33 ms·

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

• haskellandchill 5y ago
  > Much of the demand for programmers right now stems more from expectations of future profits than from profits being currently made. That's a big assumption to make.
  • bagels 5y ago
    Many very large software companies are making handsome profits. We will probably see changes in software employment if that fact changes.
• ihsw 5y ago
• MattGaiser 5y ago
  > Developers are expensive. If a new IDE shows up and they can deliver stuff 5% faster, that means you can have 5% less programmers! Of course the IDE has a price, but it is almost certainly cheaper than 5% of a developer. Dev work is nebulous enough that very few companies seem willing to invest in dev tooling. I've heard nothing but good things about JRebel for example and how it keeps people focused instead of sword fighting during long builds. I am aware of one company that uses it, and they only allow it for senior devs.
  • withinboredom 5y ago
    I’m aloud to pretty much expense any tool at work as long as I can justify it. I’ve never been asked to justify it, but that’s the rule. I think I probably expense a hundred bucks a month on tools.
    • MattGaiser 5y ago
      Please make a list for the rest of us and post about it.
      • withinboredom 5y ago
        I shared it in a sibling comment.
    • toomanydoubts 5y ago
      Care to share which tools are these? I've been in the field for several years and can't remember the last time I shelled money for a tool. What cool stuff am I missing?
      • withinboredom 5y ago
        Mostly ngrok, grammarly (for documentation), postman and IntelliJ.
  • sp332 5y ago
    If you just made all your programers 5% faster, they are each more productive. Now you should hire more programmers because there's a wider range of things they can profitably work on.
    • PeterisP 5y ago
      In essence, Jevon's paradox - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox - where in certain conditions (which plausibly apply to programmers) increasing efficiency results in an increase of consumption, not a reduction of it.
    • baron816 5y ago
      Yes, this. There are a lot of engineers out there that spend a most of their time in meetings, or writing design docs, or reviewing code, or a few dozen other thing that are not actually writing code. Much of that can’t be automated away. If you could get a machine to do much of the programming, that just leaves you with more time to work on the harder problems the business has to deal with, which likely means you’re able to deliver more value, and thus deserve more money. And just think about it, what were Cobol and Fortran developers paid way back in the day? Not nearly as much as an engineer with comparable experience and education as someone today. They were also far rarer in breed. Engineers are paid much more today because the better tools we have now make us more productive and more capable of unlocking business value. Paying an engineer $500K today is worth it if they’re able to unlock $5 million in profits.
• rzw2 5y ago
  Short of a dot-com burst I don't see a glut of software engineers. However, as the career prospects are better known there are more people thinking they want to be a software developer, will this increase the talent pool and decrease demand?
  • AlanSE 5y ago
    I feel like this has already been happening for years... probably longer than that. I find a lot of the people I work with were pulled away from other industries. Some industries are over-represented, like science, engineering, education.
    • spaetzleesser 5y ago
      I think amount of people who are capable of and willing to do software development is limited. Most "normal" people I know would hate the job.
  • spaetzleesser 5y ago
    I think the long term trend will be good for software people but I think something like the dotcom crash is due. There are way too many questionable startups only made possible by excessive investment money floating around. I was around in 2000 and once investment started drying up only a little the whole house of cards came down because a lot of companies "sold" unprofitable products to other unprofitable companies. I think the situation is very similar now.
• honkycat 5y ago
  I can't remewthe last time my job bottleneck was writing code to implement requirements. The bottleneck is almost always migrating a legacy system, getting buy-in, interviewing users to design the system, or waiting on requirements to be finalized.
  • rubicon33 5y ago
    The bottleneck for me is always myself. Getting started can be hard sometimes. Getting into the flow of programming where code comes swiftly is tough. Getting stuck on problems by trying too hard to optimize / design / abstract is common. At the end of the day its really these things that prevent me from being a better programmer. I have nobody to blame but myself, yet nothing I do really seems to move the needle. Presence of mind and clarity of thought are both a fleeting resource. I have to strike while the iron is hot, and the iron is (unfortunately) not always hot.
    • theonething 5y ago
      Your honesty is relatable and refreshing.
    • honkycat 5y ago
      I used to struggle greatly with ADHD, but recently got on Vyvanse and that was a HUGE help for me. My older brother also struggled, but he got on Prozac for his anxiety and he has suddenly become a freaking SUPER HUMAN. I've considered dropping the Vyvanse and switching to Prozac because I have multiple friends and family on it, and the switch from before and after is STARK. And POSITIVE. It is amazing to see someone who previously struggled with anxiety, to the point that I thought this friend DESPISED ME, to becoming a friendly pal of mine after he found a way to manage his anxiety (prozac). Our brains are not designed to sit in an office and coax functionality out of a computer. We used to be hunters and prey creatures, and that lizard brain still lives in our bodies constantly reminding us of that a sabre-tooth tiger could be lurking nearby. Or that the other human across from you may try to steal your chance at successfully breeding etc... Point being, humans have a lot of emotions in modern life that are not always helpful for the way we now have to live.
• boboche 5y ago
  Epic Solar flare or some capitalist downfall is more likely than those lame-from-the-same-pre-2000 book of predictions that servers wouldn’t need IT staff as they get easier to manage (that didn’t age well!).
• willcate 5y ago
  uh, with more greatness?
• JackMorgan 5y ago
  A lot of programmers work to automate and manage huge shifting businesses, saving sometimes 100x more than they cost. Many others work in effectively the entertainment industry: social media, actual entertainment, apps, and games. I don't think the entertainment industry will ever stop: there's always someone with money and an idea to capture the world's attention. I don't think businesses will ever stop growing and evolving, therefore needing programmers to migrate and rework their systems.
• TameAntelope 5y ago
  Is this actually true? Are CEOs lamenting their engineering labor costs like this? I feel like by now the cost of engineering labor has demonstrated its value over and over again, to the point where most CEOs accept the cost of engineering is more or less a shared expense across competition, and not really something to be reduced.
  • MattGaiser 5y ago
    Depends on where. Hearing the complaining openly at some companies. My former employer openly called American engineering salaries too high during all hands.
  • Sytten 5y ago
    Well we have a couple of particularly vocal CEO here (Quebec, Canada) that are always moaning (sometimes on national television) about how they cannot find talent or that gaming companies "steal their talents". All the while they pay comparatively low salaries when compared to what you get working remote for US business. Worst case is when they IPO, they get a fat exit and the workers get nothing because company don't generally give equity here.
