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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?

#41

Post by PeterisP »

sp332 wrote: post #8
MattGaiser wrote: post #2

> Developers are expensive. If a new IDE shows up and they can deliver stuff 5% faster, that means you can have 5% less programmers! Of course the IDE has a price, but it is almost certainly cheaper than 5% of a developer. Dev work is nebulous enough that very few companies seem willing to invest in dev tooling. I've heard nothing but good things about JRebel for example and how it keeps people focused instead of swo…

If you just made all your programers 5% faster, they are each more productive. Now you should hire more programmers because there's a wider range of things they can profitably work on.

In essence, Jevon's paradox - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox - where in certain conditions (which plausibly apply to programmers) increasing efficiency results in an increase of consumption, not a reduction of it.

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

#43

Post by spaetzleesser »

rzw2 wrote: post #5

Short of a dot-com burst I don't see a glut of software engineers. However, as the career prospects are better known there are more people thinking they want to be a software developer, will this increase the talent pool and decrease demand?

I think the long term trend will be good for software people but I think something like the dotcom crash is due. There are way too many questionable startups only made possible by excessive investment money floating around. I was around in 2000 and once investment started drying up only a little the whole house of cards came down because a lot of companies "sold" unprofitable products to other unprofitable companies. I think the situation is very similar now.

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

#44

Post by spaetzleesser »

AlanSE wrote: post #19
rzw2 wrote: post #5

Short of a dot-com burst I don't see a glut of software engineers. However, as the career prospects are better known there are more people thinking they want to be a software developer, will this increase the talent pool and decrease demand?

I feel like this has already been happening for years... probably longer than that. I find a lot of the people I work with were pulled away from other industries. Some industries are over-represented, like science, engineering, education.

I think amount of people who are capable of and willing to do software development is limited. Most "normal" people I know would hate the job.

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

#45

Post by tupac_speedrap »

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…

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.

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

#46

Post by jollybean »

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?

Lawyers and Doctors have

1) Very stringent standards, particularly in Medicine

2) Doctors guilds control how many people get medical education

3) It's often 'nationally dependent' wherein skills are not always transferrable.

'Software Developer' can mean anything which has advantages and drawbacks.

I for one, wish there were some kind of 'basic general certification' frankly. There are so many 'not very good devs' I would like to just completely ignore people with out some basic qualifications.

The 'exams' might even require us to 'fill in some blanks' in our education because all of us have blind-spots!

It might be hard to do something like that from an examination level though.

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

#47

Post by ldjkfkdsjnv »

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…

The problem is, at the end of the day, business logic needs to get encoded in the program. So all the abstractions cant abstract away the domain specific "if else" statements. Infrastructure itself will be a solved problem, and we will implement interfaces like serverless lambas, but it still remains, the logic of the business needs to go in the code. OOP itself is meant for building relationships between sets of business logic, and coding that, as has been discussed, always ends in complexity and needs thought

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

#48

Post by spaetzleesser »

nostromo wrote: post #25
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?

Lawyers and doctors in the US effectively have union-style control on the supply of lawyers and doctors, via the Bar Association and AMA. Developers have no such labor association. We also have headwinds like H1-Bs, that push down our wages.

H-1 is a good point. Where are the H-1 lawyers and doctors?

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

#49

Post by steve_adams_86 »

osrec wrote: post #27

I actually think high quality programmers will always be in high demand. Poor programmers will get found out sooner, as the general population becomes more technical.

When will they become more technical though? My kids are far less technical than I was, and their friends as well. Try as I might, they simply aren’t interested. Is some other part of the population experiencing some kind of technical advancement amongst their kids? I don’t see it.

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

#50

Post by missedthecue »

TameAntelope wrote: post #10

Is this actually true? Are CEOs lamenting their engineering labor costs like this? I feel like by now the cost of engineering labor has demonstrated its value over and over again, to the point where most CEOs accept the cost of engineering is more or less a shared expense across competition, and not really something to be reduced.

Unless you've raised a ton of money, I see no way that a new company can compete at these prices. With one decent engineer going for $160k all in, there's no way to do that if you're bootstrapping.
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