The Developer's Dystopian Future

For various reasons I've been doing a lot of cardio for the last year. I just started lifting weights again and it's true that I don't read docs while lifting.

I'm 31 and can relate to some of this. Learning new technologies is fun when it's a genuine step forward, or something new to explore. It's not fun when it's just "how we do things here" bullshit that you have to take in because some 27-year-old "wunderkind" (who isn't that great, but is politically protected) called those shots that way. There are a lot of new technologies that aren't impressive, or are obvious bad ideas (ORMs).

The lack of coherence in the software career is troubling. See, what we're not told is that (at least under closed allocation) 4/5 of us are going to be bench-warmers, given low-importance evaluative projects, and what determines whether a person gets promoted to something real, or gets enough clout to direct his career and protect his specialties, is mostly politics, not merit. (This can be afforded because, put to genuine work, good programmers are worth $500k-2M/year to the business, and great programmers are worth $2-10M. So low utilization is quite affordable with programmer salaries at their current level.) The result of this is that we have to job-hop until we find jobs where we "click" (find like-minded people, or win the political lottery, or just come in at the right time) every 1-3 years. It's not fun to change jobs constantly, but there's often no other way to have a legit career in this industry.

The other thing that's really shitty is that employers demand specialization and high-quality work in job candidates, but refuse to recognize specialties once the person is on board. In terms of work experience, most companies don't eat their own dogfood. This is also why software firms have a terrible record on internal promotion. Even they would rather hire, for a high-impact position, a mercenary who only did cool stuff over the loser "team player" who let them load him up with grunt work.

I think it's time to consider some form of collective action. I don't want an old-style union (with wages set by seniority alone) because that tends toward mediocrity. I think our model needs to be more like the Hollywood model (Screen Actors Guild, worker-side talent agents). We're generating a lot of value, but ultimately the people who decide what to do with our work aren't using it to improve the world or the state of technology, but to cut jobs. We're in the business of helping executive assholes unemploy people, and that just fucking sucks. We need to take charge of this industry and make it work on our terms, not theirs.

I'm 27, used to be in tech like the biggest nerd of them all. But not anymore, frankly I'm tired of all of the changes that happened in the industry - it's not that I'm tired of learning but it's that the changes lack substance. Learning a new framework that does the same thing like layout or user design; it's not like learning music and digging into a deeper discipline like moving from acoustic strumming to jazz improvisation, it's just learning new keywords to do the same crap because the old keywords have been remapped.

I'm reminded by a writing blog, like writers of popular fiction, programmers aren't creating technology anymore but we are simply selling a idea (e.g., Martha Stewart for home furnishings flash sales sites, fear of missing out for Facebook/Instagram, diversion or outlet for teenage aggression/frustration for iPhone games) that validates a user's idea that is wrapped around technology. Hence, tech trends surrounds consumer tech instead of system programming now and new web frameworks sprouts by the day that emphasize shaving the man-hours of a routine set of mundane tasks down by a fraction of an hour for the benefit of the agile burn-down chart.

This is not meant to be depressing nor cynical comment but a liberating one for me. Too often, I or I have witnessed a lot of my mostly younger peers try to reconcile the art and commerce, or to put in blunt way, have our cake and eat it too. I see that as a cowardice or indecisive but perhaps necessary stage in one's journey of growth, not to commit yourself and not to express your personal values through the imperfect tradeoff's and limited circumstances of a finite professional life - but be swayed by the arbitrary trinkets that one's professional guild assigns and equating its idea of worth to your self worth.

VB/Pythonistas/Rails/Node.js I've seen them come and go like names on the Billboards charts moving to VH1's "Behind the Music/Where are They Now?". I'm convinced now that you have two routes in this business, 1) make your programming craft secondary to the development of your domain expertise, so learn finance, SEO or sales whatever is the main objective of your business, 2) make your programming craft your domain business and work at companies where their business is the software.

> One of the lovely things about being older is having the confidence to be able to be able to point out that the latest fad is just a warmed-over rehash of something old.

Sane advice. I'm 39, and I'm rather stunned to see 27yr olds calling themselves "old" and disillusioned with tech and what not ... let alone 17!

If you like to build things, hone your system level thinking .. which lasts longer than Angular/Backbone/whatever. (Heck I'm working with the intention of obsoleting them, based on old Smalltalk ideas!) If you like to build things the possibility of which average society has no idea of, hone your algorithmic thinking. I'm certainly more productive today than I was, say, a decade ago because I chose to focus on the ideas rather than specific tools during that time. I'm confident I can work with any tool at hand due to exactly what rayiner says. Good debugging skills, for example, don't die because you need to approach it scientifically.

rayiner - while you're right about the "if you know .." part, many companies today ask for specific skills and hirers don't know enough to say "we need guys to work on a Java code base, you know Smalltalk, you can handle it, hop onboard". So it is up to us tech folks who give these job specifications to hint at the broader kind of people we can accept.

I keep wondering if the only reason you see that many ads for a trending tech is because those are newly-founded startups or small web dev shops that will be going under in a year anyway, or maybe because tech recruiters are out of ideas.