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Hermit Programmers Are Dead

henning 5y ago
It is very fitting that this article that can predict the future also has a JSON error displaying at the footer: > An error occurred: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data. That to me is the near future of software: people thinking software is somehow solved or easier while failing to execute well on basic things like displaying a static HTML document.
kuu 5y ago
> Thus, writing a bunch of code is not going to be a cool thing to do anymore: thinking about how to assembly existing software pieces to solve problems with computers will. The vast majority of sw projects are exactly that: connecting pipes.
- watt 5y ago
  Where do the pipes come from, though? And it's not just "a" pipe and "b" pipe you are connecting. It's not a "pipe" at all. It's complicated components that can have complicated interactions.
  - iso1210 5y ago
    One guy in Nebraska. There's about 4 people that really understand how ffmpeg works, and thousands of people that write stuff that runs on the top.
    - vbezhenar 5y ago
      Do you think that it's sacred knowledge? Or just nobody cared enough to understand how ffmpeg works, because those guys are doing good work already? Also I don't really think that it's fair to claim something for everyone in the world. There are plenty of developers, forking some project and working silently upon it inside some big corporation. I'm sure that there's some chinese guy chuckling on your words as he writes some assembly optimization for H.264 for some rare architecture. It's just that one guy in Nebraska situation is kind of local optimum and everyone is more or less OK with that, at least for the time being.
      - pdimitar 5y ago
        Your comment is absolutely spot on, I've known people forking GCC internally and beating stock GCC with 7% to 10% on an obscure architecture -- and legal prohibited them to share the patch upstream. I've seen such things several times in my career and it made me very skeptical of people generalizing, like your parent poster kind of did.
      - sumtechguy 5y ago
        Not just inside big corps either. Sometimes they just do not like the upstream devs and are not going to share. One project I watch one dev in charge of the project is seeing comment after comment in the project is 'I will just keep these changes to myself then, closed' and specifically because of him. Lots of devs are keeping their stuff private. I personally have done this in another project. I got tired of arguing with one dev over 2 lines of code. So my private version works. The public one is broken in that case. That was 2 years ago. It is still broken publicly and the forums for that group are telling them that...
peter_retief 5y ago
I am a hermit programmer AND I do ML(AI). Last time I checked was still breathing, thanks for asking.
- mb_72 5y ago
  This also seems like something a self-aware AI would write to avoid arousing suspicion related to it's creator not being seen alive for some period of time.
thrower123 5y ago
Good lord, people have been saying crap like this for decades now. Don't be good at programming, just glue lego bricks together, This Is The Future!
ok123456 5y ago
The author created a 1970s bofh straw man to tare it down. Testing, documentation, and larger scale design (patterns or whatever you want to call it) are things that are so pervasive now that even a lone practitioner is expected to do them in some form.
wayoutthere 5y ago
I mean, they were never really that great. People tolerated them when we didn’t have good ways of managing technology, but the archetype of the hermit programmer has been confined to academia for decades. Development practices have focused on collaboration, pair programming and code reviews for a long time now. Concur with the large number of commenters saying this guy seems to have limited experience with which to judge the scale of the problem.
antonvs 5y ago
I find it hard to understand why anyone would read past the first few paragraphs of this obvious dreck. Y'all are much more charitable than I.
- pdimitar 5y ago
  I barely lasted 3 paragraphs before I said to myself: "oh, this guy imagines himself as a revolutionary who will break down the monopoly of the tyrannous programmers, I see, nothing interesting then".
streetcat1 5y ago
was this written by GPT-3?
- SGML_ROCKSTAR 5y ago
  Rude way to comment on the writing quality.
- peter_retief 5y ago
  That seems quite possible.
- thedevindevops 5y ago
  The sentences, on average, are unnaturally short. It's not a bad call.
- square_usual 5y ago
  Barring the poor grammar, perhaps due to the writer not being a native speaker, nothing here seems to suggest that. The overall article is very coherent.
- oytis 5y ago
  Yeah, GPT-3 trying to inflate its significance on the job market.
swiley 5y ago
They've been saying this since the 80s. The magical world where prolog/pascal/java/NPM solves all your problems is eternally 3 years away.
- dickiedyce 5y ago
  Only 3?
- docflabby 5y ago
  Rust ;)
- peter_retief 5y ago
  The eternal 3 year prediction...
- totololo 5y ago
  Yeah, it's not directly the point of the article but I thought if we can't automate truck driving, programmers are safe for a while.
  - vbezhenar 5y ago
    Who said we can't automate truck driving? Of course we can. It's the balance of safety/cost that prevents to fire all truck drivers right now. In programming it's different. Cost of mistake is negligible for most projects. Worst case is your production database is dropped, so you have some downtime while restoring it from the back up. If some AI will be able to actually replace even junior developer, it'll be widely adopted. May be not for martian missions or artificial heart, but for some boring CRUD service - any day. An issue is that so far GitHub Copilot is the only widely known AI attempt to tackle code generation. And while it's promising, it's far from replacing a human. It just can't write useful programs. While automated truck driving is absolutely a thing for many years.
- SGML_ROCKSTAR 5y ago
  Is the fact that it hasn't, due to the market at all?
thih9 5y ago
I disagree with the article's summary; the tasks listed at the end (planning, documenting, testing, refactoring) are helpful but: 1. There exist successful projects that don't rely on them. 2. They're not in an exclusive relationship to programming (e.g.: a person that focuses just on programming and that write code for themselves can still refactor their code).
57844743385 5y ago
I feel bad saying it but I’m just not willing to read something this long until eventually it comes to the point.
- djrockstar1 5y ago
  The TL;DR seems to be that if you don't plan, document, test or refactor your code, and don't have great communication skills, you'll be replaced by an AI. Yeah I wish I hadn't read it either.
- iso1210 5y ago
  Just look at the conclusion at the bottom
jpfr 5y ago
The text seems to imply that people on the "technical track" (only programming) are doing so because of some flaw in their personality. That is absolutely not the case! This is not a good way to launch "hermit programmer" as a new term. The term is not defined and mentioned only three times in the entire text (once in the title). I suppose most readers have different assumptions on its meaning. I know a few "hermits" (the way I interpret the term) that are excellent engineers and also excellent communicators. Only that they work via mailing lists and not in person. And that they are not willing to succumb to a manager bossing them around.
- lucraft 5y ago
  There's a part of the article at the bottom that defines a Hermit programmer more precisely: * they don’t plan how they're going to finish a task * they don’t document * they don’t test * they don’t refactor * they don’t know anything about production infrastructure * they don’t have good communication skills * they don’t try to diversify their skills I'd agree with the article that this kind of programmer is "dead".... but as far as I know they've been dead for a very long time already.
  - qazpot 5y ago
    Maybe "Bad Programmer" is more apt instead of "Hermit programmer" and yeah it is a no brainer that they are "dead"
    - dagw 5y ago
      Maybe "Bad Programmer" is more apt Some of the very best programmers I've ever met tick all those boxes. They could deliver in a week something other teams would struggle with for months. The problem of course came when other people would try to understand and build on what they had done. If you believe the quote that "Real Developers ship" then they where absolutely Real Developers.
      - IlliOnato 5y ago
TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
> People that lived by and for their own coding creations, pleasing managers from time to time What? I don’t think this guy was a programmer in the 90s. Maybe a fetus.
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
I get An error occurred: Unexpected token < in JSON at position 0. at the bottom of the page.
joeblubaugh 5y ago
Who does the author think is going to write all the SaaS services and low code tools?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
