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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?

#91

Post by akkartik »

adamredwoods wrote: post #24

>> The CEO’s job is to make as much profit as possible. Higher salaries mean less profit. It’s just how the game works. I find this to be too simplified. The CEO's job is far beyond salaries alone. >> Even if we enter some new dotcom bubble and a good chunk of our startup ecosystem dies off, demand for tech is spreading across all industries, businesses everywhere are digitizing their operations and these systems wil…

Yeah, it's an idiotic, 1-dimensional proposition in a game of n-dimensional chess. Tech employees are competition for a company's profit after all the other companies trying to commoditize their complements (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v). Starting with AWS. Treating programmers as cost centers was precisely what hindered the previous generation of companies in competing with tech.

There may well come a time when a company can compete for gross margins without competing for tech employees. But it'll require a case more rigorous than this blog post.

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

#92

Post by ianai »

beckingz wrote: post #86
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…

The system works! In reality, we will likely see some aspects of software development become less well compensated, while other aspects will continue to be rare and highly valued.

That’s where I thought it was headed…in 2001.

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

#93

Post by Apocryphon »

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.

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

#94

Post by Msw242 »

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…

Nocode tooling available today is already extremely powerful.

That doesn't mean non-technical users can really leverage that abstraction well.

What I've seen is that the abstractions give the most leverage to developers and developer adjacent people... Think people who started in comp sci, but don't really enjoy writing code.

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

#95

Post by imwillofficial »

krainboltgreene wrote: post #70
CydeWeys wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quoted post unavailable.

No post body was provided.

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

#96

Post by streetcat1 »

mistrial9 wrote: post #79
streetcat1 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually AI will catch up to doctors and lawyers much faster than to programmers. In addition, programmers have many more domains that they can switch into, however, once the AI lawyer or AI doctor will rise, it would practically replace 90% of the lawyers/doctors.

this is true for certain activities like structured information retrieval; legal opinion and binding decisions are not what is on the line.

Right. But most lawyers and doctors work (let say 95%) is routine work. The problem with fields like law / medicine, is that you invest heavily one time (I.e. at school) in a fixed body of knowledge (law or medicine) in order to enjoy life time of protected earning.

Note that the earning are protected mainly because you invested the time , and not because of some union.

The Achilles heel of those professions, is that the body of knowledge is constant, with very long half life. But this also make it ready for automation.

With AI, the destruction of those professions will be quick, as they will get destroy from the bottom. I.e. Even if AI make existing lawyers twice as productive, it would mean that you would need half the lawyers. If AI will make them 4x productive, you would need 25% of lawyers, etc.

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

#97

Post by UnpossibleJim »

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 listen to techno music?!? This is a bunch of dudes typing all day after going to a couple of stand-ups and messaging on Slack and clearing out bugs on JIRA. This sucks. I'm out =P

EDIT: No offense to anyone... I meant the universal dude, of all orientations, genders and creeds.

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

#98

Post by Apocryphon »

Very few comments in this thread talking about what he concludes as the most likely scenario- "decreased investment". Just what will happen when the Fed is forced to raise interest rates? What will happen to the unprofitable unicorns or even unprofitable public unicorns, much less all of the no-name startups burning VC capital? Surely not every Uber is going to get the Amazon treatment and allowed to keep burning until it finds a way to profitability.

Of course, if ZIRP is reversed, who knows what will become of the economy in general.

https://www.readmargins.com/p/zirp-explains-the-world

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

#99

Post by balaji1 »

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…

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.

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

#100

Post by jb3689 »

Despite efforts to make the job of programming easier, the reality is that it has just expanded the scope. The cloud made it so you had to learn cloud computing in addition to Linux management. Containers add a whole other vertical of problems. It just goes on and on. The need for expertise doesn’t go away with more abstraction
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