    • cableshaft 5y ago
      > or that gaming companies "steal their talents" As a former developer in the game industry, I find that difficult to believe. The average career of someone in the game industry is ~3-6 years[1], as devs get chewed up, burnt out, and then discover that by leaving they can (usually) have greater work/life balance for about 50-100%+ more money. I lasted about four years myself, and as much as I'd love to work on games again, I couldn't accept the pay cut or the long hours. So I just make games in my free time now. I may take a 3-6 month sabbatical at some point to work on it full time again for a little while, but it'll be my own projects. They must treat their devs pretty poorly and/or pay garbage salaries there if gaming companies are successfully stealing devs away. [1]: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-great-video-game-exodus https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-great-video-game-...
• commandlinefan 5y ago
  Lawyers and doctors have always enjoyed “good times” and there’s no reason to think they’ll stop. Why not programmers, too?
  • spaetzleesser 5y ago
    Because they are smart and have built up huge barriers for entry. In contrast everybody can get into programming without any training.
    • eloisius 5y ago
      In fact within our industry we’ve nearly normalized developers spending their own time and money to pull more entry level developers into the work force. I’ve participated in several weekend beginner bootcamp type things, donated money, and will probably continue to do so, but considering the incentives is interesting. Of course these bootcamp things get peanuts of sponsorship from whatever big players are in town, but the real sponsors are the volunteers that spend their own time on these things, and for what? Brownie points for helping beginners, or making tech more diverse, or so that tech companies have bigger, cheaper pool of labor? It’s cynical, but the tech biz really are masterful at propagandizing people against their own interests and distracting us from the fact that they have made the most absurd amounts of money imaginable.
  • abcc8 5y ago
    Lawyers and doctors are certified by their respective boards and bars. Individuals who aren't certified can't perform tasks that certified individuals can without non-trivial legal consequences. I'd say they aren't really the same.
  • ses1984 5y ago
    Programmers don’t have to go to expensive law school or medical school. Programmers don’t have to pass the bar. Programmers don’t have to work 80+ hours a week for years in residency. Programmers don’t have to work face to face with infected people and put themselves in harm’s way. Times are, imo, much better for programmers than doctors or lawyers right now.
• ta78373764 5y ago
  Right now developer salaries have greatly risen at the top end - the max has risen much faster than the median. Much of the top end growth has been at companies benefitting from easy investor capital. I think this will follow a typical business cycle. When the next recession comes, investors and companies will focus on shorter term ROI, and many high end developers and long term projects will seem too expensive. Reduced competition will dramatically affect the top end, and non-salary benefits may drop quite a bit. The median salary will probably remain sticky but lose a bit when adjusted for inflation. Eventually the next expansion starts but it may take a very long time for the top end competition to heat up to this degree again. I don't expect low-code, AI, or developer productivity jumps to have any real impact anytime soon; there's no real evidence of a true jump in the productivity of the overall project.
  • notduncansmith 5y ago
    > I don't expect low-code, AI, or developer productivity jumps to have any real impact anytime soon; there's no real evidence of a true jump in the productivity of the overall project I respectfully disagree. I don’t think those productivity gains will be evenly distributed throughout the industry, but I think AI and developer tooling will evolve radically over the next decade and programming in 2032 will look quite different for some. Things like Github Copilot are just the beginning. Once programming becomes a matter of operating the AI, there will probably be very different hiring strategies and incentive structures for developers.
    • ta78373764 5y ago
      It's certainly possible, I just don't see any real evidence for it yet. AI has a history of promising demos and then very long (decades) stalls in progress. I could be wrong, but I'm skeptical of the current round of AI as well. It will generate code in the same way as AI generates online articles or music - not very well.
      • machiaweliczny 5y ago
        I think that by 2030 we should have conversations that produce most of business software. Think of CLI + AI. There are already people working on this. My bet is on Microsoft or them buying winning startup
• mrtksn 5y ago
  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 into AWS type of infrastructure and “cloud literacy” has become a thing. I would expect layers of abstraction to continue to build up and programming to become something like using spreadsheets to do your actual task. Eventually, “true programming” will scale back to building these tools. It would be rather niche, very high skill serious engineering - an elite, hard to get in profession that continues to fetch high salaries. They probably will have some kind of association similar to the lawyers/doctors, the code they write will no longer tolerate bugs as a fact of life but they will be responsible as any other licensed professionals. Skipping unit test will land you in jail or very high fine due to malpractice if something goes wrong.
  • 300bps 5y ago
    I think it ends with everyone becoming a developer Not in a million years. When I was 10 I got my first computer and spent 12-16 hours per day on it every day learning BASIC, 6502 Assembly and many other languages. All the adults at the time thought, “this is how all kids will be from now on!” Except none of my peers did it. The generation after me only had a small percentage of people truly interested in computers and it hasn’t grown much since then. I’ve interviewed a couple hundred computer science graduates from top schools for jobs and the vast majority of them didn’t touch their first programming language until college. And these are computer science graduates! A large percentage of the total population is outright technology hostile and proud of it.
    • czbond 5y ago
      >A large percentage of the total population is outright technology hostile and proud of it. Can you expand on this? I was one of the CompSci because I loved it people - and find it hard to fathom this - and could use some insight.
• csw-001 5y ago
  The super volcano under Yellowstone explodes, triggering end times.
• MaxMoney 5y ago
• adamredwoods 5y ago
  >> 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 will need to be maintained somehow. We're not in a bubble. We are in the information era, and cloud computing is helping drive this. The demand for programmers will go away when the human population saturates on robots and AI. We've barely scratched the surface. The only other possible downturn I can think of is a social reaction to reject technology, and enter another type of 'dark age'.
  • e40 5y ago
    Just saw an article earlier about google lowering salaries in some state.
  • brailsafe 5y ago
    What about when everyone becomes a programmer (now) and starts a race to the bottom?
    • adamredwoods 5y ago
      I don't think everyone will want to become a developer, and it's not a job just anyone wants to jump into. Compare this profession to say, the legal industry (the first example I could think of), where being a good lawyer/barrister is a high-paying profession. The law career may have a saturation point and regionally limited, but it still exists and pays well in certain situations. I could see entry-level developer job salaries drop, but rise rapidly with experience. That would be my first indicator of a market correction.
    • polski-g 5y ago
      Not everyone has the cognitive ability to become a programmer.
      • 5y ago
• osrec 5y ago
  I actually think high quality programmers will always be in high demand. Poor programmers will get found out sooner, as the general population becomes more technical.
  • steve_adams_86 5y ago
    When will they become more technical though? My kids are far less technical than I was, and their friends as well. Try as I might, they simply aren’t interested. Is some other part of the population experiencing some kind of technical advancement amongst their kids? I don’t see it.
