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Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

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Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#91

Post by jleyank »

To me the golden age of programming was the 60’s and 70’s when gods walked the earth who thought up pretty much all of the stuff we use or do. Networking, operating systems, languages, …. Hackers, for the most part, did it because it scratched their itch or because it helped out a buddy. Or demonstrated their powers in the appropriate way.

Nobody counted money and it was funded by the government mostly. But it created the basis of where the HN readership lives. And I’m always frustrated that I missed participating in it.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#92

Post by AnimalMuppet »

j45 wrote: post #84
freedomben wrote: post #20

This is a really terrible article. I suspect the HN comment section will be good, but TFA is not worth reading IMHO (though it is quite short so can be read in a minute or two). > For years, companies like Google, Facebook/Meta, and Amazon hired too many developers. They knew they were hiring too many developers, but they did it anyway because of corporate greed. They wanted to control the talent pool. Aside from all…

Over hiring junior talent to keep talent off the market away from competitors was a known behaviour as well.

Well, it was a widely and strongly suspected behavior. It was never proven, to the best of my knowledge.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#93

Post by afthonos »

antonvs wrote: post #73
tickettotranai wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your framing is unfalsifiable, I question its utility.

They're identifying a driving force, greed, behind a range of actions. That's no more "unfalsifiable" than the claim that gravity is variously responsible for objects falling, orbits, spherically symmetric bodies, and stars collapsing.

So what would be impossible to explain in a world where “corporate greed” is indeed what causes all these things? The answer can’t be “nothing”—or “corporate greed” doesn’t mean anything.

I can say, for example, that under gravity, an object will not accelerate upwards when entering else stays down; if you show me that happening, I either have to say gravity didn’t cause it, or that gravity is not what we thought it was (and we should probably get a new word for whatever it has).

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#94

Post by bluetomcat »

netcan wrote: post #65
freedomben wrote: post #20

This is a really terrible article. I suspect the HN comment section will be good, but TFA is not worth reading IMHO (though it is quite short so can be read in a minute or two). > For years, companies like Google, Facebook/Meta, and Amazon hired too many developers. They knew they were hiring too many developers, but they did it anyway because of corporate greed. They wanted to control the talent pool. Aside from all…

The hyperbole and cliche (corporate greed) makes this trashy, but let me fix it... Big Tech firms with blockbuster products like adwords, aws, iPhone and whatnot... they are extremely profitable. So profitable that the basic business logic of "invest more in the money-maker" reaches reductio ad absurdum. So yeah. A lot of talent is locked up where the salaries are highest. These have so much resources and talent thro…

Big Tech drove us towards techno-feudalism. It's a wider social phenomenon and their hiring patterns for programmers are only one aspect of the problem. Small businesses are forced to do business on their platforms according to their rules, or else they go bust. Programmers are forced to learn their APIs, so that their "app" can live in their walled gardens. They soaked a huge amount of talent to optimise their ad and recommendation engines. This is a huge opportunity cost to society - that talent could be doing great creative stuff for small and medium-sized businesses instead.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#96

Post by surgical_fire »

afpx wrote: post #80
rkozik1989 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort. Money is how you define a Golden Age of Programming? I consider the late 1990s and early 2000s more of a Golden Age, and my reasons for it have nothing to do with making money. The time was of Golden Age because that's when programming became more accessible to the masses. Yes it wasn't without its fault, namely with regards to cyber sec…

Of all the impressive software developers I had pleasure to meet before 2012, I never met one who did it for money. They loved their work, the craft, the science, and sheer joy of the creative process. That culture ended quickly pretty around 2012-15, but I never figured out why.

People figured out that their passion was being exploited by some very rich and greedy people for obscene amounts of money.

If you can't fight it, you can at least profit from it too.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#97

Post by thisisit »

I don't think the writer is aware how regular business cycle works.

It starts off with some companies in a particular industry generating great margins. Slowly more companies start joining the industry and there are still great margins. The early employees see huge jump in salaries. But with time everyone wants to pile in - both companies and people. You start seeing hype that this industry is the next big thing and you can't survive without being part of the industry. Once the industry becomes too saturated companies start exiting, people are laid off, industry services become worse etc etc. Nearly every industry goes through this boom and bust, spring and winters. Most destruction leads to a new spring.

Software has seen two springs though. First, the dotcom boom. During the dotcom boom lots of OPEX was spent on undersea cable because everyone was going to use these new fangled "websites". But after the 2000s crash the data prices crashed and it led to the 2013-2020/21 boom. We have to see where things go from here.

The same thing is happening in AI. It is started off with some companies making good margins, there are huge salaries being doled out to early AI experts and give it enough time the market will be chockful of AI related stuff and also going down. That time we can see similar commentaries about how golden age of AI was killed due to greed.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#98

Post by blehn »

lokar wrote: post #32

I’ve seen this claim that Google and others had some plan to over hire. From my time there that was not the case. There was the natural demand for more people on existing projects and lots of (often good) ideas for new projects. The money just poured in. We could never actually hire close to the approved levels. Internal “fights” were over actual people, not headcount, everyone had tons of open headcount. I think the…

Counterpoint: I worked there for years and the demand for more people wasn't natural. It came from (1) typical employees not getting much done because they were either not very motivated, not very competent, or stuck in meetings all day, (2) proliferation of people managers who weren't producing anything — product teams of 200 with 50 of them being managers, (3) managers playing the headcount game because it was a path to promotion — all things being equal, who's getting promoted: an L6 manager with 3 reports or an L6 manager with 12 reports? Constant headcount battles

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#99

Post by thewebguyd »

afpx wrote: post #80
rkozik1989 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort. Money is how you define a Golden Age of Programming? I consider the late 1990s and early 2000s more of a Golden Age, and my reasons for it have nothing to do with making money. The time was of Golden Age because that's when programming became more accessible to the masses. Yes it wasn't without its fault, namely with regards to cyber sec…

Of all the impressive software developers I had pleasure to meet before 2012, I never met one who did it for money. They loved their work, the craft, the science, and sheer joy of the creative process. That culture ended quickly pretty around 2012-15, but I never figured out why.

> That culture ended quickly pretty around 2012-15, but I never figured out why.

The learn to code movement, the plethora of bootcamps promising to make you "job ready", and how it became more widespread knowledge that software development was a "quick" way to a 6 figure+ salary. It's around that time it spread beyond just the nerds and became the hot new easy money career, or at least people thought at the time.

2008 played a role as well. People saw that tech was relatively resilient, and one of the only industries accelerating after the crisis. After 2008, chosen majors at universities saw a drastic change as well from humanities and arts into more job-focused degrees, CS being the major one.

Still happening today, although the job market isn't what it used to be, tech is still one of the very few fields where someone can quickly earn 6+ figures without a PhD.

Honestly if salaries would have kept up in other fields, we probably would not have seen as many people rushing to software development as a safe haven from economic instability.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#100

Post by surgical_fire »

ecb_penguin wrote: post #39
zwnow wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I define golden age by how much I have to do to support my family. How much work there is and ultimately how much $/hr you are paid for it. Your interpretation is also very valid. The article complains about there not being available jobs though, so I went that route.

That would be a golden economic age. We're talking about the craft of programming. They're different things.

If that's your metric, then the golden age never ended, and we are still in the upward trend.

There were never as many tools, programming languages, IDEs, framework, services and tools available for programming. And with the advancement in technology, even a pretty old laptop is still powerful enough to run it all. You now even gave LLMs that are interesting (even if very flawed) code assistants.

If anything, the golden age of programming is a tomorrow that is always postponed another day.

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