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Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

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Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#111

Post by pech0rin »

CydeWeys wrote: post #63
tupac_speedrap wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is not touching a programming language until college a bad thing? Some people just want to make a living out of software engineering and then go home and they aren't sweating over Web 4.0 or whatever we are on now.

18 is awfully old to start learning something for the first time. Imagine saying the same thing about math, reading, or history. It's harder to pick things up when you're older, and it leaves fewer people capable of it. See also: learning human languages.

This is absolutely false. I became fluent in Japanese in my 30s. Learned guitar in my late 20s. This is so wrong. You can continue learning until you are dead.

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#112

Post by echelon »

UnpossibleJim wrote: post #97
irrational wrote: post #83

> The markets are doing their thing. Everyone sees tech workers making money and just generally having a good time and they think: “Hey that sounds like a good career choice”. It seems like you could replace tech workers with any other profession that sounds like a good career choice. Can literally everyone (or even the majority) learn to code? Do they want to learn to code? In my experience, the answer to both quest…

I think almost anyone could learn to code, but they get to the doing of it and find out that they don't want to. Most people don't want to plan, do logic puzzles and problem solve all day, and when they figure out that, that's the majority of it in type form and some meetings thrown in, so you can do it in groups... the movie romance dies away pretty quickly. WTF! There's no cool 3D graphics and hacking while we list…

> I think almost anyone could learn to code, but they get to the doing of it and find out that they don't want to.

I agree with this 100%. I think most people could learn to do our job, they just don't want to.

People frequently tell me they'd like to change careers and they've been eying the software field. I explain that it's one of the best lateral jumps to make as we have all of the resources necessary to learn available freely online. I then suggest they spend one evening a week programming a video game or building a website -- some kind of self directed project. More than half of the time the person I'm telling completely zones out and loses interest. "Hm, maybe..."

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#113

Post by eloisius »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #36
commandlinefan wrote: post #14

Lawyers and doctors have always enjoyed “good times” and there’s no reason to think they’ll stop. Why not programmers, too?

Because they are smart and have built up huge barriers for entry. In contrast everybody can get into programming without any training.

In fact within our industry we’ve nearly normalized developers spending their own time and money to pull more entry level developers into the work force. I’ve participated in several weekend beginner bootcamp type things, donated money, and will probably continue to do so, but considering the incentives is interesting. Of course these bootcamp things get peanuts of sponsorship from whatever big players are in town, but the real sponsors are the volunteers that spend their own time on these things, and for what? Brownie points for helping beginners, or making tech more diverse, or so that tech companies have bigger, cheaper pool of labor? It’s cynical, but the tech biz really are masterful at propagandizing people against their own interests and distracting us from the fact that they have made the most absurd amounts of money imaginable.

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#114

Post by echelon »

twblalock wrote: post #105
balaji1 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A supply factor that this article doesn't consider - a big chunk of the new wave of graduates are software engineers in different parts of the world. And building a team in those countries will be a big trend. Rippling did this well, building a team in India. That should reduce the comp in the Bay Area.

People have been predicting that outsourcing would lower US salaries and take US jobs for over 20 years and it hasn't happened. Nothing is different now.

> Nothing is different now.

1. Venture capital is making major investments in India, Europe, Latin America, and Asia. At a scale never before seen.

2. Offices will never happen again. Now employees could be in Antarctica for all you're concerned -- as long as they're on a relatively friendly time zone with the rest of their team, it'll work.

This time is different.

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#115

Post by smrtinsert »

300bps wrote: post #26
mrtksn wrote: post #17

I think it ends with everyone becoming a developer. Making machines do things will never end. However, the tools for making machines do things is evolving very quickly. The general art of being a developer will continue to get specialized and at some point specialists at any field would be expected to be able to program their machines. Very few people are learning how to run their servers and much more are moving int…

I think it ends with everyone becoming a developer Not in a million years. When I was 10 I got my first computer and spent 12-16 hours per day on it every day learning BASIC, 6502 Assembly and many other languages. All the adults at the time thought, “this is how all kids will be from now on!” Except none of my peers did it. The generation after me only had a small percentage of people truly interested in computers a…

This is something I've realized as well. There's only a few of us that are excited to do this work and that's what you need to do it longterm.