    • hackerfromthefu 5y ago
      I think there was a generational sweet spot. That is the first generation where computers were affordable enough to be 'personal computers' and in the home. Before then kids weren't able to be exposed to computing early enough, and after then games became shrink-wrapped so kids didn't have to become technically minded to get their games running. Children growing up with a computer at home were doing all
  • tupac_speedrap 5y ago
    The general population isn't becoming more technical though, as an example almost everybody drives cars but most people aren't mechanics. People see cars and tech as a means to an end, which is perfectly fine for me. They just want to get their job done.
    • francisofascii 5y ago
      In the same way that giving IPads to grade schoolers does not make them more technical.
• adamnemecek 5y ago
  This is such a childish view of the matter. Imagine if a scribe in medieval times wrote an article. "Times are great for people who know read and write now. How does it end?"
  • Kranar 5y ago
    I don't see your point. I'm sure it would have been very interesting back in 15th century to investigate the impact of continued literacy among the populace and its effect on various power structures: religious, economic, and political. Today we know the answer so obviously in hindsight it seems obvious and maybe trivial, but I don't think it would have been at all trivial back then to investigate the matter.
• rubyist5eva 5y ago
  >> The CEO’s job is to make as much profit as possible. Higher salaries mean less profit. Such a silly reductive view, if this was the case Facebook/Meta engineers wouldn't be some of the best paid in the world.
• jollybean 5y ago
  Everyone in the US or a wealthy country pushing for 'remote work' is outsourcing themselves, ultimately. In the short term we get 'remote work' which some see as a benefit. In the medium term, absent the apparent advantage/willingness of people to be 'on prem' (in the minds of employers), it's just as easy to hire someone at 3/4 price from Europe, 1/2 price from E. Europe, 1/4 the price from India. While 'language and custom' do present real challenges, let's not kid ourselves: the CFO can use very, very powerful language to push for 'offshoring' because they will talk in terms of 'raw dollars'. The 'advantage' of devs. from wealthier nations is abstract. Their costs are not. In much the same way companies made a fairly narrow choice to jam everyone into 'open work spaces' - which drives a lot of people nuts and I think harms productivity, but is quantifiably cheaper ... companies may opt to 'cheap out'. Many will. I'm wary that the material realities of on/off prem, language, culture, time-zones, communications etc. will be lost in the mix.
  • Barrin92 5y ago
    This framing of "cheapening out" or "The US and other wealthy countries" is a little bit behind the curve. Tech talent physically moves frong HK to the mainland nowadays, The salaries in some Eastern European countries are higher than in Portugal or Spain. It's not cheapening out as much as it is diversification at this point, and give it another generation and it'll simply be people having the choice to work anywhere in the world. Companies don't just 'outsource' any more but primary want a presence and access to incredibly large markets with domestic talent.
  • Apocryphon 5y ago
    You're completely ignoring Canada and Latin America. Good luck dealing with timezones and language barriers.
  • mihaigalos 5y ago
    Sure, go ahead and do that. Meanwhile: https://medium.com/@dodiyadharmik/boeings-737-max-software-outsourcing-to-9-an-hour-engineers-7049c07b5ded https://medium.com/@dodiyadharmik/boeings-737-max-software-o...
• ipaddr 5y ago
  If it ends, it could end with companies asking for more experience. Everybody in the current group would be okay but new grads would find salaries lower.
• wetpaws 5y ago
  I've been hearing op topics, exact things more or less, in differen shapes or forms for over 3 decades. And yet here we are.
• kamaal 5y ago
  Regardless of whatever trends exist now, every programmer must spare a thought about their future. Ageism is common in this industry. No matter how great a programmer you are, you will be eventually discriminated. And this area of work is notoriously famous for giving people age related diseases. If you have a gravy train going for you. Ensure you plan your retirement well, take care of your diet, exercise and relationships. Nothing really lasts forever, even if does for a community, individuals always run out of luck. Instead of thinking of yourself as a superman, imagining yourself as a mortal with limited resources, time and luck will have you better placed for the future. YMMV.
• bedobi 5y ago
  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.
  • humanrebar 5y ago
    Agreed. Especially around three to ten years after the no code solution is implemented when it needs a full rewrite in order to do one of: decrease vendor lock-in, satisfy audit requirements (i.e. meaningful peer review), incorporate professional change management, or scale beyond what the relevant no code framework was designed for.
  • Apocryphon 5y ago
    > think that everything that goes up must come down It doesn't take a pessimist to be remember Newton's apple.
    • bedobi 5y ago
      No, but it does to nonsensically apply the same rule in literally every context. People and programmers are not apples. The economy and society are not gravity. I don't know what else to tell you, and I guess it doesn't matter, since people with a zero sum world view can't be convinced otherwise.
      • Apocryphon 5y ago
        There's a difference between believing there is a zero sum world view, and observing that every economy that has ever existed has generally operated on boom and bust cycles.
        • bedobi 5y ago
          I don't think anyone is disputing the economy has boom and bust cycles. But despite the great depression, two world wars, the cold war, the dot com bubble, the 08 crash, insane environmental destruction, climate change etc etc the economy is growing, the global population is growing, and rather than more and more people fighting over less and less resources, pretty much everyone everywhere is healthier and more prosperous than ever, and extreme poverty is on track to be completely eradicated in our lifetimes. (this doesn't mean there aren't exceptions, or that there isn't still lots to do to address climate change, global economic and health inequality etc etc, but it does prove the peak oil doomer zero sum world view people wrong)
• mberning 5y ago
  For people that are entrenched in the industry, 10+ years of experience, specialized skill sets, etc. I really don’t think the genie will be put back in the bottle. The people that will be burned the worst are newcomers or people with narrow skillsets in areas that fall out of fashion.
• astonex 5y ago
  >The CEO’s job is to make as much profit as possible It doesn't have to be, especially if the company isn't public. Their job is to run the company successfully. Part of that is keeping their employees happy and retaining talent. >If a new IDE shows up and they can deliver stuff 5% faster, that means you can have 5% less programmers! That's never how it works though. As workers have become more efficient they have been required to output more and more. Overall a lot of claims in this blog are unsubstantiated
• spcebar 5y ago
  Talking specifically about the web: We're still not there with no code tools and I don't know if there's a future where the very specific needs of businesses could be met with building blocks. Sure, designs, basic features--but there always seems to be the one feature that is outside of the scope of what the tool can provide and it can send the project tumbling down trying to shoehorn it in. The tools are getting better, but I think we're a long way away from where developers, at least strong backend or full stack developers need to worry about their job security.
• irrational 5y ago
  > 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 questions is no.
