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Developers are the autoworkers of our generation

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Re: Developers are the autoworkers of our generation

#31

Post by lhnz »

6thSigma wrote: post #27
luu wrote: post #22

As usual for HN, all of the most upvoted replies disagree with the article. Let me play devil's advocate and not disagree. Sure, the analogy isn't perfect, but what happens if we take the idea seriously? [1] Isn't it amazing, the lack of sacrifice necessary to make fat stacks of cash writing software? Even when law school was thought of as a golden ticket, it was a lottery, and to win, you had to sacrifice your perso…

I have at least 10 friends who are in the technology industry but don't know how to program. Every single one of them have been saying for years how they want to learn. None of them have. It takes more sacrifice than you think to learn new skills.

It's not the sacrifice which you should worry about. These things don't happen quickly.

Watch the curriculum of young children change. 10 years is all it will take.

Re: Developers are the autoworkers of our generation

#35

Post by jebblue »

The points seem all logical on the surface. There's just one thing that makes me disagree with the article as a whole. The software industry doesn't behave like any other industry. The industry changes and fluctuates as often as software gets refactored. It's like a billion springs permeating a billion sponges. It's silly putty for computers. I saw this coming reading articles about software as a kid. The one rule that hasn't changed in the 30+ years I've been writing software as a hobby or for pay is that the software disobeys all the rules of all the other industries. With software and compute power, if you can dream it you can build it and someone, somewhere, will want it.

Re: Developers are the autoworkers of our generation

#36

Post by grandalf »

karlkatzke wrote: post #30
nohuck13 wrote: post #7

Hold on a minute. You can't discuss labor markets without discussing productivity. In the heyday of the automotive industry, the best auto worker in the world produced about the same output as the average auto worker. Maybe they messed up less, but being a genius autoworker didn't let you tower head and shoulders above the competition, because car factories are designed with auto workers as interchangeable parts. We'…

While that's true for the autoworker example, it's not true for the lawyer example: The best lawyers produced much more than the normal lawyers. I would put programmers roughly on par with the law industry, not with the auto industry.

Please elaborate. Define "best" in the context of lawyers. Is it a graduate of Harvard Law? Or someone who managed to make partner at a major firm? How do you define output for a lawyer? Billable hours? Cases won? Contracts written?

Re: Developers are the autoworkers of our generation

#38

Post by johnfuller »

The bottom line is that there is an infinite number of things to build and while software won't build these things alone, it's still a big component. Software didn't build the Space X rocket or the Google self driving car, but there is a lot of code which is a big part of making those things possible. All of the things that we can imagine in 50 years needs to have the foundations laid in part by software developers today. A factory worker has limited contribution to this future because of the constraints of the job, but software development is wide open. We may not be able to build the deathstar right now, but we can start working on the code for it.

cd deathstar git init

Re: Developers are the autoworkers of our generation

#39

Post by sillysaurus2 »

lhnz wrote: post #31
6thSigma wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have at least 10 friends who are in the technology industry but don't know how to program. Every single one of them have been saying for years how they want to learn. None of them have. It takes more sacrifice than you think to learn new skills.

It's not the sacrifice which you should worry about. These things don't happen quickly. Watch the curriculum of young children change. 10 years is all it will take.

10 years matches my experience as well. That's about the length of time to become truly proficient at learning how to learn technology, which is probably more important than merely learning technology.

Re: Developers are the autoworkers of our generation

#40

Post by grandalf »

One difference is that new kinds of software exist every day and old ones become obsolete. Shopify is only suitable for a fraction of e-commerce sites, and before Shopify there was oscommerce, volusion, yahoo stores, magento, and dozens of other web 1.0 e-commerce platforms.

If you are starting an e-commerce business and have $30 per month, Shopify is a great idea, but if you have a larger budget its limitations start to become impactful.

Skills will definitely become obsolete, but code moves quickly and allows new ideas to become realized. What the author erroneously thinks of as a stable business model (e-commerce) is not, and there will be lots of people trying to improve upon it in ways that existing platform abstractions are insufficient for.

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