Are coders worth it? • Hacker News Board

Re: Are coders worth it?

#201

Post by nekopa » Thu, Jun 06, 2013, 6:30 PM UTC

nawitus wrote: post #168

grey-area wrote: post #50

Wonderful writing, I loved the way it circled several times around the central issue - the value of work, and I particularly liked this conclusion - much validation and reward in our society is driven by how much people are willing to pay you for your chosen work, and it's very hard to separate your self-worth and confidence from that. It's hard to reconcile when your values don't meet those of the people around you,…

>The creative content (writing, photography, art, travel guides etc) is all in demand, but no-one wants to pay for it, perhaps because it's so easy to produce something yourself, and so hard to distinguish the fine differences in quality which separate a remarkable piece of writing or photography from the mediocre. The real reason is not really that people don't want to pay for it, but rather it's available for free,…

In response to you and grey-area about news: yes I get news for free, and it is normally good enough. But... Some of the recent reporting from the NYT has really made me reconsider paying for a news subscription, just to be able to fund great investigative reporting. If I wasn't in a low income country making low income wages it would be a no-brainer. But I really do think that there is a market for high quality reporting, and people willing to pay for it.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#202

Post by dhimes » Thu, Jun 06, 2013, 6:33 PM UTC

gte910h wrote: post #186

dhimes wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. There are some that are worth a lot of money. But to be worth that kind of money you need deep domain knowledge. I won't pay $120/hr for someone to tinker with jQuery. I will pay that for a machine learning specialist. The fact is that 'coders' are today's version of auto mechanics in the 70s. The barrier to entry is low- an old box, a linux distro, google- and off you go. So everybody who can't do something…

The fact you think price per hour is directly correlated with total cost to achieve a good result is a bad thing. Expensive (per hour) developers are often far cheaper.

The fact you think price per hour is directly correlated with total cost to achieve a good result

I don't believe that. My point is that some web/coding skills are not that difficult to achieve, and those skills don't fetch seasoned defense-lawyer rates. At least, not from me.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#203

Post by Falling3 » Thu, Jun 06, 2013, 6:34 PM UTC

damoncali wrote: post #193

mediaman wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great point. Because software has near-zero replication costs, the "manufacturing" process has no good analog for software industry. The manufacturing industry is supported by an army of engineers in a wide variety of specialties. In fact, manufacturing, in some ways, is starting to look a little more similar to software, because the non-material costs of production are falling (automation replaces direct l…

However, like a draftsperson or an engineer who refuses to learn Solidworks, the more powerful software will be a negative for those who cannot, or choose not to, evolve their skill set above a more basic level. That line jogged loose a memory that might cause some thought in other so I'll share: I used be an aerospace engineer. Typically, what we called * designers* were technical people who were very good at workin…

But doesn't it stand to reason that if he'd been just a little more personable and just a little less resistant to change, he could have done even better?

Re: Are coders worth it?

#204

Post by chudi » Thu, Jun 06, 2013, 6:36 PM UTC

sologoub wrote: post #153

This article seems to be missing a parallel that was drawn previously many times. PG has written on the subject, and so have others. The closest parallel we can draw between "coders" and the distant past, is that with the artisans of the middle ages. Aside from the landowning nobles, the artisan class was probably the closest thing to a true middle class. Many advanced to upper-middle and later became the industrial…

I think that an analogy that we can use is that for making the machine that makes the products, a team of engineers is required, the products can be physical goods, a scalable webapp, a game, a library that then we can use that to make some other machine that can make others stuff.

I think that we already made that advancement in our industry its just that we are making lots of new products that require lots of engineers to make the machine that makes the products.

About the issue of the molding process, even intel with a fpu bug has problems and not just only software has issues whit errors early in the process

Re: Are coders worth it?

#205

Post by mark_l_watson » Thu, Jun 06, 2013, 6:37 PM UTC

sologoub wrote: post #153

This article seems to be missing a parallel that was drawn previously many times. PG has written on the subject, and so have others. The closest parallel we can draw between "coders" and the distant past, is that with the artisans of the middle ages. Aside from the landowning nobles, the artisan class was probably the closest thing to a true middle class. Many advanced to upper-middle and later became the industrial…

+1 ""Software engineering has not yet gone through a true manufacturing disruption."" I keep expecting this to happen: the disruption. How much more productive is an engineer using something like Meteor compared to an equally talented engineer several years ago for building web apps where users interact (data wise) in some way. Same comment for Rails, even better IDEs, PAAS providers, libraries, etc.

When I started programming in 1973, my boss (who had a PhD in computer science) said that there was a factor of 100 difference in the productivity of different programmers he had worked with.

Even if this differential productivity remains, as tooling gets better I have to wonder how many software engineers will be needed in 20 years if all programmers become much more efficient?

Re: Are coders worth it?

#206

Post by bennyg » Thu, Jun 06, 2013, 6:39 PM UTC

nekopa wrote: post #192

bennyg wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure some parts of software will become manufactured and mass produced - I mean that's the case today. How many libraries do you use? However, software is still an intellectual, out of thin air, endeavor. It requires thought to create new and make work with existing circumstances. You aren't melting metal into a mold to make a tangible object. You are literally fusing thoughts and intellectual processes together to d…

But how long will this idea of 'fusing thoughts and intellectual processes' remain the sole domain of humans? Besides from some creative leaps, a lot of this has to do with logic: knowing what works where and when. I'm working on an idea tied to literate programming where someone can tell a story of what they want a program to do, put it in a wiki, and then programmers can edit the wiki to add in the actual software…

That sounds awesome. I've dreamed of a context-aware, natural language programming language:

Change value of potatoes to 10. (potatoes = 10).

Make potatoes equal 10. (potatoes = 10).