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#116

Post by Kranar »

adamnemecek wrote: post #28

This is such a childish view of the matter. Imagine if a scribe in medieval times wrote an article. "Times are great for people who know read and write now. How does it end?"

I don't see your point. I'm sure it would have been very interesting back in 15th century to investigate the impact of continued literacy among the populace and its effect on various power structures: religious, economic, and political. Today we know the answer so obviously in hindsight it seems obvious and maybe trivial, but I don't think it would have been at all trivial back then to investigate the matter.

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#117

Post by bedobi »

Apocryphon wrote: post #93
bedobi wrote: post #66

Author seems to have a zero-sum world view, and think that everything that goes up must come down. I personally don't believe in either. Tech workers will continue to be in increasingly high demand, and automation, AI and "no-code" or "low-code" will only intensify that trend, not diminish it.

> think that everything that goes up must come down It doesn't take a pessimist to be remember Newton's apple.

No, but it does to nonsensically apply the same rule in literally every context. People and programmers are not apples. The economy and society are not gravity. I don't know what else to tell you, and I guess it doesn't matter, since people with a zero sum world view can't be convinced otherwise.

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#118

Post by twblalock »

echelon wrote: post #114
twblalock wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been predicting that outsourcing would lower US salaries and take US jobs for over 20 years and it hasn't happened. Nothing is different now.

> Nothing is different now. 1. Venture capital is making major investments in India, Europe, Latin America, and Asia. At a scale never before seen. 2. Offices will never happen again. Now employees could be in Antarctica for all you're concerned -- as long as they're on a relatively friendly time zone with the rest of their team, it'll work. This time is different.

Offices are still "happening" and will not go away. The current optimism about remote work is overly exuberant, and many people will be disappointed about the pullback of remote work over the next few years. Also, people are dreaming if they think Silicon Valley companies will continue to pay Silicon Valley salaries to workers in other locations, even if remote work continues to be broadly accepted.

Furthermore, India and much of Europe (especially eastern Europe) are definitely not friendly time zones for collaboration with colleagues in North America.

It's really not different this time.

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#119

Post by hackerfromthefu »

mrtksn wrote: post #90
JohnBooty wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would expect layers of abstraction to continue to build up and programming to become something like using spreadsheets to do your actual task. But in general, people have been saying this for 50+ years. It hasn't happened yet for (at least) two reasons. 1. Increased demands on programmers have increased at least as quickly as their productivity has skyrocketed. 2. Non-trivial systems will require some non-trivial e…

Just because it has not completed doesn't mean it isn't happening. These days very small number of people know how computers actually work(how many know assembly or even C?) but there's a huge number of people building their businesses by programming machines do things. In the last 20 years, people were using languages close to English to express their ideas to a computer and make it do work. You touch computer scien…

This seems perhaps an idealistic take on how effective the layers of abstraction are.

To examine just one of the examples >> these days it's just a form you hav to fill and express some rules about accessing the resources in "plain English".

I'm of the opinion getting the cloud to run your systems effectively, and without blowing a large hole in your budget, may be a little harder than it seems from that sentence.

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#120

Post by Apocryphon »

bedobi wrote: post #117
Apocryphon wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> think that everything that goes up must come down It doesn't take a pessimist to be remember Newton's apple.

No, but it does to nonsensically apply the same rule in literally every context. People and programmers are not apples. The economy and society are not gravity. I don't know what else to tell you, and I guess it doesn't matter, since people with a zero sum world view can't be convinced otherwise.

There's a difference between believing there is a zero sum world view, and observing that every economy that has ever existed has generally operated on boom and bust cycles.
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