  • beckingz 5y ago
    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.
    • ianai 5y ago
      That’s where I thought it was headed…in 2001.
      • noogle 5y ago
        The median salary for software engineers is not that high. Still ~double the median household salary, but it's not the only profession that yields that. So you were not completely wrong.
  • UnpossibleJim 5y ago
    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.
• Apocryphon 5y ago
  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 https://www.readmargins.com/p/zirp-explains-the-world
  • Animats 5y ago
    It's already over. You can get over 1% on CDs now.
• jb3689 5y ago
  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
• jrm4 5y ago
  I don't know if it will happen, but a thing that needs to happen that will probably tamp this down: Liability, and/or other real consequences, for bad programming. We have this for construction and other fields, and it's basically nonexistent here.
• neosat 5y ago
  >> Higher salaries mean less profit. It’s just how the game works. This is a false premise. As a counter argument it would be easy for a rational CEO to pay higher salary if the net incremental ROI on that salary is positive. Then there are second order benefits. A players attract A players, and so on. So you have to also consider the non-financial ROI on the higher salary to attract the best talent. There is a reason why the top companies are willing to pay higher salaries ...
• kukabynd 5y ago
  It doesn’t. Software has been eating the world, and there’s no sign of it stopping. Software gave people like me a way to escape dire economic situation, and is the main reason for increased social mobility as in having lots of options. That is attractive to every young person out there, and the demand goes up and to the right.
• analog31 5y ago
  It seems like the entire economy is like one great big software project, running late, and adding as many people as possible. What did Fred Brooks say about this? I think it will end when the rest of us can't produce enough to keep the programmers fed.
• Animats 5y ago
  I'm amazed that web site development and web servers are still so complicated. I expected that to be all drag and drop by now. Most of it isn't very original. As for programmer employment, we've seen that collapse before. Go read SFGirl from 2001.[1] Check out the Pink Slip Parties. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20010302012226/http://www.sfgirl.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010302012226/http://www.sfgirl...
• vparikh 5y ago
  All it takes is two things: 1. The investor bubble to bust - and I think this will happen due to the soon to be rising interest rates making capital much more difficult too secure. 2. One of the big employers dumps devs into the market - say one of the FAANG companies has a sever downturn and lays of thousands of devs. Don't think it can happen - Facebook and Google are just a few regulations away from mass lay offs and downsizing.
  • Apocryphon 5y ago
    Regulations? Meta itself seems to be losing marketshare all on its own just fine, with maybe some regulatory work by the iOS App Store.
  • lambdasquirrel 5y ago
    I think the answer is closer to this, and also a lot scarier. There are vast swaths of the economy that have got to be over-leveraged and just weird from all these years of low-to-negative interest rates. We really don't know where things will be at until we have to turn up those rates, and the Fed is walking on a precarious tightrope. If interest rates go back to where they were in the 80s, it could be a bloodbath in the streets. That is why rates may end up going slower (in the grand scheme of things) than we might expect. There is a plausible scenario of the entire economy being in the VC heat-death scenario in the 80s that older tech folks had previously been expecting, but has been pushed out hitherto because of the combination of easy returns and easy money. Then of course there's how it will play out in tech. Historically, returns in tech have indeed been driven by VC capital, which is one of the more speculative areas of the economy. But speaking as someone working at a company that isn't a FANG, it seems that there's a chunk of tech that has become more like traditional finance in terms of its microeconomic structure. You have highly leveraged workers whose labor is being amplified by a combination of machines and capital, but the capital isn't so much speculative as it is boring and predictable.
  • ardit33 5y ago
    These off the cuff remark are the typical 'armchair commentary' we get in HN and somehow they get a lot of votes, but they are really low grade 'feel good' efforts. While FB/Meta is in a vulnerable position, they still make 30B+ a quarter, and a net income of 10B. Google in such a strong position, that it seems there will be nobody that will/can disrupt it, even though their search results haven't been the greatest. Even if they got 'broken up' by the regulators, Search, Youtube, Google Apps, entities by themselves will probably be bigger and employ more people combined (the Baby Bell, breakup is a good precedent of it, where the sum of the pieces was larger than the original company). The reality is tech is becoming more and more important for everything in society. Eg. Cars: Tech was about 10% of the cost of a typical car in the 90s, now is over 35% and increasing. Cars can't be build because lack of chips and not lack of manpower or aluminum/steel. The pandemic increased the acceleration of all tech by at least 5 years, and increased demand overnight. Even when things start normalizing, some of it will stick along, as for many people the day to day life has changed, and some 'work for home' or hybrid work is here to stay. Will we see soft hiring seasons? Absolutely. In the next recession, probably hiring will be softer, and people will have harder time to find a job in the short term, (think 2008-2009), but expect in the long term that technology will take a higher percentage of the economy and tech hiring will be going up on the long term.
• dehrmann 5y ago
  > No code / Low code...But hey, deep learning was in a similar spot in the 90s and now we have real products that use it and it mostly works. The major difference is deep learning because viable because parallel computing became 3+ orders of magnitude cheaper. Low-code isn't limited by technical limitations, so I don't see anything changing anytime soon.
  • jasongi 5y ago
    Don't really see low code replacing developers. You'll just see low code specialists like you do right like with CRMs and things like mulesoft.
• hubbins 5y ago
  More code is being written every day than is being retired. With an ever-growing code base, comes the requirement for more resources to maintain it. Demand for developers is outpacing supply.
• suzzer99 5y ago
  When I was 10 years old I sat next to a guy on a plane who sold linoleum tile. He said he used to be an aeronautical engineer, but lost his job when the bottom dropped out of his industry. I've always remembered that, and try not to take the good times for granted. But damn it's been going on 25 years now, and except for little hiccups in 2001 and 2008, demand for programmers is still white hot.
• donatj 5y ago
  > No code / Low code > People have been trying this for decades and it never really worked out. I can’t think of a single product that was able to get to any meaningful degree of success running on top of some low code platform. Every. Single. Squarespace. Website. You probably interacted with several today without even knowing it. They’re everywhere. No code solutions have almost entirely killed the need for developers of shopping carts for small businesses. That was my bread and butter in the mid aughts.
  • moring 5y ago
    My impression is that low-code/no-code fails when it tries to be a generic, domain-agnostic solution for everything. People then realize that programming languages are complex for a reason. However, when it is applied in a highly domain-specific way, like the shopping carts you mentioned, it's quite good. Basically, when that happens, actual programmers are solving the programming-related part of the problem and the product people have actually invested time to think about what parts must be customizable through low-code/no-code. The smaller problem space means better opportunities for simple tools.
