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The Developer's Dystopian Future

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Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#81

Post by personZ »

orbitur wrote: post #60
personZ wrote: post #11

Honest, legitimate post that I very much enjoyed. However I do think posts like this feed in ageism. I say this because it posits that the change is that the author is older and has more things to do, therefore they've fallen out with technology. The take-away invariably being that people who are older and have more things to do have fallen out with technology, whereas the young are still with it, whatever it is. Let…

> The take-away invariably being that people who are older and have more things to do have fallen out with technology, whereas the young are still with it, whatever it is. But it's still true, in general. Sure, I work with plenty of early 20s people who have (frustratingly) no interest in their domain outside of what is necessary to get them through the work day. These young people exist. But there are also the young…

But it's still true, in general.

At best what you could say is true is that people with no relationships and no "extra-curriculars/external interests" have more free time.

This crosses all ages. There are young people with filled social and activity calendars (I've worked with young people who seemingly had filled social calendars at work). There are older people who have all the time in the world.

I remember reading once that the best employees are the unhappiest (in life). These were the people with endless time because they had no activities, no family or social relationships, etc. They'd happily burn the candle 120 hours a week because they had nothing else to do. Not sure how beneficial that is to knowledge work.

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#82

Post by mqsiuser »

zmmmmm wrote: post #78

I relate to this quite strongly. Whether you like it or not, a software career forces you into being a generalist eventually. Technology changes dramatically every few years - unable to improve what we have, we do entire revolutions to make incremental progress, and in the process, we make everybody's skills stale. The only things that survive are the principles that are common to everything. There's nothing you can…

I met COBOL/zOS people that talk about retirement "next year". They are ~60 to 70

That shows something: Every generation has it's path (must have :D "push/squeeze")

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#83

Post by izolate »

jchrisa wrote: post #9

I think there is still room for a generalist to make a dent in the world. If you can build full stack apps you're at least worth gold to someone / yourself as a technical cofounder if you can stomach the risk.

Thank you for boosting my spirits. I can build a modern web app from design to deployment, but 2-3 years experience seems to not be enough for most jobs. Considering just starting my own business at this point.

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#84

Post by nomnombunty »

I feel like it is pretty safe to specialize in c and c++. A lot of production systems are still using these languages and I don't foresee companies switching all their systems to go/rust any time soon. I think that having a good understanding of c, c++, and the linux kernel is still very valuable. It is quite difficult to find good c/c++ programmer these days.

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#85

Post by X4 »

sergiotapia wrote: post #79

I agree with you completely man. I'm working on my senior thesis to wrap up my degree and I have to use the Microsoft stack to write a real-time web app. I haven't use MS stack since MVC2, and now we're at MVC5. I'm looking over the new things and now there's this new stuff called OWIN and Katana. Wat? Buzzwords galore: iterative, modular, lightweight. Ugh. It used to work fine and now I have to learn some new thinga…

Sorry, but you don't learn actually anything new there buddy (there is more). You're right that MS packs all the un-branded wisdom into products with custom API's, SDK's coming with 20 new buzzwords describing the improvements. Well, because people love good packages. For MS software there are the Rx extensions and F#, but I'm sure that you can live with just ReactJS too. However here is some short but good read: http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/08/reactive-programming-emerg...

But if you once learned what FRP is, what Software-Engineering means, OOP Patterns, Functional Programming, then you'll be set for at least half of your life man. Also Real-Time Applications for the Web are a big misconception, they can only be of use where you really really need hard-real time applications. Which is mostly not the case with web-apps. What you need is a reactive web application, but please don't eat the BS in the reactive-manifesto.org. It's not wrong, but not intended for engineers and comes packaged with just hot-air, that according to the writers is "useful" to communicate to managers. I digress, but reactive programming is the concept you would be better of focusing on instead of real-time, except you are having one of the rare cases that actually needs hard-real-time synchronization.

OT: Am I hell-banned or something? My submissions appear dead at arrival.

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#86

Post by zmmmmm »

trumbitta2 wrote: post #56

If I get it right, Ed is concerned about specialization. He misses the days when he was a generalist. Well, I've been consistently "forced" to generalize my skills for the last 9 years and I have similar concerns. Now that I'm looking for another company, it seems I'm not specialized enough for like nobody. And while I know for sure my value is – let's say – 9 / 10 where 10 is the likes of Jeff Atwood, John Resig, an…

I imagine it is very hard to distinguish your specialization from the mass of people who will claim to know HTML and CSS and pay lip service to the accessibility part as well.

Have you thought about going the independent / consulting route? It seems to me a lot of companies will value having a consultant come and tell them how to fix their accessibility but not be willing to employ someone full time on that basis.

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#87

Post by hyp0 »

The perennial question is: what do you like to do, that is worth money? What Color is Your Parachute is a job-hunting guide, but most of it is working out what you like.

What skills have lasting value? JS frameworks seem to come and go faster and faster, each one tweaking some aspect and reinventing the rest. Is there any evidence that the current crop will last any longer?

But the underlying principles are lasting. And writing, mathematics, problem-solving, people-skills are lasting.

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#88

Post by X4 »

vinceguidry wrote: post #57

I think the author vastly over-estimates what it takes to be a proficient technologist. He can figure things out. That's all you need to have a job/career in tech. Because technology is hard enough that the vast majority of people just won't want to do it. Everything else is just stuff that makes that job/career easier and more fulfilling.

2 Weeks is what it usually takes to catch-up with all new libraries in all the languages you care about. Not more. Easy as googling it and checking github explore, then trying each one out. Simple as that. Do that every 6months and you're set. What could go wrong? :)

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#89

Post by jamiepenney »

thegeomaster wrote: post #25

I'm not even legally an adult, and I feel like things are moving too fast for me. At 17 years. I guess I shouldn't feel like that, but I can't help it. I started with VB6 as a kid, 6 years ago. I moved onto C++, then learned about 3D graphics and game engines, then learned HTML, CSS, JavaScript, gotten into web development, learned Photoshop, some basic design, working with Linux, PHP, a little of C#. Recently tinker…

It all seems overwhelming when you look at the whole of the industry like that, but it's a lot easier if you pick a niche for now. If you like backend work, just ignore Javascript for now. If you need it for a job, you'll be able to pick it up, I promise. You sound a lot like me at 17, although to be fair to you there weren't so many technologies at the time. I started with C/C++ and Win32, played with MFC, learnt OpenGL and tried to write a game engine with a friend, got into Java at Uni, did language parsing and C# WinForms at my first job, moved to a SaaS company having done no real web development before, now I work for another web startup where I need to know a whole chunk of those techs you listed.

I tell people I probably won't be working in tech when I'm 40. If you think that's where you'll end up, plan for it. My plan is to buy a business with my wife in her field and do some contracting on the side. No idea if that will work out or not, but that's a 10 year plan. Just having a plan can help with the anxiety.

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#90

Post by dobbsbob »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #6
poolpool wrote: post #4

Luckily you don't need any of these fad/new libraries to make good products and websites.

Unfortunately, when you're job hunting ... you do. As I'm finding out. Two years as a system admin and not keeping up with trending tech and I can't land anything here.

There's plenty of remote sysadmin jobs https://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/16884/unix-devops-sys...

Note: "If you don't meet all those criteria, apply anyway. We'd love to talk to as many people as we can."

My local craigslist has dozens of jobs posted today looking for "Linux sysadmin" with scant requirements, offering $60-70k. Not huge money but better than being unemployed.

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