qazpot 5y ago
In summary, hermit programmers who only write code for themselves are dead because: As they don’t plan, you never know when (or if) they are going to finish a task. As they don’t document, their code is not reusable because nobody knows how it works. As they don’t test, chances are the code they write is full of bugs. As they don’t refactor, the software cannot evolve. As they don’t handle infrastructure, their code has only been executed on their machine, and only God knows what will happen when the code runs in production. As they don’t have good communication skills, they do not know how to sell what they do to the market, which is why they are always behind the competence. As they don’t diversify their skills, powerful AI will take over their workplaces. I think in the end the author took the attributes of "Bad" programmers and applied them to "Hermit" programmers. So yeah I agree Bad Programmers are going to have a Bad time in future.
- vllaw 5y ago
  Indeed, the whole article is worthless and designed to elevate its author who presumably has all of these "communication skills" and a reasonably good looking picture. He might even get hired because managers love this kind of incoherent drivel. He is still wrong though.
  - dhosek 5y ago
    And yet his communication skills are—not so much good.
    - geodel 5y ago
      I usually get suspicious of "excellent communication skills", "best practices" or in general "best <anything>". These things are more often not really that good and sometimes rather bad.
  - dangerlibrary 5y ago
    corroborated by his tagline: "I'm a Ph.D. student doing excellent research in Software Technology"
mikewarot 5y ago
In the old days, a server was fast enough to do everything, you bought it, installed the parts, and ran it for years, sometimes more than a decade, before being turned off. You didn't need to configure infrastructure, because you had already built it, once, and it just worked. It was a much simpler way of doing things because the number of users was known, and you didn't need to scale past that. Also, your users were known, and thus you really didn't have to worry about security, for the most part. Programming was a matter of finding the right libraries, and doing plumbing, back then, as it is now. Nothing has really changed in that aspect. What has changed is that productivity has plummeted as a result of having to fragment systems across servers, networks, and client platforms, with many additional leaky layers of abstraction added to attempt to compensate. I watched as the office network I was hired to support in 1997 became so reliable that by 2013 there was almost nothing for me to do. The tools that can produce code to run in that environment from 1997 only fail because we've switched from 32 to 64 bit environments. All those layers of plumbing need to be managed, and it's programmers, not some AI that is going to do the job.
- IlliOnato 5y ago
  > Programming was a matter of finding the right libraries, and doing plumbing, back then, as it is now. It seems by "programming" you mean setting up a website or a webapp. You know, maybe this is what most of the programmers do, but the whole programming area is much, much more vast. Very little of what I have been doing in 25 years of software development, or what my colleagues are doing, could be described this way. Yes, there is some plumbing in networking, GUI, or say UTF-8 handling. But I would guess 95% of our code is original and complex logic.
  - mikewarot 5y ago
    Sorry, but this triggered me getting defensive... here's the rant. By programming, I mean starting from a sketch on a piece of paper at lunch at Wendy's outlining an idea, and implementing it on both a handheld computer programmed in PL/N, connecting to it via a weird custom serial card/cable, then in Turbo Pascal on an IBM compatible PC, implementing a database, text editing routines, multitasking, and all end user support... in the days of MS-DOS through Windows 3.1 Building my own multi-tasking definitely wasn't plumbing, but after I had the libraries built I needed, it was all plumbing. The nice thing is in Turbo Pascal, everything had help that was complete, with a working example piece of code. GIT still is way better than backups to zip file on floppies.
phpnode 5y ago
This article could have been written 10, 20 or 30 years ago with only the slightest of adjustments. We work in an industry with the constant need to learn new things and adapt to new ways of working, this will never change.
jstx1 5y ago
> Don't call yourself just a programmer anymore This subtitle is almost the same as the title Patrick McKenzie's popular article on salary negotiation and career progression which is almost 10 years old now. So not really anything new and it's a bit disingenuous to present this as a big new change as of 2021. The article does this switcharoo where it states something in the title, never addresses in the text and then it lists conclusions which aren't related to the main text or to the title. The conclusions make sense on their own - it's a list of useful skills for software developers. But they don't belong to the rest of the article or to its title.
everyone 5y ago
Yet another article on HN where "programming" = webdev
zarzavat 5y ago
This article reads like it was generated by GPT-3. High on buzzwords, low on coherence. Not sure how "AI" is going to do anything other than create more demand for programmers.
ed_elliott_asc 5y ago
Again another story “copilot” will do the work for you - it doesn’t, it can make things easier but that is all.
mullikine 5y ago
This is just wrong. Imaginary computing (based on language models) and blockchain or other source of truth is the future. As hermit programmers we can rely on AI to make a prediction as to when a task will be done, generate documentation for us, generate tests https://mullikine.github.io/posts/imaginary-reflection/ https://mullikine.github.io/posts/imaginary-reflection/, generate, etc. Any deployment system that doesn't use language models will be fragile as the time to onramp new developers will become exponentially more difficult over time. Hermit programmers are OK if they lean heavily on AI and blockchain. This article is a case for sell-outs, and pessimists
- lpcvoid 5y ago
  There is only one place for Blockchain - in the center of the Bullshit-Bingo tile matrix.
  - mullikine 5y ago
    Firstly, what I'm saying does not rest on blockchain being the source of truth. It could, for example, be another language model from a corporation that you trust. Secondly, if you can't see the value of a blockchain or decentralised cryptography as a way to deal with the issues of consensus, then that's not my problem.
hahamrfunnyguy 5y ago
"The number of programmers is constantly on the rise, but many programmers no longer need to be experts, middle-skilled developers now do what needed an expert before" Not really. It's more that the balance between breadth and depth has shifted. Applications are so much more complex and do so much more than they did 20 years ago. You definitely need to build a web version, and probably at least two mobile platforms too. Depending on what it is, maybe one or more desktop apps too.
blablabla123 5y ago
I've been working both as 1-person team for years but also in larger teams for the same amount of time. In my experience the hermit programmer is some sort of a myth. It's true that sometimes tech staff is more separated from more non-tech staff but that is always a management decision because they think it makes people more efficient. In fact as a 1-person team it's usually necessary to interface much more often with other non-technical people. In larger (scrum) teams that is usually centralized through a PO or PM. Which is in the long-run usually a good thing, pressure can be extreme for 1-person teams since people call the programmer directly. I used to work at places where sometimes for a time frame of 1 hour a day someone tries to make me listen to his or her ideas. Such a waste of time.
- foxfluff 5y ago
  I'm a 1-person remote team, and I virtually never deal with non-technical people. So I'd say hermits most certainly do exist.
zaptheimpaler 5y ago
Yet more expectations on programmers without considering our environments. At the same time that programmers are leaving their jobs in droves and we are seeing widespread burnout. You sub-tier hermit blub code monkey piece of shit how could you forget to document and test well and refactor and stay on top of a 100 tech trends while churning out tickets all day, firefighting production issues, mentoring other programmers and working from home during a pandemic while friends and family around you are getting sick or dying? All of these things are doable if we had 5x more time and training and sane work cultures but we don't. Fuck off, blame management.
mbeex 5y ago