  • ozim 5y ago
    Yeah but you won't build Squarespace competition on top of a low code platform. This the way of thinking I expect author is following. If you want to run a webshop they yes - you probably don't have to write a single line of code. But then you get "wordpress developers" who are people that are configuring wordpress for others and this is where fun begins - because wordpress is mostly installing plugins + some configuration and business people should be able to configure it. Then still you get those "wordpress devs" and don't get me started on SAP consultants :D
• goldenshale 5y ago
  If you look at the data, software jobs are growing far faster than new graduates in computer science. A quick google search just found well over 250,000 open positions in the US, with about 50,000 new graduates per year. I'd bet we have decades more of high demand and high salaries for people with CS degrees. I wouldn't be surprised if low-code tools get good enough to power many websites though, so I wouldn't be quite as bullish on code-camp graduates seeing the same growth in salaries.
  • acbart 5y ago
    Maybe if we didn't make "Teaching Computer Science" such a worse job than "Being a Software Engineer" in so many ways. Of course, then we might accidentally start making "Teaching" a good job for folks, and that apparently is completely counter to the American ideal.
  • b20000 5y ago
    the question is, how many of these jobs pay enough o comfortably provide for a family, buy a house and retire, and have enough in the bank to not have to worry about money.
    • chii 5y ago
      not many jobs will offer those end results - CS related or not.
• b20000 5y ago
  times are great? why?
• LAC-Tech 5y ago
  I feel like we have so much leverage and don't use it at all. We're still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor. It's nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this. If anyone has read Developer Hegemony, I'm fully on board with that general premise - we start operating like lawyers with partnerships, and turn bosses into customers. Though that does require us to think of ourselves as professionals not nerds who are too smart for business.
  • drbojingle 5y ago
    Are you honestly telling me that developers know best? All that leverage and you just want to not listen to anyone? Honestly you'd get further not leveraging anything than doing that. I agree with your last paragraph and your first but that second is a doozy.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • gieksosz 5y ago
    There are such partnerships, they are called dev agencies. Usually good for partners themselves, less so for rank and file employees.
    • skywal_l 5y ago
      Exactly like any lawyer firm.
    • WJW 5y ago
      That is exactly the problem with the "Dev Hegemony" book; it spends the first half of the book showing how the current system naturally evolves from very human flaws like ambition and pride, then tries to spend the second half of the book going "Yeah but what if we all start treating each other as equals (except non-programmer, they get to be non-owner employees only)". World peace would also be an easy problem to solve if you can get everyone to just get along, but without a practical way of getting there it's just a pipe dream.
• dahart 5y ago
  > I can’t think of a single product that was able to get to any meaningful degree of success running on top of some low code platform. I don’t know if this is just wildly ignorant or intentionally misleading, but thousands (maybe millions?) of businesses and organizations run low code platforms to develop their internal DBs and inventory and POS systems, among other things. Access and FileMaker are well known examples that lots of small businesses have used over the years. Bigger corps use all kinds of form generators, DB query systems, RAD tools, and low-code environments. These days devs are now using low code game engines to make games that have hit the top-10 lists on your favorite App Store. Demand for devs is still going up, and low code platforms aren’t going to suddenly change that, but this story point should probably have been left out because low code platforms are hugely successful and are growing, and devs are still in demand despite the success and increasing market for low code platforms. It’d be interesting to explore why, but it’s just wrong to claim low code isn’t successful.
  • cudgy 5y ago
    The low code examples listed are not code. They are forms that essentially pull data from a database and display it with little if any interaction, validation, and/or processing. These tools have been available for decades.
    • dahart 5y ago
      Right, and this is exactly what the author was referring to and claiming has never worked. The claim by the author included all “no code” platforms, so both sides of the line you’re splitting. MS Access certainly is a coding environment though, enough so that there’s some debate over whether it’s “low code” or not. It comes with a programming language and APIs. Same goes for something like GameMaker. Perhaps by definition low-code and no-code platforms are typically quite domain specific. And lots of no code platforms grow into low code over time to evolve into adding more control but not get so technical that they need people with CS degrees.
• 8n4vidtmkvmk 5y ago
  5% speed improvement in my tooling would result in about 0.0000001% improvement in my productivity. first of all, so little of what we do is about the tooling. yes, it's very helpful, but no tool, no matter how good, can tell you how to migrate a monolithic service into microseconds microservices with no downtime and no data loss. maybe if we didn't fuck up the original implementation such things wouldn't be needed but there's still trillions of lines of code out there and they aren't going to rewrite themselves. Google and Facebook aren't going to be overthrown by some hot new IDE with autocode built in. secondly.. 5% is nothing. our tooling is so effing slow it needs a 1000x improvement. not in how fast we can write code, just to compile and test the damn stuff. speaking of, amazons reasoning tech sounds interesting. at best this tech will cut out some L3 maybe L4 jobs, but L5+ isn't writing code anymore. which in itself will be interesting because new grads are hired at L3.. how will they ever get hired if those slots are tightened up?
  • 8note 5y ago
    I think of interns as L3 and new grads as L4. I love having L4s around. They don't have distractions so they can get stuff done
    • 8n4vidtmkvmk 5y ago
      Maybe it's different at my company. I don't know what interns are classed as... not sure if they're L2 or L3-intern. But people that are fresh out of uni are always L3. A few years of industry experience is L4.
  • jstanley 5y ago
    If a 5% speed improvement represents 0.0000001% of your time, then isn't 1000x speed improvement still only 0.002%? I don't understand how you can simultaneously argue that almost 0 of your time is spent waiting on tooling, and also that your tooling is so slow that it needs to be 1000x faster.
    • 8n4vidtmkvmk 5y ago
      Alright, let's do some legit math here. Compile times are often about 15 minutes, so a 5% improvement would shave off 45 seconds. That's not too bad. But because that's still a very long wait, I'm not gonna twiddle my thumbs for 14 minutes and 15 seconds, I'm going to go do something else. Probably some social site to kill a few minutes, maybe check some emails, who knows what. Then I'll come back 20-30 minutes later to check if my tests passed or failed. So that 45 seconds isn't really saving me anything because I've already moved onto other things. We have to get that down to a few seconds to avoid distractions. 15 minute / 1000 brings it down to less than a second. And then my other point was that depending on my day, I might not be writing any code at all. For the past few weeks I've just been reading and writing documents. So no amount of speed improvements will help me.
• can16358p 5y ago
  It won't end for anyone who can stay relevant and adopt to the new tech. It will end for everyone who is stuck at current tech which will be "past" in the future, both for tooling/tech and most importantly mindset. For example, React Native and Solidity pays well nowadays. I know they will probably be replaced with something else (in terms of demand, not necessarily an immediate technical successor). If I don't start learning whatever-comes-next-in-my-field, I'd stay in the past, no matter how good I get on React Native or Solidity.
