We will never have enough software developers (2020)

On the other hand, tax codes and laws change all the time. If the law changes, and you don't know it as a professional in that area, the outcome isn't good.

Every field has to deal with change. In law, you've got politicians changing the rules, in the corporate area, you've got Office Politicians changing the rules.

Some really good points on the ultra-fast depreciation of SE tech skills. A relative of mine is a mechanical engineer, well past retirement age and still going strong in his 2-man consulting shop because that's what he loves doing. He works with precision manufacturers, automotive suppliers,... all very cutting-edge stuff, helping them develop new product lines, manufacturing processes,... He says the core skills that he's using are still those that he learnt in university several decades ago.

I was actually surprised because I heard so much about crazy new materials like carbon fibers, graphene, technologies like 3D-printing,... but apparently what makes a machine break are still the same things: mechanical stress, heat dissipation, friction,... new materials and processes might change the coefficients, but not the (mostly Newtonian) physics (my interpretation btw, not his words).

One could say the same thing about software engineering - true fundamental advances in algorithms and data structures are sufficiently rare that it wouldn't be a nuisance to keep up with them. But the %-age of how important those basics are relative to the extremely fast-changing landscape of tools and frameworks is much smaller (plus, one could argue that even the fundamentals see a lot of shifting ground in CS, with neural architectures, differentiable programming, not to mention quantum computing).

My first initial reaction was: did the computer write that code, or is it cribbing code from Stack Overflow? While the latter is problematic for developers who do the same, it is not a problem for developers who have to write original code or where the code has to be verifiable. If it is problematic, it would also say a lot about what the industry has evolved into and would probably be why so many people are leaving it (even if AI could not take over, less experienced and less expensive developers could).

> I got the impression that there is much less of this in lower level languages.

Not only the lower level languages, but fundamental skills in general, I think. Undertanding the computer from the hardware level, OS level as well network protocols, filesystems etc tend to continue to provide benefits even if one fashionable technology is replaced by another.

Similarly, fully undertanding algorithms, data structures, design patterns and architectural patterns also generalize, provided you DO understand these concepts with their strengths, weaknesses, and when to use them and not use them.

If you have the skills above (+ some math and general troubleshooting ability), you are able to approach most software/compute problems from first principles. If so, you may find that you are able to take up senior roles even involving technology you have not used before, as long as the tech introduces few new fundamental ideas. (And if there are new fundamental ideas, you need to learn those to keep up, but such ideas arrive much more rarely than new tech).

People who do not learn these things from first principles, but instead are memorizing patterns they learn from other people, have to do a lot of new memorization when new tech becomes fashionable.

Not only does that take a lot of effort, it also makes it unlikely that they will be able to identify antipatterns by themselves, and it may cause them to end up trying to use the new and fashionable tech in ways it is not suitable for.

Yeah indeed. Coming from someone who had to work with physical labor before I started programming, software developers don't know how good they have it.

"The pay isn't great", "treated far too shabbily", "dealing with bugs and bad decisions", "inadequate processes" and so on, sucks when development is the only thing you've dealt with, but you have no idea how it is to actually have a blue collar job if you're actually complaining about those things.

I think cs137 and others like them should try to have a part-time job at McDonalds (or whatever that is not in front of a screen), because it will make you love your software engineering job again.