To me, this is simply a rant against technical qualification - more bluntly, an excuse of the own inproficiency. Something whose significant increase as a trait of software development in this age is in my opinion undeniable. And this is a problem. > no-code movement will continue its expansion One of the many examples of false opposites. A good programmer / software engineer / whatever you name it, is characterized by his ability to move smoothly between very different layers of abstraction vertically as well as the ability to adopt different points of view, technical caused ones and others. This requires different levels of mastery of all of these things. Not always at the same time, but ultimately no one can be avoided. Regarding the example from above: Dealing with a real programming language becomes unavoidable with certainty at some point. And this isn't simply "glue code", a pretty derogatory term often used by people who just can't program. It is part of real quality.
- dagw 5y ago
  > no-code movement will continue its expansion One of the many examples of false opposites. Absolutely. As a developer who works a lot in a no-code environment, the way I approach a problem is no different there than if I was developing the same solution by typing text in an editor. I see every day that people who are "good" programmers produce solutions in those environments way beyond what non-programmers produce.
  - kitsunesoba 5y ago
    Indeed, code gets too much focus in these sorts of discussions. The bulk of a programmer’s value is in their way of thinking and solving problems, and code just happens to be the most capable and complete manifestation of those skills. Someone with a programmer’s mindset is going to continue to have a solid advantage when building software, regardless of the tools used in building.
nathias 5y ago
Another strawman slain.
pdimitar 5y ago
So he conflates "hermit" with "unsociable solo star with no communication skills", i.e. "the bad programmer", apparently. Should be obvious that being a hermit does not correlate with being professionally unsociable, nor does being an amazing programmer does correlate to being sociable. They are separate things and even if there's some overlap that says nothing about the one thing or the other. Fairly pointless article, feels like it was written mostly so the guy can advertise himself.
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
What a waste of time. Every single point in the conclusion is wrong.
petercooper 5y ago
This article focuses on 'hermit' programmers as employees, but I think ultimately that type of stereotyped character is now as likely to become a small business owner. With all of the benefits of efficiency and the cloud mentioned in the article, such lonesome characters can now put together their own SaaS or similar sorts of high margin services/products (such as infoproducts, data, or semi-automated consultancy) and make a reasonable income, and most customers don't care whether it's wired together with tests, refactored properly, or what not. It does require at least enough business, marketing, and communication skills to sell their work, however, but even this is becoming an easily reproduced or outsourced skill nowadays.
- JediPig 5y ago
  what you said is true. i may start taking contracts again. i work alone, only thing i promise is it works as agreed on, and near zero quality issues. i have systems in place for decaded that have produced one or two bugs. how? i actually print out the sourCe code and go line by line while on the toilet. though i now use an ipad to do that.
  - smoyer 5y ago
    Ironically, your comment has one or two "bugs".
  - JasonFruit 5y ago
    Please wash your hands.
kuratkull 5y ago
Throughout reading this I had a creeping thought: "this person has no idea what they are talking about".
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  And also "this line of thought is not at all original, people have been predicting it for years, decades even."
  - commandlinefan 5y ago
    I've been reading it at least a couple of times a year since I started coding professionally in 1991.
- snuser 5y ago
  it's as if all of his opinions were developed reading marketing material
- Veen 5y ago
  The writer is an academic, a PhD student, so they likely have little industry experience. Presumably extremely smart and capable in their domain, but not well informed about the industry beyond what they have read in history books about old-timey programmers.
  - giglamesh 5y ago
    Also pretty clearly not a native english speaker/writer (I'm hoping based on how substandard their english skills are). It may not be entirely fair, but the poor writing pre-disposes me to not give much merit to their arguments.
    - flavius29663 5y ago
      Is your username a PUN that I am missing, what's the relation to Gilgamesh?
JesusRobotics 5y ago
I’m scared to read this. I’m interested in being able to do these things. I think my communication skills might be lacking and I haven’t figured out an approach that works for someone like me… but I definitely know that it’s something that needs improvement.
rglover 5y ago
I'm a total hermit... > As they don’t plan, you never know when (or if) they are going to finish a task. I have the next year and change planned out. > As they don’t document, their code is not reusable because nobody knows how it works. I write lots of documentation. > As they don’t test, chances are the code they write is full of bugs. I do a healthy amount of testing (specifically on stuff that involves a lot of variability or uncertainty). > As they don’t refactor, the software cannot evolve. Refactoring is like church. > As they don’t handle infrastructure, their code has only been executed on their machine, and only God knows what will happen when the code runs in production. I built and maintain my own stack on a combination of setups involving bare-metal, Docker, and Kubernetes. > As they don’t have good communication skills, they do not know how to sell what they do to the market, which is why they are always behind the competence. I've been told I'm an excellent communicator. Maybe that's because I spend most of my time talking to myself. > As they don’t diversify their skills, powerful AI will take over their workplaces. I can design, develop, write, market, speak, and sell. --- tl;dr; Don't apply lazy generalizations to yourself as they set an artificial ceiling on your potential that makes you easy to control. See: https://podcastnotes.org/kapil-guptas-solo-podcast/kapil-17/ https://podcastnotes.org/kapil-guptas-solo-podcast/kapil-17/
bstar777 5y ago
This is such a strange thing to choose to write a derogatory article about. If you are a singular developer that is only writing code to satisfy your needs, then you can do whatever the hell you want. If you have to work in a collaborative environment, then you will likely need to play by the rules of that environment. There's not much else to say about it. The stuff about automation doesn't even seem to fit in this article... that's a completely different conversation.
- speeddemon 5y ago
  I'm guessing the article refers to a form of "cowboy coding" or similar things promoted along with the myth of the 10x programmer, where there are attempts to apply that practice (of siloing developers and having them only write code to satisfy their needs) into the organizational environment. And I'd agree with the article there, in my experience that's awful and leads to everyone being upset. The hermit programmer is no different from a rogue programmer. It's a great way to ensure that key pieces of information are missed or glossed over.
  - bstar777 5y ago
    It all depends on what your perspective is. This article seems to speak to web devs, and I agree with their premise for the most part. But it doesn't work for single indie game developers. Hermit programming is very effective in that space (insert Stardew Valley reference here). So I come back to... why bother even writing this? It's no secret that poor "team players" are a nightmare to work with.
    - speeddemon 5y ago
      I'd be careful with that, I don't see why game development would be any different. You still have to focus on customer satisfaction. Single indie game developers succeeding without doing that seems to be an exception, not the rule. For every Stardew Valley, it feels like I've read a dozen postmortems from people who went off developing something for years only to find out that nobody wanted it and there was no audience for it.
sharikous 5y ago
If you are going to write a text pontificating how good programmers should work, at least have the decency of placing a decent toolbar at the top (broken in Safari). And even the content is not much better.
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  The toolbar works fine, seems like Safari is broken. That being said, the article sucks and I hate his fonts.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
Huh. The author would probably consider me a "hermit programmer." > As they don’t plan, you never know when (or if) they are going to finish a task. > As they don’t document, their code is not reusable because nobody knows how it works. > As they don’t test, chances are the code they write is full of bugs. > As they don’t refactor, the software cannot evolve. > As they don’t handle infrastructure, their code has only been executed on their machine, and only God knows what will happen when the code runs in production. > As they don’t have good communication skills, they do not know how to sell what they do to the market, which is why they are always behind the competence. > As they don’t diversify their skills, powerful AI will take over their workplaces. I have only one answer to these rather ... interesting ... statements: https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall
