other people. The other devs need to review the code, the QA team need to test it, and then regression test the rest of the app, the devops team need to deploy it, the legal team need to update the legal documentation that lists the licenses for the dependencies the code has, the technical writers nee…

You are right if you work in an organization that is overly bureaucratic and incompetent. For the rest of us not so much.

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

#550

Post by GFischer »

Ekaros wrote: post #155
q-big wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The compensation can be high if you work in Silicon Valley (even though the cost of living is high there). The standard corporate programming job is already paid much worse. Also in a lot of countries that are not the USA, software development is not such a well-paying job.

I don't think there is that many countries were software developers aren't reasonably well compensated compared to local standard of pay. And that is the level that we should really compare to. Is the pay above median or in top 25% for the location? I would guess that it is for most of the world.

My brother in law lived in Austria, he was paid similarly to any other job there, there was an impassable ceiling, so he moved to San Francisco and makes 10x.

I looked for software development jobs in Spain, and they pay even less than in my native Uruguay.

And forget about six figures unless you're in the US, England, Switzerland or Australia or a top company in Europe.

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