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As processing power cheapens, programmers will settle for lazy and inefficient code for everyday consumer applications. It will be easier to be a programmer, be

by xwdv 6y ago

As processing power cheapens, programmers will settle for lazy and inefficient code for everyday consumer applications. It will be easier to be a programmer, because you can get away with writing shitty code. So wages will fall and the prestige of being a software developer wanes. The jobs requiring truly elite skill and understanding will dwindle and face fierce competition for their high pay. Before this happens, I recommend having your exit strategy for the industry, living off whatever profits you made working as a developer during the early 21st century.

Fronzie 6y ago
Energy cost and thermal cooling place restrictions on the computations. C++, with all it flaws, stays in use because it does give control over performance trade-offs.
gameswithgo 6y ago
did you write this in 1980?
no_flags 6y ago
Processing power has cheapened exponentially for the last 50 years (Moore's law). I am skeptical that a continuation of this trend will drive a fall in wages. In my own experience performance optimization is an important but infrequent part of my job. There are other skills an elite programmer brings to the table like the ability to build a mental model of a complex system and reason about it. If downward pressure on wages occurs I think it will be for another reason.
- Enginerrrd 6y ago
  I think in general you are right, however, there will certainly be sectors where it will be a lot easier to just throw it at a wall of computation than pay someone to think about it. But architecting complex systems so that they are maintainable, scalable, and adaptable... there's not gonna be enough cheap computation to solve that problem and omit top talent for a long time.
vlovich123 6y ago
I’m less pessimistic. Even if CPUs are 10x faster than they are, that still opens up more opportunities than what can be “absorbed” by less efficient coding/masses. There will always be demands for eking out more of the available processing/compute power and doing so will always be a difficult task. For example, today you can edit large scale videos in real-time and view various movie-quality SFX applied real-time on a consumer desktop. More computing power = more ability to do things cheaply that were in feasible/impossible before. You’re limited by your imagination more than anything. What’s truly more of a threat is AI-aided programming if that ever becomes a thing. Again, I’m not worried. The gap between telling an AI “do something that makes me $1 billion dollars” and “write a function that has properties x/y/s” or “do this large refactor for me and we’ll work together on any ambiguous cases”, is enormous. So you’ll always have a job - you’ll just be able to do things you couldn’t in the past (it’s questionable whether an AI can be built that generates programs from vague/poorly defined specs from product or even that generates those specs in the first place. As an obvious counter example to your theory, we have CPUs that are probably 10000x more powerful than in 1980 (actually more if you consider they have processing technologies that didn’t even exist back then like GPUs and SIMD). The software industry is far larger and devs make more individually. Technically SIMDs and GPUs existed back then but in a much more immature form, being more powerful, cheaper and widespread today than what was available in the 80s.
tsimionescu 6y ago
Hardware efficiency is only relevant for programming effort today in a few industries, and even there, only in a few specific applications. If you gave me a processor that could run instructions instantly, my product's release would at best be brought forward 1-2 weeks. The largest efforts in programming are to do with translating requirements into code. Efficiency is a part of that, and there are obviously problems where it dominates, but there are many other difficulties even when it isn't.

by xwdv 6y ago

Fronzie 6y ago

Energy cost and thermal cooling place restrictions on the computations. C++, with all it flaws, stays in use because it does give control over performance trade-offs.

gameswithgo 6y ago

did you write this in 1980?

no_flags 6y ago

Processing power has cheapened exponentially for the last 50 years (Moore's law). I am skeptical that a continuation of this trend will drive a fall in wages. In my own experience performance optimization is an important but infrequent part of my job. There are other skills an elite programmer brings to the table like the ability to build a mental model of a complex system and reason about it. If downward pressure on wages occurs I think it will be for another reason.

Enginerrrd 6y ago
I think in general you are right, however, there will certainly be sectors where it will be a lot easier to just throw it at a wall of computation than pay someone to think about it. But architecting complex systems so that they are maintainable, scalable, and adaptable... there's not gonna be enough cheap computation to solve that problem and omit top talent for a long time.

vlovich123 6y ago

I’m less pessimistic. Even if CPUs are 10x faster than they are, that still opens up more opportunities than what can be “absorbed” by less efficient coding/masses. There will always be demands for eking out more of the available processing/compute power and doing so will always be a difficult task. For example, today you can edit large scale videos in real-time and view various movie-quality SFX applied real-time on a consumer desktop. More computing power = more ability to do things cheaply that were in feasible/impossible before. You’re limited by your imagination more than anything. What’s truly more of a threat is AI-aided programming if that ever becomes a thing. Again, I’m not worried. The gap between telling an AI “do something that makes me $1 billion dollars” and “write a function that has properties x/y/s” or “do this large refactor for me and we’ll work together on any ambiguous cases”, is enormous. So you’ll always have a job - you’ll just be able to do things you couldn’t in the past (it’s questionable whether an AI can be built that generates programs from vague/poorly defined specs from product or even that generates those specs in the first place. As an obvious counter example to your theory, we have CPUs that are probably 10000x more powerful than in 1980 (actually more if you consider they have processing technologies that didn’t even exist back then like GPUs and SIMD). The software industry is far larger and devs make more individually. Technically SIMDs and GPUs existed back then but in a much more immature form, being more powerful, cheaper and widespread today than what was available in the 80s.

tsimionescu 6y ago

Hardware efficiency is only relevant for programming effort today in a few industries, and even there, only in a few specific applications. If you gave me a processor that could run instructions instantly, my product's release would at best be brought forward 1-2 weeks. The largest efforts in programming are to do with translating requirements into code. Efficiency is a part of that, and there are obviously problems where it dominates, but there are many other difficulties even when it isn't.