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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

#131

Post by freedomben »

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.

I think it was the rise of SaaS and major-scale big tech. That was also the point where structure sucked a lot of the fun out of it by converting SWEs into code factory workers by removing most of the forms of artistic expression from it (yes SWEs aren't always the best UI designers or product managers or program managers, but I think it was a mistake to remove them entirely from the equation. Regardless whether it was a mistake, it really sucked the joy out of it for many people, myself included).

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#132

Post by gruez »

bluetomcat wrote: post #94
netcan wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

>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.

???

What are you talking about? For a typical fullstack app the proprietary bits probably account for less than 5% of the codebase.

>They soaked a huge amount of talent to optimise their ad and recommendation engines.

That's just PR/advertising/sales. If the companies didn't exist it's not like those job or efforts will disappear, they'll be allocated elsewhere, classified ads in newspapers for instance.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#133

Post by Paratoner »

wahern wrote: post #116
ffsm8 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately, all actions multinational companies take are rooted in greed. Questioning that feels a lil naive? Are you honestly of the opinion that big tech isn't primarily motivated by money and is instead being run like a family business with an upstanding owner that has the well-being of their employees at heart?

Being motivated by money isn't greed. Per Merriam-Webster, greed is an "excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed". The key qualifiers there are excessive and more than is needed. How do we determine what excessive employment is? I'm not even sure how companies can be greedy. Many animals will gorge themselves on food far beyond what they "need" in the moment. There's nothing guaranteeing…

> How do we determine what excessive employment is?

Idk perhaps we have a slight hint in the tens of thousands of workers Microsoft _alone_ has laid off in the past year? I'm sure there is no way to intuit that big tech has indeed been over hiring with a clear disregard for its individuals beyond their utility at fixed points in time.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#134

Post by freedomben »

surgical_fire wrote: post #100
ecb_penguin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gol…

That's true, but I think you need to account for the state of hardware and operating systems too. Unless you're on Linux, the hackability and control over your own computing environment has never been worse (aside from when those things weren't accessible at all). Yes I can build almost anything nowadays, but actually using it is a different story, even just for personal use (ask people with iPhones and increasingly Android about that).

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#135

Post by graemep »

freedomben wrote: post #124
graemep wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever (claims which are not at all self-evident), blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees? Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off? Both can be true depending in circumstances. The management of companies are primarily motivated by increasing their share price, as that is what remuneration is most commonly linked to, nor profits. For example…

I don't disagree, but then it seems like the definition of "greed" that you are using is essentially synonymous with "running a company." If we want to use that definition, then the claims become true, but the term "greed" also becomes meaningless as it applies to everything we as humans do. "Greed" becomes the motivation behind why I took two slices of pizza instead of one, or why I turn the thermostat down in the w…

I do not think it is synonymous. Running a company means pursuing profits, but it does not mean you have to ignore all other considerations. You can have ethical limits, server customers, look after the interests of your employees, reduce your environmental impacts etc.

Greed means running a company without due consideration of these things.

IN this case the explanation I am suggesting is even less synonymous because by putting short boosts to the share price over long term profitability is not (in the long term) even serving the best interests of the shareholders.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#136

Post by Kapura »

gishglish wrote: post #70
Kapura wrote: post #68

Concentrated capital strikes again. Why would I work on building websites in my local community if google is going to at least 3x the salary to build and cancel several products? We need to flatten the capital distribution curve and many of these problems will work themselves out.

> Why would I work on building websites in my local community if google is going to at least 3x the salary to build and cancel several products? We need to flatten the capital distribution curve and many of these problems will work themselves out. It’s all good. The local community doesn’t need you to build out sites anymore. I quit doing that when small business owners started expressing that they didn’t need a webs…

and thus, the capital spent on a squarespace website leaves that community, never to return.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#137

Post by ryandrake »

wahern wrote: post #116
ffsm8 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately, all actions multinational companies take are rooted in greed. Questioning that feels a lil naive? Are you honestly of the opinion that big tech isn't primarily motivated by money and is instead being run like a family business with an upstanding owner that has the well-being of their employees at heart?

Being motivated by money isn't greed. Per Merriam-Webster, greed is an "excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed". The key qualifiers there are excessive and more than is needed. How do we determine what excessive employment is? I'm not even sure how companies can be greedy. Many animals will gorge themselves on food far beyond what they "need" in the moment. There's nothing guaranteeing…

> Being motivated by money isn't greed. Per Merriam-Webster, greed is an "excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed". The key qualifiers there are excessive and more than is needed. How do we determine what excessive employment is?

Turn it around. How do we determine what "enough" is? Ask any business person who is beholden to shareholders to define "enough" and they will tell you there is no such word.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#138

Post by skirmish »

blehn wrote: post #98
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 pa…

Also: telling a senior SWE (L5) that for good performance reviews they must act as a tech lead and spend most of their time in "alignment" meetings with other TLs and managers. Also: a team of 3 SWEs where each claims to be a tech lead of an area, purely for good performance reviews.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#139

Post by Hilift »

rvz wrote: post #86

No it did not. It killed the golden age of mediocre software developers, which includes the over inflated role of web development which that can be safely done by LLMs.

Around 1999, eBay code was c++ compiled into a "ebayisapi.dll". It became too large for x86. I'm guessing it had lots of COM+ and must have been a disaster, bodies everywhere.

https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs330/2007fa/slides/eBayS...

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#140

Post by gishglish »

Hilift wrote: post #139
rvz wrote: post #86

No it did not. It killed the golden age of mediocre software developers, which includes the over inflated role of web development which that can be safely done by LLMs.

Around 1999, eBay code was c++ compiled into a "ebayisapi.dll". It became too large for x86. I'm guessing it had lots of COM+ and must have been a disaster, bodies everywhere. https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs330/2007fa/slides/eBayS...

Oh man, was it implemented as an ISAPI extension? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in the wild.
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