Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

vaghetti.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 611 posts

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

#381

Post by lionkor »

I think it ends with everyone being a programmer of some kind, and with the field splitting into more distinct fields.

Like comp sci split from math, and with all the specialisations we see already, it has to go that way.

You dont just study to be an engineer or a scientist anymore, you become a "microbiologist" or a "structural engineer", and a similar thing will happen to CS + IT.

Already, around the second or third year of university (if not earlier), someone interested in web dev will have a vastly different skillset than somebody interested in embedded. Someone interested in dev ops may have no clue about how to organize your stack when writing x64 assembly, and some software forensics person may not be able to tell the difference between React and Angular.js.

Already you dont hire a "programmer", you hire a "frontend engineer" or "embedded C programmer" etc.

I believe Low- and No-code solutions will continue to be added to any software it can be, making more "regular" people from other jobs aware of what conditions, loops and variables are. They may not ever become programmers the way we know it now, but they will be (and already are) programming their machines.

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

#382

Post by thenerdhead »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #176

I feel like we have so much leverage and don't use it at all. We're still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor. It's nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this. If anyone has read Developer Hegemony , I'm fully on board with that general premise - we start operating like lawyers with partnerships, a…

When your bonus is tied to making your incompetent boss happy, I’m sure you’d sit quietly through a horribly ran standup too.

I don’t see what is preventing anyone from operating like that today. I do that and I know many others do that. Yes sometimes there is cat herding to be done, but boundaries are needed or else you become a doormat. Stand up for yourself, time is limited in our lives.

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

#383

Post by soneca »

lelanthran wrote: post #258
LAC-Tech wrote: post #176

I feel like we have so much leverage and don't use it at all. We're still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor. It's nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this. If anyone has read Developer Hegemony , I'm fully on board with that general premise - we start operating like lawyers with partnerships, a…

> We're still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor. It's nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this. This is actually quite interesting as I was just talking to a few other professionals about this in a social setting. I was the only one in software development. I mentioned how stand-ups work briefl…

For me (and the culture of the 3 companies that I worked), standups were about collaboration, no micromanagement. Far from it, btw.

Your conversation above just sounded arrogant for me.

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

#384

Post by schwartzworld »

pdimitar wrote: post #316
schwartzworld wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every single one of them (all professionals, like I said) were adamant that they would leave any position that managed them no better than a burger-flipper. Such entitled garbage. Restaurants manage people much more tightly, and often with very abusive practices and wage theft added in. Stand-up is nothing compared to having an underpaid alcoholic yell at you because you leaned against the wall 2/3 of the way throu…

So the programmers are on the level of restaurant workers? Not sure what your argument is.

Responding the the person claiming that stand-ups === being "managed no better than a burger flipper".

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

#385

Post by schwartzworld »

hkt wrote: post #331
schwartzworld wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every single one of them (all professionals, like I said) were adamant that they would leave any position that managed them no better than a burger-flipper. Such entitled garbage. Restaurants manage people much more tightly, and often with very abusive practices and wage theft added in. Stand-up is nothing compared to having an underpaid alcoholic yell at you because you leaned against the wall 2/3 of the way throu…

Wage theft is endemic in programming. Think of all those colleagues who have worked late on a deadline because somebody pressured them into it. They're reducing their own effective hourly rate and contributing to a long hours culture because of the daily ritual of humiliation at standup. It is very different to the restaurant analogy but wage theft and humiliation are still baked in for many of us.

When you accept a salaried position, you understand that there are going to be weeks your "effective hourly" fluctuates. Some weeks I have lots of work. Some I don't. I have sympathy but that's not wage theft.

Actual wage theft is very common in food service. As in, you earn the money and someone else takes it.

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

#386

Post by schwartzworld »

dunefox wrote: post #359
schwartzworld wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every single one of them (all professionals, like I said) were adamant that they would leave any position that managed them no better than a burger-flipper. Such entitled garbage. Restaurants manage people much more tightly, and often with very abusive practices and wage theft added in. Stand-up is nothing compared to having an underpaid alcoholic yell at you because you leaned against the wall 2/3 of the way throu…

So because some professions have it worse developers need to have it worse as well? What a garbage point.