- tdsamardzhiev 5y ago
  They sound like a good strawman, if I ever saw one.
rubyist5eva 5y ago
Working with dips like this is dead. I fire people with this kind of inflammatory attitude towards others.
lanstin 5y ago
This seems about ten years out of date. Current cloud deployment software is now so powerful that a lone developer can write and deploy entire systems: front end, middle tier micro services, data stores, private network, firewalls, all of it, boom. And it’ll be containers every where so dev and prod will be more in sync than ever. And communication skills where highly useful in the mid 90s as much as they will always be. And the salaries for developers are so much higher now than before. Yeah sure everyone that knew what CGI was in 1996 got a great job, but that salary was like 25% of what is now.
- Jensson 5y ago
  Yeah, so far the value delivered per developer has gone up, not down, as the number of developers increases. Every new thing we gets over the hump to where it can be done entirely digitally massively increases the potential for new applications and need for developers. At some point we will run out for such things, but that point isn't today. For example, once self driving cars gets on the road you will likely see a huge need for developers writing apps for using those cars to automate many daily tasks etc.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- slightwinder 5y ago
  > Current cloud deployment software is now so powerful that a lone developer can write and deploy entire systems: When was this ever different? Single developers always could barf out whole systems. And going by my experience, the relative quality of fullstack-devs today is not better than it was in the past, they just have now more gears moving. > And the salaries for developers are so much higher now than before. Are they? Salaries are always going up, so going just by the numbers of course is it higher. But did salary in IT really grew stronger than in other jobs over the last decades?
  - withinboredom 5y ago
    When was it different? I mean, there was a time when the technology didn’t even exist, if we are being pedantic. But before cloud services, you could not “barf out” a “whole system.” Colo places weren’t as open as they are now; if you knew the right people and had access to cash to buy a server up front, sure you could barf out what you could afford. Before that, you’d have to have a number of landlines to provide a service from home that people had to dial into.
deeblering4 5y ago
> In summary, hermit programmers who only write code for themselves are dead because: > As they don’t plan, you never know when (or if) they are going to finish a task. >As they don’t document, their code is not reusable because nobody knows how it works. >As they don’t test, chances are the code they write is full of bugs. >As they don’t refactor, the software cannot evolve. >As they don’t handle infrastructure, their code has only been executed on their machine, and only God knows what will happen when the code runs in production. >As they don’t have good communication skills, they do not know how to sell what they do to the market, which is why they are always behind the competence. >As they don’t diversify their skills, powerful AI will take over their workplaces. What does any of this have to do with being a hermit? I’d also argue that good communication skills are subjective. For instance people in different regions communicate differently, and some skilled people have disabilities affecting how they communicate. In my view it’s important to be open and accepting towards diverse communication styles. There is no “good skill”, that if you don't posses makes you “always behind the competence”
pyrale 5y ago
After reading this article, I have a strong feeling that the author is trying to sell something. The number of platitudes, buzzwords and non-sequiturs is usually a dead giveaway. I still don't know what's being sold, though.
cafard 5y ago
"This was possible in part because the number of available technologies (software + hardware devices) was so limited that, for instance, a C programmer could literally code for any available platform; and we all know how cryptic can easily become a piece of driver code written in C." At the beginning of the 1990s, one still had minicomputers, notably but not only the VAX. In the workstation market, one had MIPS, SPARC, PA-RISC, Alpha, 88000 platforms. And that's not even addressing IBM world.
werdnapk 5y ago
Offtopic: For some reason I find the articles font hard to read. It's readable, but makes my eyes a little "buggy".
IlliOnato 5y ago
In the old days, there were no separate "engineer" and "factory worker" jobs, just "craftsman". Or "architect" and "construction worker", just "builder". Perhaps a similar separation will occur in programming, and perhaps (this is a separate assumption) the lower-skill jobs that involve mostly "plumbing" will be automated, just like "assembly worker" jobs are getting automated. I doubt very much that the more complex and "creative" tasks could be replaced, not in foreseeable future.
bigbillheck 5y ago
> It’s 2021, and the job market has crashed Is this actually the case?
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
Exactly. Completely clueless statement.
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
> This was possible in part because the number of available technologies (software + hardware devices) was so limited that, for instance, a C programmer could literally code for any available platform; Uhhhh…WTF?? On a scale of 0 to WRONG this is WRONG + 1.
okareaman 5y ago
This article has the feel of being written by an AI. If that is the case, then I'm confident that the need for human writers is not dead.
stooliepidgin 5y ago
Honestly, I thought the term was "cowboy coder," but maybe my vernacular is archaic. Not to pile-on, but I don't understand the bizarre disparagement of computer science. There are far too many programmers, hermit or otherwise, who don't know what big-O notation is, which data structure(s) to choose in a particular scenario based on requirements, algorithm design, or the Church–Turing conjecture. I would also add variations of software engineering methodologies are obligatory knowledge of a professional programmer for situations like using strict, formalized waterfall development in life-safety systems. Credentialed Professional Engineers supervising and/or implementing critically-important code are also Good Things in such situations too.
toomanybeersies 5y ago
People have been prophesying the dawn of no-code since before I was even born, and yet we're yet to see the demise of programmers. Also: > if you want more SSD storage or CPU processors, you just need to add them to the basket I used to say "CPUs are cheaper than developers", until the day I discovered that's not always true, and had to spend several months refactoring the product we were building so that it could actually scale properly. Funnily enough, Terraform doesn't magically solve P=NP.
Tozen 5y ago
Sounds like this person is swallowing and licking up whatever corporate gives them. But as many have or will find out, companies don't love you like that. Lifetime employment at the same company is just about dead too. When that pay raise doesn't happen, when cuts to the staff come down, when that other or junior person get's chosen or promoted over you, when your job get's outsourced, etc... It's about their profits, not you. Somehow this person has got themselves so twisted up in the corporate game, they don't know the difference between "hermit programmer" and "bad programmer". Below is a list of traits of bad programmers. Saying that only an independent or hermit will do one or more is to be blind to reality: 1) they don’t plan 2) never know if they are going to finish a task 3) they don’t document 4) their code is not reusable 5) they don’t test 6) code they write is full of bugs 7) they don’t refactor 8) the software cannot evolve 9) they don’t have good communication skills 10) they don’t diversify their skills 11) powerful AI will take over their workplaces As for AI, corporate is more likely to use such to eliminate jobs internally, to save themselves a few bucks. In addition, corporate environments and teams don't produce bug-free code and management can lead a project "off a cliff" to where it fails. Just because a team of people think they are doing the right things, doesn't mean they actually are nor is there any guarantee of success. Doing things by committee can also be a source of vicious arguments, resentment, and project stagnation. Every team isn't effective or efficient, so can depend on the situation. Bad programmers can exist in corporate environments and teams too, because they are able to abuse the power of their position or fool management for a while or prior to them jumping ship unexpectedly to another company.

