4 ms·

A solid solution is to have a professional union/association with a meaningful exam for entrance, meaningful certifications for specialties, and the mandate to

• jacquesm 10y ago
  And aviation. Not pretty but it definitely works.
  • semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    I definitely agree that good professional organizations and well-functioning unions and good worker protection laws gives a good total system. However, one thing that must be kept in mind when comparing to e.g. healthcare or aviation is that progress in those fields happens at a pace that's positively glacial as compared to software development. The development time for new airplane tech or healthcare tech can easily be a decade or more. At that pace, employers don't perceive "you're old and don't understand the new stuff anymore" to nearly the same degree. Some of the stuff that happens regularly here in software land is like if suddenly accupuncture became the best cure for most diseases, or if pilots were given new planes with flight controls manipulated by moving your eyelids in a special way.
    • pnathan 10y ago
      Can you cite specific improvements in the past 5 years that aren't more reinventions of previous wheels?
      • chadcmulligan 10y ago
        Yes, this old saw that software changes so quickly that only kids can keep up seems BS. I've been a developer for 30+ years and I still do the same thing I've been doing for years. There's some new frameworks that come along that arrange things a little differently, but if you know C (well) then all the other things are just variants imho... and yes I've built web apps, coded industrial micro controllers, written SQL databases and so on. The things I learnt last century I still use every day. (Though I would say the level of quality and documentation has decreased and unnecessary complication has increased since the 90's)
      • dottedmag 10y ago
        Purely functional UI (React) stopped being fringe academic topic and became a mainstream.
        • br3w5 10y ago
          But tech like Flux and Redux are clearly derived from the Command pattern (of course i've never seen or heard reference to these patterns in the docs or videos for for flux and redux), and also seem pretty similar to Java enterprise patterns so arguably were already in the mainstream 10 years ago (at least). See http://www.corej2eepatterns.com/Patterns/ServiceToWorker.htm http://www.corej2eepatterns.com/Patterns/ServiceToWorker.htm http://www.corej2eepatterns.com/Patterns/FrontController.htm http://www.corej2eepatterns.com/Patterns/FrontController.htm http://www.corej2eepatterns.com/Patterns/DispatcherView.htm http://www.corej2eepatterns.com/Patterns/DispatcherView.htm I work daily with javascript and enjoy it but it frustrates me that people treat aforementioned tech as cutting edge but these ideas were already around a long time ago. The counter to this is that javascript is finally maturing and starting to use these patterns which is a positive thing, I just wish the people promoting these "new" technologies would give recognition to what came before.
      • semi-extrinsic 10y ago
        I won't say anything as to what is good progress vs. reinventing the wheel. For the purpose of this discussion, I don't think it matters much; if employers expect you to code using React/Angular/Bootstrap/whatever, it doesn't matter if you think those are inherently good progress on previous tech or not. And there are definitely software devs working in fields that change more slowly. But if you take web development as we frequently do around here, e.g. the joke article posted yesterday about "Hello world" in PHP does provide some good examples of stuff that's changed dramatically in the last five years. https://kukuruku.co/post/hello-real-world-in-php-in-2017/ https://kukuruku.co/post/hello-real-world-in-php-in-2017/