Huh? I was responding to someone saying that stand-ups === being managed "no better than a burger flipper".

I don't agree with that point, especially since food service has the most toxic management of any industry.

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

#387

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

durnygbur wrote: post #295
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netherlands to a degree has at least some big tech willing to pay six figures and up, while that's almost not the case in places like Austria and Belgium while still having insane taxes. >list me one country where it doesn't apply If you can move to Romania and freelance, you can pay as little as 1% tax. And if you freelance for six figure US gigs you've basically hit the jackpot.

In post-Communist countries you have social services, healthcare, and infrastructure at the level worse than in US. You're alone with your cash and every doctor, agent, and clerk looks to screw you over. It's attractive only for natives with family locally, or maybe for someone who is fluent in the native language. No salary would convince me to relocate alone to Romania.

>In post-Communist countries you have social services, healthcare, and infrastructure at the level worse than in US.

True to a degree, but not everyone can get a visa for the US, and unless you've got an outdated view of the eastern block, safety there far better than some shady parts of some american cities. You can live without a car and walk everywhere without the fear of being mugged by homeless people or opioid addicts.

>You're alone with your cash and every doctor, agent, and clerk looks to screw you over.

That's true nearly everywhere you move as an expat without knowing the local language, laws and customs , even in Germany.

> It's attractive only for natives with family locally, or maybe for someone who is fluent in the native language.

Not really, plenty of entrepreneurial people in the tech space from Germany, Austria and the UK, etc. looking to make money and tired of the governments robbing them blind, relocate their online businesses to Romania for the massive tax saving.

>No salary would convince me to relocate alone to Romania.

Understandable, but you asked me to point you out a country with lower taxes than those, not to a country with perfect social system AND lower taxes.

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

#388

Post by goodlinks »

*flippant comment warning...

three things coming together: 1.things like sharepoint and powerapps getting better 2.more exposure to programming/abstractions/scripting in the general populous 3.widespead documentation / agreement of standard business processes (maybe in the form of templates for number 1)

underlying all of this is when people wake up to the fact that data and process matters, software doesnt.

there will still be developer jobs but they will look more like how infra jobs look under cloud computing - higher skilled, harder, bigger implications when you mess up.

There is value in a few amazing coders out there but IMHO most developers add most value by getting to know how to abstract thier particular customers business.

EDIT:formatting

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

#389

Post by heurisko »

mstipetic wrote: post #244
jseban wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doctors and lawyers have way more integrity and status, because they are well rounded people as well as experts. They can put their knowledge to the best possible use. In the software industry there is a lingering stereotype of the eccentric genius who is really good with computers, and really bad at everything else in life, and their computer skills make up for lacking a lot of basic skills of a functioning adult, s…

As someone who has managed developers And worked as a developer I’m not sure that’s completely untrue. I’ve seen bored devops people starting to build their own ci/cd system, massive meetings where people started building their own micro service framework, a dev in my startup spent a month reworking things into sagas with no consideration that we have no product market fit yet, people that insist on “contributing the…

> I’ve seen bored devops people starting to build their own ci/cd system

I've seen this too. It added tons of overhead before it was rightly cancelled.

> I’ve seen millions and millions of euros get wasted on things that don’t matter.

To be fair, I've also seen this from the business side. A great number of ill thought out unsuccessful projects, that are dispiriting to work on, as you know from the beginning that they will not be a success for concrete reasons, e.g. using an immature piece of software that doesn't support the features required.

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

#390

Post by sage76 »

jd115 wrote: post #356
sage76 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see it applying to me. It only applies to a small set of people from top unis or those who have the FAANG brand names on their resumes. Otherwise, I know several people who tried for months to switch jobs and finally gave up due to exhaustion.

I have NO university degree and ZERO affiliation with anything remotely FAANG (I'm based in Europe, where relatively few people work for FAANG). There are no globally recognisable names on my CV. I am still the highest paid person I personally know - by a rather high margin, because of my experience as a software engineer. Since I dropped out of university almost 20 years ago, I have been consulting and contracting,…

Good for you. I have experience with all 3 of those technologies and it's nearly impossible to even get an interview.
Post reply on HN