It is very fitting that this article that can predict the future also has a JSON error displaying at the footer: > An error occurred: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data. That to me is the near future of software: people thinking software is somehow solved or easier while failing to execute well on basic things like displaying a static HTML document.

kuu 5y ago

> Thus, writing a bunch of code is not going to be a cool thing to do anymore: thinking about how to assembly existing software pieces to solve problems with computers will. The vast majority of sw projects are exactly that: connecting pipes.

watt 5y ago
Where do the pipes come from, though? And it's not just "a" pipe and "b" pipe you are connecting. It's not a "pipe" at all. It's complicated components that can have complicated interactions.
- iso1210 5y ago
  One guy in Nebraska. There's about 4 people that really understand how ffmpeg works, and thousands of people that write stuff that runs on the top.
  - vbezhenar 5y ago
    Do you think that it's sacred knowledge? Or just nobody cared enough to understand how ffmpeg works, because those guys are doing good work already? Also I don't really think that it's fair to claim something for everyone in the world. There are plenty of developers, forking some project and working silently upon it inside some big corporation. I'm sure that there's some chinese guy chuckling on your words as he writes some assembly optimization for H.264 for some rare architecture. It's just that one guy in Nebraska situation is kind of local optimum and everyone is more or less OK with that, at least for the time being.
    - pdimitar 5y ago
      Your comment is absolutely spot on, I've known people forking GCC internally and beating stock GCC with 7% to 10% on an obscure architecture -- and legal prohibited them to share the patch upstream. I've seen such things several times in my career and it made me very skeptical of people generalizing, like your parent poster kind of did.
    - sumtechguy 5y ago
      Not just inside big corps either. Sometimes they just do not like the upstream devs and are not going to share. One project I watch one dev in charge of the project is seeing comment after comment in the project is 'I will just keep these changes to myself then, closed' and specifically because of him. Lots of devs are keeping their stuff private. I personally have done this in another project. I got tired of arguing with one dev over 2 lines of code. So my private version works. The public one is broken in that case. That was 2 years ago. It is still broken publicly and the forums for that group are telling them that...

peter_retief 5y ago

I am a hermit programmer AND I do ML(AI). Last time I checked was still breathing, thanks for asking.

mb_72 5y ago
This also seems like something a self-aware AI would write to avoid arousing suspicion related to it's creator not being seen alive for some period of time.

thrower123 5y ago

Good lord, people have been saying crap like this for decades now. Don't be good at programming, just glue lego bricks together, This Is The Future!

ok123456 5y ago

The author created a 1970s bofh straw man to tare it down. Testing, documentation, and larger scale design (patterns or whatever you want to call it) are things that are so pervasive now that even a lone practitioner is expected to do them in some form.

wayoutthere 5y ago

I mean, they were never really that great. People tolerated them when we didn’t have good ways of managing technology, but the archetype of the hermit programmer has been confined to academia for decades. Development practices have focused on collaboration, pair programming and code reviews for a long time now. Concur with the large number of commenters saying this guy seems to have limited experience with which to judge the scale of the problem.

antonvs 5y ago

I find it hard to understand why anyone would read past the first few paragraphs of this obvious dreck. Y'all are much more charitable than I.

pdimitar 5y ago
I barely lasted 3 paragraphs before I said to myself: "oh, this guy imagines himself as a revolutionary who will break down the monopoly of the tyrannous programmers, I see, nothing interesting then".

streetcat1 5y ago

was this written by GPT-3?

SGML_ROCKSTAR 5y ago
Rude way to comment on the writing quality.
peter_retief 5y ago
That seems quite possible.
thedevindevops 5y ago
The sentences, on average, are unnaturally short. It's not a bad call.
square_usual 5y ago
Barring the poor grammar, perhaps due to the writer not being a native speaker, nothing here seems to suggest that. The overall article is very coherent.
oytis 5y ago
Yeah, GPT-3 trying to inflate its significance on the job market.

swiley 5y ago

They've been saying this since the 80s. The magical world where prolog/pascal/java/NPM solves all your problems is eternally 3 years away.

dickiedyce 5y ago
Only 3?
docflabby 5y ago
Rust ;)
peter_retief 5y ago
The eternal 3 year prediction...
totololo 5y ago
Yeah, it's not directly the point of the article but I thought if we can't automate truck driving, programmers are safe for a while.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  Who said we can't automate truck driving? Of course we can. It's the balance of safety/cost that prevents to fire all truck drivers right now. In programming it's different. Cost of mistake is negligible for most projects. Worst case is your production database is dropped, so you have some downtime while restoring it from the back up. If some AI will be able to actually replace even junior developer, it'll be widely adopted. May be not for martian missions or artificial heart, but for some boring CRUD service - any day. An issue is that so far GitHub Copilot is the only widely known AI attempt to tackle code generation. And while it's promising, it's far from replacing a human. It just can't write useful programs. While automated truck driving is absolutely a thing for many years.
SGML_ROCKSTAR 5y ago
Is the fact that it hasn't, due to the market at all?

thih9 5y ago

I disagree with the article's summary; the tasks listed at the end (planning, documenting, testing, refactoring) are helpful but: 1. There exist successful projects that don't rely on them. 2. They're not in an exclusive relationship to programming (e.g.: a person that focuses just on programming and that write code for themselves can still refactor their code).

57844743385 5y ago

I feel bad saying it but I’m just not willing to read something this long until eventually it comes to the point.

djrockstar1 5y ago
The TL;DR seems to be that if you don't plan, document, test or refactor your code, and don't have great communication skills, you'll be replaced by an AI. Yeah I wish I hadn't read it either.
iso1210 5y ago
Just look at the conclusion at the bottom

jpfr 5y ago

The text seems to imply that people on the "technical track" (only programming) are doing so because of some flaw in their personality. That is absolutely not the case! This is not a good way to launch "hermit programmer" as a new term. The term is not defined and mentioned only three times in the entire text (once in the title). I suppose most readers have different assumptions on its meaning. I know a few "hermits" (the way I interpret the term) that are excellent engineers and also excellent communicators. Only that they work via mailing lists and not in person. And that they are not willing to succumb to a manager bossing them around.

lucraft 5y ago
There's a part of the article at the bottom that defines a Hermit programmer more precisely: * they don’t plan how they're going to finish a task * they don’t document * they don’t test * they don’t refactor * they don’t know anything about production infrastructure * they don’t have good communication skills * they don’t try to diversify their skills I'd agree with the article that this kind of programmer is "dead".... but as far as I know they've been dead for a very long time already.
- qazpot 5y ago
  Maybe "Bad Programmer" is more apt instead of "Hermit programmer" and yeah it is a no brainer that they are "dead"
  - dagw 5y ago
    Maybe "Bad Programmer" is more apt Some of the very best programmers I've ever met tick all those boxes. They could deliver in a week something other teams would struggle with for months. The problem of course came when other people would try to understand and build on what they had done. If you believe the quote that "Real Developers ship" then they where absolutely Real Developers.
    - IlliOnato 5y ago