Give every person at the dinner table a potato. (for x = 0; x Etcetera.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#207

Post by nekopa » Thu, Jun 06, 2013, 6:45 PM UTC

venutip wrote: post #195

oblique63 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a negative, self-worth thing, it's a perspective thing. What the OP here is describing, is exactly the mentality that leads to this nonsense: http://programmingisterrible.com/post/50421878989/come-here-... A lot of people would agree that empathy is one of the large components of what makes us "human", and that's rather vague, but it does make evolutionary sense for why empathy is useful for societal progr…

> I think the problem is that the OP is labeling what he's arguing with as "web development" when it's really more of a subset of startup culture that he's referring to, not all web developers You hit the nail on the head. I'm a web developer, and what I do is build websites and other online solutions for non-profits. They range from the very small, to the very large (many millions of dollars in budget). I'm paid les…

Off-topic: Can you contact me (email in profile) as I am trying to rebuild my portfolio of work from scratch (as I've been out of the tech world for a decade) and rather than put up files on github scratching my itches, I have been trying to find non-profits or charities to re-do their websites (for free). My skills are very rusty, but I am pushing ahead to get up to speed with the modern tech world. (I programmed in the 80s and 90s everything from AI to geocities, but spent the last 15 years living life and trying different things)

Re: Are coders worth it?

#208

Post by nostrademons » Thu, Jun 06, 2013, 6:46 PM UTC

mark_l_watson wrote: post #205

sologoub wrote: post #153

This article seems to be missing a parallel that was drawn previously many times. PG has written on the subject, and so have others. The closest parallel we can draw between "coders" and the distant past, is that with the artisans of the middle ages. Aside from the landowning nobles, the artisan class was probably the closest thing to a true middle class. Many advanced to upper-middle and later became the industrial…

+1 ""Software engineering has not yet gone through a true manufacturing disruption."" I keep expecting this to happen: the disruption. How much more productive is an engineer using something like Meteor compared to an equally talented engineer several years ago for building web apps where users interact (data wise) in some way. Same comment for Rails, even better IDEs, PAAS providers, libraries, etc. When I started p…

I think it's not that software engineering has not yet gone through a true manufacturing disruption, it's that each new disruption increases the scope of problems that software can be applied to rather than reducing the skill it takes to create it.

The invention of compilers was a huge watershed moment for programming. All the manual labor you had to do, keeping track of memory layouts and registers and stack frames, was handled automatically for you. Yet the result is not that programming became easier - it's that programs became more complex. A journeyman programmer today can write Tetris in a few hours, while it took how many months for the original? But modern games are things like Starcraft 2 and Halo, not Tetris and Space Invaders.

Same with databases. It used to be that you had to think in terms of bytes in sectors on a disk. Now we have filesystems and databases and query languages to abstract that all away from us. But that doesn't mean programming the systems becomes easier, it means that the volume and variety of data stored increases.

It used to be that domains like speech recognition, natural language processing, text mining, computer vision, OCR, etc. were completely off-limits for computational approaches. Now we have standard libraries for them, and standardized tools for generating those standard libraries. But that just means the tools get applied to progressively more problems, not that solving those problems becomes easier.

I think this is what Marc Andreesen meant when he said that "Software is eating the world". There will eventually come a time when no more software engineers will be needed, when they have automated themselves out of a job. But that time will come when everything we do is computerized, when every aspect of modern life is ruled by algorithms and data. Until then, advances in technology just mean computation can be applied to more and more problem domains.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#209

Post by TWAndrews » Thu, Jun 06, 2013, 6:47 PM UTC

I actually think that the current trend of "chasing eyeballs" is really valuable on its own terms.

Anyone who wants to start a business to support themselves, or their family will ultimately need customers, and as we continue to move away from the post-war era of people working principally for large companies which make things towards a services economy, a lot of people will need to find ways to communicate with their potential customers.

Lowering the cost of acquiring customers makes it much, much easier to start a new business, and to make it successful. Products and platforms that do so are generating real value on human terms.

My wife, for instance, is a photographer whose business is driven almost entirely by word of mouth, and twitter and facebook are both important components of enabling her network to share her work with potential clients. It would be enormously more expensive and difficult for her to run her business via traditional advertising, and would probably preclude her from running her own photography business.

tl;dr Chasing eyeballs makes small businesses easier to start and that's a real, human good.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#210

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Jun 06, 2013, 6:49 PM UTC

mark_l_watson wrote: post #205

sologoub wrote: post #153

This article seems to be missing a parallel that was drawn previously many times. PG has written on the subject, and so have others. The closest parallel we can draw between "coders" and the distant past, is that with the artisans of the middle ages. Aside from the landowning nobles, the artisan class was probably the closest thing to a true middle class. Many advanced to upper-middle and later became the industrial…

+1 ""Software engineering has not yet gone through a true manufacturing disruption."" I keep expecting this to happen: the disruption. How much more productive is an engineer using something like Meteor compared to an equally talented engineer several years ago for building web apps where users interact (data wise) in some way. Same comment for Rails, even better IDEs, PAAS providers, libraries, etc. When I started p…

> Even if this differential productivity remains, as tooling gets better I have to wonder how many software engineers will be needed in 20 years if all programmers become much more efficient?

Greater labor efficiency in the production of a good only decreases the quantity of labor directed to producing that good demanded in the market when there is either some non-labor (or different kind of labor) input to production of the good (e.g., in agricultural productivity, land would be the non-labor input) whose supply is limited, or quantity demanded of the output good goes past the point where cost declines are responded to 1:1 with increased quantity demanded.

Given the number of existing and potential markets for software and the relative transferrability of programmer skills and effort between those marktes, I would be surprised if the latter was true, and I don't see an obvious non-programming constraint on the production of software that would be limiting.