  • TeeWEE 5y ago
    React Native is dying AFAIK? Its mostly Flutter and ML that's souring?
    • can16358p 5y ago
      Definitely not dying and doing great. Flutter might be on the rise though I don't believe in long term success of it because: - Opiniated UI, even worse: Designed by Google, maybe personal but I think Google sucks at design and dislike any design coming from them even if I don't know Google created it in a blind test. - From Google who's known for abandoning many projects - React is already solid and very easy learning curve from React to React Native - The obvious one: JS vs Dart. I don't know Dart, it might be a better language than JS, but MANY people already know JS and wouldn't be super comfortable with learning another, less popular language whereas RN is on top of JS(X).
• ir123 5y ago
  Other people know more than me but the times are good now because the VC's are playing a ponzi scheme (or greater fool theory). Each VC puts in money simply because the valuation will go up and there would be another VC wanting in, willing to pay more. VC's have a lot of cash for whatever reason, low interest rate or Oil money. Hot take: this is not dissimilar to what is happening to crypto. We developers are just part of this game, just incidental to the story. We are paid more simply because a lot of money comes in from top, not for some nonsense like we are "highly skilled" or the supply is less. Yes I do believe that most of tech is a zero sum game, hardly any value is created. Where does it end? It ends when VC's get bored of this game and move on to other things
• hooby 5y ago
  Programmers are increasingly needed for *everything*. I mean, we've entered an age, where a farmer can't milk their cows, if the software of the milking robot has a hitch - can't plow their fields, when the gps-software that drives the tractor isn't working. Apart from that, programming is becoming every other job - as far as domain knowledge is concerned. I've personally experienced (multiple times!) professional accounting companies complaining about not being able to just modify official invoices (totally illegal) but having to cancel and re-issue them with a new invoice number (how it MUST be done). -> It's now the responsibility of the programmers to understand how accounting works. Professional accountants just click a button and expect the software to "do the right thing". -> As in this case, the professional accountant no longer adds much value, they'll probably be entirely replaced by software at some point. A more relatable example might be Taxis drivers. It might take years still, but at some point, all Taxis will be self-driving vehicles, created by robots in a fully automated factory. Programmers will be needed for the driving software and the factory software. You might still need some mechanics to repair the factory robots - until when that job is done by robots as well (that have to be programmed). It currently seems more likely to me, that we are headed towards a future, where programming is the *only* job - and everything else is done by software.
  • nokcha 5y ago
    > I mean, we've entered an age, where a farmer can't milk their cows, if the software of the milking robot has a hitch - can't plow their fields, when the gps-software that drives the tractor isn't working. Seems like quite a dangerous situation, if something like the Carrington Event knocks the grid offline for an extended period of time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
    • tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      Seeing how we coped with Covid has made me wonder how well we would manage an event like that. Supposedly we are well prepared in the UK but that was also the case for Covid and we know how that turned out.
• durnygbur 5y ago
  As a web/fullstack with over 10 years of experience and based in EU, I don't have this impression at all. Actively applying and interviewing, still receiving absurd requests to resolve various quizzes, teasers, and assignments. Potential salaries top at miserable 70-80k EUR in countries where monthly salary deductions reach 40%. It's better for me to basically seat idle and work on some personal projects.
  • ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    >Actively applying and interviewing, still receiving absurd requests to resolve various quizzes, teasers, and assignments. Potential salaries top at miserable 70-80k EUR in countries where monthly salary deductions reach 40%. Let me guess, France/Austria/Belgium?
    • durnygbur 5y ago
      Germany, Denmark, and even Netherlands after the initial 5 years discount... list me one country where it doesn't apply...
      • ChuckNorris89 5y ago
        Netherlands to a degree has at least some big tech willing to pay six figures and up, while that's almost not the case in places like Austria and Belgium while still having insane taxes. >list me one country where it doesn't apply If you can move to Romania and freelance, you can pay as little as 1% tax. And if you freelance for six figure US gigs you've basically hit the jackpot.
        • durnygbur 5y ago
          In post-Communist countries you have social services, healthcare, and infrastructure at the level worse than in US. You're alone with your cash and every doctor, agent, and clerk looks to screw you over. It's attractive only for natives with family locally, or maybe for someone who is fluent in the native language. No salary would convince me to relocate alone to Romania.
• black_13 5y ago
• randomsearch 5y ago
  I think the current bubble is very short-term. It has been caused by 10 years of low interest rates pushing a lot of capital into startups. The recent "next level" hysteria in the market has been caused by stimulus packages in the US and elsewhere. A lot of what we're seeing is very reminiscent of the .com bubble. That said, I do think underlying the froth is a genuine increased societal demand for tech and programmers, so I don't expect the collapse to be as bad as .com outside of crypto and other hyper-bubbles. Yes, there will be a lot of job losses, but most engineers will just experience a salary correction rather than years of unemployment. In the long-term, a move away from traditional programming will be necessary to solve the supply problem. Tools like SquareSpace, which are really awful but do genuinely replace a lot of low-end web dev work, will eventually mature and begin to eat up a decent amount of engineering demand. We'll see lots of these Excel-like apps that can serve low-end business needs reasonably well and remove the need for engineers. I think there are a lot of opportunities making great creative tools for programming-like tasks, just as we've had a few decades of innovation in graphic design or publishing tools - there are lots of very valuable startup opportunities waiting for those who have the motivation and patience to figure out how to help non-nerds do nerdy things.
  • aembleton 5y ago
    What's so awful about SquareSpace? I've recommended it to a few people who were after a website.
    • randomsearch 5y ago
      It's a slow, clunky, imitation of what could be. It's a useful tool only because it's the least worst such tool we have. I would also recommend it and similar tools to non-technical folks.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• jdrc 5y ago
  I prefer to see it in terms of power hierarchy. Programmers gained a massive advantage in the past decades because they got to dictate to everyone how to work - they went higher in the power hierarchy. This has taken the wages of everyone else lower and lower and lower, while tech companies have been making absurd margins (yes there is a lot of zero sum in it). But now free money is over and inflation is showing its teeth very sharply -- here in europe it is going to be a massive problem. What you will see is more and more tech-savvy business owners in all other sectors that will reign-in the overpriced-snake-oil salesmen of the big tech and will put developers back in the lower ranks of the cogs hierarchy.