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago

> People that lived by and for their own coding creations, pleasing managers from time to time What? I don’t think this guy was a programmer in the 90s. Maybe a fetus.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

I get An error occurred: Unexpected token < in JSON at position 0. at the bottom of the page.

joeblubaugh 5y ago

Who does the author think is going to write all the SaaS services and low code tools?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

qazpot 5y ago

In summary, hermit programmers who only write code for themselves are dead because: As they don’t plan, you never know when (or if) they are going to finish a task. As they don’t document, their code is not reusable because nobody knows how it works. As they don’t test, chances are the code they write is full of bugs. As they don’t refactor, the software cannot evolve. As they don’t handle infrastructure, their code has only been executed on their machine, and only God knows what will happen when the code runs in production. As they don’t have good communication skills, they do not know how to sell what they do to the market, which is why they are always behind the competence. As they don’t diversify their skills, powerful AI will take over their workplaces. I think in the end the author took the attributes of "Bad" programmers and applied them to "Hermit" programmers. So yeah I agree Bad Programmers are going to have a Bad time in future.

vllaw 5y ago
Indeed, the whole article is worthless and designed to elevate its author who presumably has all of these "communication skills" and a reasonably good looking picture. He might even get hired because managers love this kind of incoherent drivel. He is still wrong though.
- dhosek 5y ago
  And yet his communication skills are—not so much good.
  - geodel 5y ago
    I usually get suspicious of "excellent communication skills", "best practices" or in general "best <anything>". These things are more often not really that good and sometimes rather bad.
- dangerlibrary 5y ago
  corroborated by his tagline: "I'm a Ph.D. student doing excellent research in Software Technology"

mikewarot 5y ago

In the old days, a server was fast enough to do everything, you bought it, installed the parts, and ran it for years, sometimes more than a decade, before being turned off. You didn't need to configure infrastructure, because you had already built it, once, and it just worked. It was a much simpler way of doing things because the number of users was known, and you didn't need to scale past that. Also, your users were known, and thus you really didn't have to worry about security, for the most part. Programming was a matter of finding the right libraries, and doing plumbing, back then, as it is now. Nothing has really changed in that aspect. What has changed is that productivity has plummeted as a result of having to fragment systems across servers, networks, and client platforms, with many additional leaky layers of abstraction added to attempt to compensate. I watched as the office network I was hired to support in 1997 became so reliable that by 2013 there was almost nothing for me to do. The tools that can produce code to run in that environment from 1997 only fail because we've switched from 32 to 64 bit environments. All those layers of plumbing need to be managed, and it's programmers, not some AI that is going to do the job.

IlliOnato 5y ago
> Programming was a matter of finding the right libraries, and doing plumbing, back then, as it is now. It seems by "programming" you mean setting up a website or a webapp. You know, maybe this is what most of the programmers do, but the whole programming area is much, much more vast. Very little of what I have been doing in 25 years of software development, or what my colleagues are doing, could be described this way. Yes, there is some plumbing in networking, GUI, or say UTF-8 handling. But I would guess 95% of our code is original and complex logic.
- mikewarot 5y ago
  Sorry, but this triggered me getting defensive... here's the rant. By programming, I mean starting from a sketch on a piece of paper at lunch at Wendy's outlining an idea, and implementing it on both a handheld computer programmed in PL/N, connecting to it via a weird custom serial card/cable, then in Turbo Pascal on an IBM compatible PC, implementing a database, text editing routines, multitasking, and all end user support... in the days of MS-DOS through Windows 3.1 Building my own multi-tasking definitely wasn't plumbing, but after I had the libraries built I needed, it was all plumbing. The nice thing is in Turbo Pascal, everything had help that was complete, with a working example piece of code. GIT still is way better than backups to zip file on floppies.

phpnode 5y ago

This article could have been written 10, 20 or 30 years ago with only the slightest of adjustments. We work in an industry with the constant need to learn new things and adapt to new ways of working, this will never change.

jstx1 5y ago

> Don't call yourself just a programmer anymore This subtitle is almost the same as the title Patrick McKenzie's popular article on salary negotiation and career progression which is almost 10 years old now. So not really anything new and it's a bit disingenuous to present this as a big new change as of 2021. The article does this switcharoo where it states something in the title, never addresses in the text and then it lists conclusions which aren't related to the main text or to the title. The conclusions make sense on their own - it's a list of useful skills for software developers. But they don't belong to the rest of the article or to its title.

everyone 5y ago

Yet another article on HN where "programming" = webdev

zarzavat 5y ago

This article reads like it was generated by GPT-3. High on buzzwords, low on coherence. Not sure how "AI" is going to do anything other than create more demand for programmers.

ed_elliott_asc 5y ago

Again another story “copilot” will do the work for you - it doesn’t, it can make things easier but that is all.

mullikine 5y ago

This is just wrong. Imaginary computing (based on language models) and blockchain or other source of truth is the future. As hermit programmers we can rely on AI to make a prediction as to when a task will be done, generate documentation for us, generate tests https://mullikine.github.io/posts/imaginary-reflection/ https://mullikine.github.io/posts/imaginary-reflection/, generate, etc. Any deployment system that doesn't use language models will be fragile as the time to onramp new developers will become exponentially more difficult over time. Hermit programmers are OK if they lean heavily on AI and blockchain. This article is a case for sell-outs, and pessimists

lpcvoid 5y ago
There is only one place for Blockchain - in the center of the Bullshit-Bingo tile matrix.
- mullikine 5y ago
  Firstly, what I'm saying does not rest on blockchain being the source of truth. It could, for example, be another language model from a corporation that you trust. Secondly, if you can't see the value of a blockchain or decentralised cryptography as a way to deal with the issues of consensus, then that's not my problem.

hahamrfunnyguy 5y ago

"The number of programmers is constantly on the rise, but many programmers no longer need to be experts, middle-skilled developers now do what needed an expert before" Not really. It's more that the balance between breadth and depth has shifted. Applications are so much more complex and do so much more than they did 20 years ago. You definitely need to build a web version, and probably at least two mobile platforms too. Depending on what it is, maybe one or more desktop apps too.

blablabla123 5y ago

I've been working both as 1-person team for years but also in larger teams for the same amount of time. In my experience the hermit programmer is some sort of a myth. It's true that sometimes tech staff is more separated from more non-tech staff but that is always a management decision because they think it makes people more efficient. In fact as a 1-person team it's usually necessary to interface much more often with other non-technical people. In larger (scrum) teams that is usually centralized through a PO or PM. Which is in the long-run usually a good thing, pressure can be extreme for 1-person teams since people call the programmer directly. I used to work at places where sometimes for a time frame of 1 hour a day someone tries to make me listen to his or her ideas. Such a waste of time.

foxfluff 5y ago
I'm a 1-person remote team, and I virtually never deal with non-technical people. So I'd say hermits most certainly do exist.

zaptheimpaler 5y ago

Yet more expectations on programmers without considering our environments. At the same time that programmers are leaving their jobs in droves and we are seeing widespread burnout. You sub-tier hermit blub code monkey piece of shit how could you forget to document and test well and refactor and stay on top of a 100 tech trends while churning out tickets all day, firefighting production issues, mentoring other programmers and working from home during a pandemic while friends and family around you are getting sick or dying? All of these things are doable if we had 5x more time and training and sane work cultures but we don't. Fuck off, blame management.

mbeex 5y ago

To me, this is simply a rant against technical qualification - more bluntly, an excuse of the own inproficiency. Something whose significant increase as a trait of software development in this age is in my opinion undeniable. And this is a problem. > no-code movement will continue its expansion One of the many examples of false opposites. A good programmer / software engineer / whatever you name it, is characterized by his ability to move smoothly between very different layers of abstraction vertically as well as the ability to adopt different points of view, technical caused ones and others. This requires different levels of mastery of all of these things. Not always at the same time, but ultimately no one can be avoided. Regarding the example from above: Dealing with a real programming language becomes unavoidable with certainty at some point. And this isn't simply "glue code", a pretty derogatory term often used by people who just can't program. It is part of real quality.

dagw 5y ago
> no-code movement will continue its expansion One of the many examples of false opposites. Absolutely. As a developer who works a lot in a no-code environment, the way I approach a problem is no different there than if I was developing the same solution by typing text in an editor. I see every day that people who are "good" programmers produce solutions in those environments way beyond what non-programmers produce.
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  Indeed, code gets too much focus in these sorts of discussions. The bulk of a programmer’s value is in their way of thinking and solving problems, and code just happens to be the most capable and complete manifestation of those skills. Someone with a programmer’s mindset is going to continue to have a solid advantage when building software, regardless of the tools used in building.

nathias 5y ago

Another strawman slain.

pdimitar 5y ago

So he conflates "hermit" with "unsociable solo star with no communication skills", i.e. "the bad programmer", apparently. Should be obvious that being a hermit does not correlate with being professionally unsociable, nor does being an amazing programmer does correlate to being sociable. They are separate things and even if there's some overlap that says nothing about the one thing or the other. Fairly pointless article, feels like it was written mostly so the guy can advertise himself.

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

What a waste of time. Every single point in the conclusion is wrong.

petercooper 5y ago

This article focuses on 'hermit' programmers as employees, but I think ultimately that type of stereotyped character is now as likely to become a small business owner. With all of the benefits of efficiency and the cloud mentioned in the article, such lonesome characters can now put together their own SaaS or similar sorts of high margin services/products (such as infoproducts, data, or semi-automated consultancy) and make a reasonable income, and most customers don't care whether it's wired together with tests, refactored properly, or what not. It does require at least enough business, marketing, and communication skills to sell their work, however, but even this is becoming an easily reproduced or outsourced skill nowadays.

JediPig 5y ago
what you said is true. i may start taking contracts again. i work alone, only thing i promise is it works as agreed on, and near zero quality issues. i have systems in place for decaded that have produced one or two bugs. how? i actually print out the sourCe code and go line by line while on the toilet. though i now use an ipad to do that.
- smoyer 5y ago
  Ironically, your comment has one or two "bugs".
- JasonFruit 5y ago
  Please wash your hands.

kuratkull 5y ago

Throughout reading this I had a creeping thought: "this person has no idea what they are talking about".

rootusrootus 5y ago
And also "this line of thought is not at all original, people have been predicting it for years, decades even."
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  I've been reading it at least a couple of times a year since I started coding professionally in 1991.
snuser 5y ago
it's as if all of his opinions were developed reading marketing material
Veen 5y ago
The writer is an academic, a PhD student, so they likely have little industry experience. Presumably extremely smart and capable in their domain, but not well informed about the industry beyond what they have read in history books about old-timey programmers.
- giglamesh 5y ago
  Also pretty clearly not a native english speaker/writer (I'm hoping based on how substandard their english skills are). It may not be entirely fair, but the poor writing pre-disposes me to not give much merit to their arguments.
  - flavius29663 5y ago
    Is your username a PUN that I am missing, what's the relation to Gilgamesh?

JesusRobotics 5y ago

I’m scared to read this. I’m interested in being able to do these things. I think my communication skills might be lacking and I haven’t figured out an approach that works for someone like me… but I definitely know that it’s something that needs improvement.

rglover 5y ago

I'm a total hermit... > As they don’t plan, you never know when (or if) they are going to finish a task. I have the next year and change planned out. > As they don’t document, their code is not reusable because nobody knows how it works. I write lots of documentation. > As they don’t test, chances are the code they write is full of bugs. I do a healthy amount of testing (specifically on stuff that involves a lot of variability or uncertainty). > As they don’t refactor, the software cannot evolve. Refactoring is like church. > As they don’t handle infrastructure, their code has only been executed on their machine, and only God knows what will happen when the code runs in production. I built and maintain my own stack on a combination of setups involving bare-metal, Docker, and Kubernetes. > As they don’t have good communication skills, they do not know how to sell what they do to the market, which is why they are always behind the competence. I've been told I'm an excellent communicator. Maybe that's because I spend most of my time talking to myself. > As they don’t diversify their skills, powerful AI will take over their workplaces. I can design, develop, write, market, speak, and sell. --- tl;dr; Don't apply lazy generalizations to yourself as they set an artificial ceiling on your potential that makes you easy to control. See: https://podcastnotes.org/kapil-guptas-solo-podcast/kapil-17/ https://podcastnotes.org/kapil-guptas-solo-podcast/kapil-17/

bstar777 5y ago

This is such a strange thing to choose to write a derogatory article about. If you are a singular developer that is only writing code to satisfy your needs, then you can do whatever the hell you want. If you have to work in a collaborative environment, then you will likely need to play by the rules of that environment. There's not much else to say about it. The stuff about automation doesn't even seem to fit in this article... that's a completely different conversation.

speeddemon 5y ago
I'm guessing the article refers to a form of "cowboy coding" or similar things promoted along with the myth of the 10x programmer, where there are attempts to apply that practice (of siloing developers and having them only write code to satisfy their needs) into the organizational environment. And I'd agree with the article there, in my experience that's awful and leads to everyone being upset. The hermit programmer is no different from a rogue programmer. It's a great way to ensure that key pieces of information are missed or glossed over.
- bstar777 5y ago
  It all depends on what your perspective is. This article seems to speak to web devs, and I agree with their premise for the most part. But it doesn't work for single indie game developers. Hermit programming is very effective in that space (insert Stardew Valley reference here). So I come back to... why bother even writing this? It's no secret that poor "team players" are a nightmare to work with.
  - speeddemon 5y ago
    I'd be careful with that, I don't see why game development would be any different. You still have to focus on customer satisfaction. Single indie game developers succeeding without doing that seems to be an exception, not the rule. For every Stardew Valley, it feels like I've read a dozen postmortems from people who went off developing something for years only to find out that nobody wanted it and there was no audience for it.

sharikous 5y ago

If you are going to write a text pontificating how good programmers should work, at least have the decency of placing a decent toolbar at the top (broken in Safari). And even the content is not much better.