  • CraigJPerry 5y ago
    All the inflation around appears to be either supply side issues (cars, anything with semi conductors, transport issues, …) rather than demand side. There’s definitely more money sloshing around but everyone appears to be using it to jack up equities prices. Any other price rises i can spy right now appear to be opportunistic profiteering rather than over demand. Eg the used car market is already back to many cars not moving since Christmas because they’re over priced where last summer there was a legitimate shortage, no adverts were old adverts for used cars back then. That said, It doesn’t really matter with inflation whether it’s based in supply or a demand side cause or not, there will be effects just because enough people believe they will come. A self fulfilling prophecy to some extent. Im not sure the effects will be the predicted ones though, i suspect a less rational outcome because the basis for this is not on rational ground. As for programmers, I’d have to take the other side of that bet. No code has yet again proven itself to be the same useless junk it was in every other incarnation of that idea. Code is infecting everything today. Good luck buying even just a tv without apps, never mind a new car without some junk entertainment system tacked on. Still no one has solved how to write good code - the type hype just now still leads to building the wrong thing for the customers needs and still produces software with very basic security vulns like XSS. Until someone can solve making code writing reliable, the status quo will continue.
• nijave 5y ago
  >I can’t think of a single product that was able to get to any meaningful degree of success running on top of some low code platform Microsoft Office/Excel
• throwaway4good 5y ago
  Boom and bust has always been a part of this business. It was hard to find jobs as a programmer in the early 90es, the early 00es, and around the financial crisis in 2008. You can be sure that there will be a bust again, simply because hype and optimism eventually will overshoot. It has nothing to do with "no code", more productive development environments, or end-users becomming programmers. That pressure has always been in the business but the increase in productivity has always been gobled up by increase in complexity, expansion of scope, or automatization of new business.
• jokoon 5y ago
  I have depression issues, and have been coding for 10 years now. I don't know if I'm bad at programming, or if it's because I lack a degree, or because I have been chronically unemployed and lack experience, or because I'm too selective with the jobs I apply on (I can't bear php or js stuff like angular), or because I live in france or in the wrong city. I may have an atypical profile. Programming has not been very good to me. When I hear "programmers are in high demand", I don't see it applying to me.
  • namdnay 5y ago
    Plumbers are in high demand too, but if you are a plumber with depression, lack of experience, that doesn't want to touch waste pipes or shower units, and live in the sticks, it won't apply to you either
    • pietromenna 5y ago
      Ditto!
    • jokoon 5y ago
      I know, but it's not like employers are begging people to work for them either. The job market has always been a market that favors employers, not candidates, whatever the domain of work.
      • horsawlarway 5y ago
        No - At some levels and in some locations the employers literally are begging people to come work for them. If you're outside the US, that may be a big factor - but my guess is it's a "you problem" based on what you've said above.
        • ChuckNorris89 5y ago
          >At some levels and in some locations the employers literally are begging people to come work for them. Begging is useless without payment to match. >If you're outside the US, that may be a big factor The jobs market outside of the US is nearly orders of magnitude worse, especially in some EU countries. The attitude, leverage and power balance devs in the US enjoy over their employers is far greater than anywhere else.
• sails 5y ago
  As to what might happen regarding "Decreased Investment", this article [1] has an interesting analysis for those working in rapidly funded startups. In short it predicts a Minsky moment, but in relation to funding "speed" rather than "value". > Does the compression of timelines in venture change the distribution of terminal outcomes for venture-backed companies? [1] > A Minsky moment is a sudden, major collapse of asset values which marks the end of the growth phase of a cycle in credit markets or business activity.[2] [1] https://pivotal.substack.com/p/minsky-moments-in-venture-capital https://pivotal.substack.com/p/minsky-moments-in-venture-cap... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minsky_moment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minsky_moment
• n_time 5y ago
  It's worth considering that the number of programmers/technologists working in an organisation serves a signal for the organisation as an financial instrument. An organisation wants to show growth in terms of revenue but also in terms of their capabilities, and frequently the "human capital" of the organisation is a metric that is reviewed here. If you've been in a growing tech company you've probably seen this as colleagues being hire when you're not clear why, and the organisation actually preferring solutions that require many more employees. There's also just the factor that – today at least – technology management have a lot of social power within their organisations. Most managers wants to grow their little fiefdom – which usually means more headcount. Anywho, I guess I'm just saying there's a lot of factors completely unrelated to automation that incentivize hiring more programmers. Many of these factors are not rational for the organistions themselves – managers growing their headcount to the limit their structure will allow. Some of them are though! I.E. company as a financial instrument rather than as a business. The model of a business selling something and optimizing process for maximum profits is in there for sure, but from my experience there's a lot of other factors that end up building a very incoherent whole.
• gregoriol 5y ago
  Programmers will end like most factory workers: there is no reason most of the current programming can't be automated at some point.
  • adriancr 5y ago
    Programming is mostly r&d and i dont hear people trying to automate researchers, rather enhance what they can do. I'd argue if a programming position can be automated, that position wasn't needed in the first place and someone can make better infrastructure that doesnt require it in the first place. But to build that infrastructure you do need competent programmers, and if you dont a competitor will, and eventually replace you.
    • gregoriol 5y ago
      That's why I'm saying "most of current programming", thinking tasks like doing React or Wordpress stuff
• Dave3of5 5y ago
  > Higher salaries mean less profit. It’s just how the game works. Software is sold at massive markup. No sane tech company is complaining about profits at the moment. Sure they'd pay less but if they bump our salaries they're still making insane profits. At the moment it's COGS for any CEO and they've already accepted it's high for software.
• smattiuz 5y ago
  Are they really though? I'm nearly ready to call it once and for all, toxic and disruptive industry, after 12+ years in it. Expectations are unfairly high, salaries make absolutely no sense, 60+ hours a week are expected even though contracts talk about 37/40hrs/week on average. Meh.
• cudgy 5y ago
  “If the economic conditions change and investors decide they don’t like tech companies anymore, many of them will inevitably close. Less companies hiring also means less demand.” This is a cyclical phenomena, but most likely the factor listed to have the greatest impact on developers. As for high developer salaries, scarcity of knowledge with newer languages and frameworks along with the demand for experienced candidates with those skills certainly has an impact.
• rdevsrex 5y ago
  It ends with ecological and societal collapse. While the party lasts tech will increase. But eventually in the next 20-50 years tech will mean very little given we don't have the resources to continue growth exponentially. In the interim, programming is a great way to make money, but at some point it's going to lose its prominence.
  • bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    so make your primary job programmer, but maybe develop fallbacks in carpentry and subsistence farming.