Mikeb85 5y ago
The toolbar works fine, seems like Safari is broken. That being said, the article sucks and I hate his fonts.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

Huh. The author would probably consider me a "hermit programmer." > As they don’t plan, you never know when (or if) they are going to finish a task. > As they don’t document, their code is not reusable because nobody knows how it works. > As they don’t test, chances are the code they write is full of bugs. > As they don’t refactor, the software cannot evolve. > As they don’t handle infrastructure, their code has only been executed on their machine, and only God knows what will happen when the code runs in production. > As they don’t have good communication skills, they do not know how to sell what they do to the market, which is why they are always behind the competence. > As they don’t diversify their skills, powerful AI will take over their workplaces. I have only one answer to these rather ... interesting ... statements: https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall

tdsamardzhiev 5y ago
They sound like a good strawman, if I ever saw one.

rubyist5eva 5y ago

Working with dips like this is dead. I fire people with this kind of inflammatory attitude towards others.

lanstin 5y ago

This seems about ten years out of date. Current cloud deployment software is now so powerful that a lone developer can write and deploy entire systems: front end, middle tier micro services, data stores, private network, firewalls, all of it, boom. And it’ll be containers every where so dev and prod will be more in sync than ever. And communication skills where highly useful in the mid 90s as much as they will always be. And the salaries for developers are so much higher now than before. Yeah sure everyone that knew what CGI was in 1996 got a great job, but that salary was like 25% of what is now.

Jensson 5y ago
Yeah, so far the value delivered per developer has gone up, not down, as the number of developers increases. Every new thing we gets over the hump to where it can be done entirely digitally massively increases the potential for new applications and need for developers. At some point we will run out for such things, but that point isn't today. For example, once self driving cars gets on the road you will likely see a huge need for developers writing apps for using those cars to automate many daily tasks etc.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
slightwinder 5y ago
> Current cloud deployment software is now so powerful that a lone developer can write and deploy entire systems: When was this ever different? Single developers always could barf out whole systems. And going by my experience, the relative quality of fullstack-devs today is not better than it was in the past, they just have now more gears moving. > And the salaries for developers are so much higher now than before. Are they? Salaries are always going up, so going just by the numbers of course is it higher. But did salary in IT really grew stronger than in other jobs over the last decades?
- withinboredom 5y ago
  When was it different? I mean, there was a time when the technology didn’t even exist, if we are being pedantic. But before cloud services, you could not “barf out” a “whole system.” Colo places weren’t as open as they are now; if you knew the right people and had access to cash to buy a server up front, sure you could barf out what you could afford. Before that, you’d have to have a number of landlines to provide a service from home that people had to dial into.

deeblering4 5y ago

> In summary, hermit programmers who only write code for themselves are dead because: > As they don’t plan, you never know when (or if) they are going to finish a task. >As they don’t document, their code is not reusable because nobody knows how it works. >As they don’t test, chances are the code they write is full of bugs. >As they don’t refactor, the software cannot evolve. >As they don’t handle infrastructure, their code has only been executed on their machine, and only God knows what will happen when the code runs in production. >As they don’t have good communication skills, they do not know how to sell what they do to the market, which is why they are always behind the competence. >As they don’t diversify their skills, powerful AI will take over their workplaces. What does any of this have to do with being a hermit? I’d also argue that good communication skills are subjective. For instance people in different regions communicate differently, and some skilled people have disabilities affecting how they communicate. In my view it’s important to be open and accepting towards diverse communication styles. There is no “good skill”, that if you don't posses makes you “always behind the competence”

pyrale 5y ago

After reading this article, I have a strong feeling that the author is trying to sell something. The number of platitudes, buzzwords and non-sequiturs is usually a dead giveaway. I still don't know what's being sold, though.

cafard 5y ago

"This was possible in part because the number of available technologies (software + hardware devices) was so limited that, for instance, a C programmer could literally code for any available platform; and we all know how cryptic can easily become a piece of driver code written in C." At the beginning of the 1990s, one still had minicomputers, notably but not only the VAX. In the workstation market, one had MIPS, SPARC, PA-RISC, Alpha, 88000 platforms. And that's not even addressing IBM world.

werdnapk 5y ago

Offtopic: For some reason I find the articles font hard to read. It's readable, but makes my eyes a little "buggy".

IlliOnato 5y ago

In the old days, there were no separate "engineer" and "factory worker" jobs, just "craftsman". Or "architect" and "construction worker", just "builder". Perhaps a similar separation will occur in programming, and perhaps (this is a separate assumption) the lower-skill jobs that involve mostly "plumbing" will be automated, just like "assembly worker" jobs are getting automated. I doubt very much that the more complex and "creative" tasks could be replaced, not in foreseeable future.

bigbillheck 5y ago

> It’s 2021, and the job market has crashed Is this actually the case?

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

Exactly. Completely clueless statement.

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

> This was possible in part because the number of available technologies (software + hardware devices) was so limited that, for instance, a C programmer could literally code for any available platform; Uhhhh…WTF?? On a scale of 0 to WRONG this is WRONG + 1.

okareaman 5y ago

This article has the feel of being written by an AI. If that is the case, then I'm confident that the need for human writers is not dead.

stooliepidgin 5y ago

Honestly, I thought the term was "cowboy coder," but maybe my vernacular is archaic. Not to pile-on, but I don't understand the bizarre disparagement of computer science. There are far too many programmers, hermit or otherwise, who don't know what big-O notation is, which data structure(s) to choose in a particular scenario based on requirements, algorithm design, or the Church–Turing conjecture. I would also add variations of software engineering methodologies are obligatory knowledge of a professional programmer for situations like using strict, formalized waterfall development in life-safety systems. Credentialed Professional Engineers supervising and/or implementing critically-important code are also Good Things in such situations too.

toomanybeersies 5y ago

People have been prophesying the dawn of no-code since before I was even born, and yet we're yet to see the demise of programmers. Also: > if you want more SSD storage or CPU processors, you just need to add them to the basket I used to say "CPUs are cheaper than developers", until the day I discovered that's not always true, and had to spend several months refactoring the product we were building so that it could actually scale properly. Funnily enough, Terraform doesn't magically solve P=NP.

Tozen 5y ago

Sounds like this person is swallowing and licking up whatever corporate gives them. But as many have or will find out, companies don't love you like that. Lifetime employment at the same company is just about dead too. When that pay raise doesn't happen, when cuts to the staff come down, when that other or junior person get's chosen or promoted over you, when your job get's outsourced, etc... It's about their profits, not you. Somehow this person has got themselves so twisted up in the corporate game, they don't know the difference between "hermit programmer" and "bad programmer". Below is a list of traits of bad programmers. Saying that only an independent or hermit will do one or more is to be blind to reality: 1) they don’t plan 2) never know if they are going to finish a task 3) they don’t document 4) their code is not reusable 5) they don’t test 6) code they write is full of bugs 7) they don’t refactor 8) the software cannot evolve 9) they don’t have good communication skills 10) they don’t diversify their skills 11) powerful AI will take over their workplaces As for AI, corporate is more likely to use such to eliminate jobs internally, to save themselves a few bucks. In addition, corporate environments and teams don't produce bug-free code and management can lead a project "off a cliff" to where it fails. Just because a team of people think they are doing the right things, doesn't mean they actually are nor is there any guarantee of success. Doing things by committee can also be a source of vicious arguments, resentment, and project stagnation. Every team isn't effective or efficient, so can depend on the situation. Bad programmers can exist in corporate environments and teams too, because they are able to abuse the power of their position or fool management for a while or prior to them jumping ship unexpectedly to another company.