    • rdevsrex 5y ago
      Yep! This is my plan. I already work remote, so I plan to continue that as long as I can. Eventually, I want to buy land in a remote place that is as climate change resistant as possible, like the upper midwest. I want to build an off grid house and learn how to grow most of my own food and develop strong ties with the community, as well as learning lots of non-tech skills.
  • usrbinbash 5y ago
    How do you figure that tech will mean very little? What cannot continue is economic growth, for the simple reasons that the planets (and its biospheres) resources are finite. What will continue however, is technological growth, as in technology will grow ever more complex, and solve more difficult tasks. Techn development is not inherently tied to economic growth.
    • rdevsrex 5y ago
      Collapse is a complex topic, but essentially if the thesis is true, then we are on a downward spiral in complexity and in population. At some point, high tech will be replaced with low-tech solutions that take less energy and less maintenance. To me that means that there will be programmers, but far fewer, focused on only vital areas, like climate change adaptation. I don't think it's an immediate concern, but if I was 22, I'd keep my eyes peeled and try to specialize in some field that would still exist if our main concern was trying to make do with less. I know that's a bleaker outlook compared to the techno-utopianism that's common. That said, growth is a part of our system, so I think the outlook for programmers is great in the short term. Capital is going to try to maximize value right up until we fall off a cliff.
• cudgy 5y ago
  Standups with the entire team of say 5 or more people are usually a waste of time for most of the attendees. Most attendees are simply listening to updates and questions between the lead and the other team members. Sure, sometimes an unrelated developer might have insight but it is rare and can cause rabbit hole conversations that waste other team member’s time. Would prefer a structure where an experienced developer (preferably in area of work) meets one on one for 10-15 mins max with each team member, provides advice or refers the team member to resources to aid if needed.
  • herodoturtle 5y ago
    I disagree with this, but only under certain conditions. The standup is meant to be a quick meeting, 10 minutes tops. It's not there for deep advice between lead and each team member. Instead it's there to get everyone on the same page. The deep one-on-one meetings still happen separately - when needed. And as you say, the added benefit of daily standups is that sometimes a team member has great insight into someone else's issue. Of course, standups that take too long are terrible. But if done right, they're helpful, and a lot of fun.
    • cudgy 5y ago
      “get everyone on the same page” Meetings are expensive, even if they are for short periods. A simple email should be typically sufficient for information that is common to all team members. I’ve almost never attended a 10 minute meeting with more than 2 people. They are always longer, especially if they are fun.
    • dustinmoris 5y ago
      > Instead it's there to get everyone on the same page. How do you get everyone on the same page if you cannot ask questions? This whole standup theatre is complete bullshit. It's true it's a waste of time. You say it's only meant to be a quick "status update" 10 minute meeting. What is the point of that if then asking questions is not allowed? If it is allowed then it's true though that for the majority of listeners it becomes a time sink. The best performing teams I've worked on had no standups. They talked to each other when there was something to talk about and they only talked to the folks who were genuinely interested in the conversation.
• olalonde 5y ago
  I remember reading almost the exact same post around 15 years ago. Back then, the boogyman was outsourcing to India rather than code bootcamps. I am not saying programmer salaries will never go down but my feeling is that demand will keep outpacing supply for a while. Software is eating the world after all.
• thenerdhead 5y ago
  Although there’s a constant supply, there’s still an exponential demand. Programming has already created two classes of developers for many years. Those blue collar type programmers who translate requirements into code. And those white collar type engineers who design & gather requirements into concepts. I think the big divide here has always been for the latter, but companies still need the former to train & skill up to the latter. I don’t see this trend slowing down for the next 20-30 years. Hell, even by 2025 there will be a deficient of over 150 million. I don’t think we can train nor repopulate fast enough for that demand which will only increase each year in addition. Times will be great for knowledge work jobs in the tech industry. Not just programming. Programming experience will only become more required for non-coding jobs. Especially any people management or leadership type role. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/06/30/microsoft-launches-initiative-to-help-25-million-people-worldwide-acquire-the-digital-skills-needed-in-a-covid-19-economy/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/06/30/microsoft-launch...
• lionkor 5y ago
  I think it ends with everyone being a programmer of some kind, and with the field splitting into more distinct fields. Like comp sci split from math, and with all the specialisations we see already, it has to go that way. You dont just study to be an engineer or a scientist anymore, you become a "microbiologist" or a "structural engineer", and a similar thing will happen to CS + IT. Already, around the second or third year of university (if not earlier), someone interested in web dev will have a vastly different skillset than somebody interested in embedded. Someone interested in dev ops may have no clue about how to organize your stack when writing x64 assembly, and some software forensics person may not be able to tell the difference between React and Angular.js. Already you dont hire a "programmer", you hire a "frontend engineer" or "embedded C programmer" etc. I believe Low- and No-code solutions will continue to be added to any software it can be, making more "regular" people from other jobs aware of what conditions, loops and variables are. They may not ever become programmers the way we know it now, but they will be (and already are) programming their machines.
• goodlinks 5y ago
  *flippant comment warning... three things coming together: 1.things like sharepoint and powerapps getting better 2.more exposure to programming/abstractions/scripting in the general populous 3.widespead documentation / agreement of standard business processes (maybe in the form of templates for number 1) underlying all of this is when people wake up to the fact that data and process matters, software doesnt. there will still be developer jobs but they will look more like how infra jobs look under cloud computing - higher skilled, harder, bigger implications when you mess up. There is value in a few amazing coders out there but IMHO most developers add most value by getting to know how to abstract thier particular customers business. EDIT:formatting
• sam_lowry_ 5y ago
  Programmers enable a lot of bullshit jobs indirectly. And it's easy to write software that serves no purpose whatsoever without everyone noticing. The most famous business failures were hardware or offline companies like Juicero, WeWork or Theranos. Software companies tend to survive, grow and "produce". The end of great times for programmers will be the end of bullshit jobs for everyone else, and that crisis will be much bigger.
• questiondev 5y ago
  i am a programmer but don’t get paid for it yet. hopefully i can get out there before the crash (if any)
• Wildgoose 5y ago
  The article claims "Supply goes up" and "Every year we get more Computer science graduates." Except, that isn't true. The number of CS graduates as a proportion of all graduates is actually falling, while the need for programmers is steadily rising.
• morpheos137 5y ago
  When the easy money stops. Web/mobile tech is subject to vast over investment in the USA relative to the real economic value it creates.
• Damogran6 5y ago
  I’m coming to the uncomforable conclusion that we’re ALL doing a dance. Programmers make a product, Managers manage the people, HR protects the company, Legal protects HR, the Shareholders leverage the Executive Staff to make their profit margins. But in all of this, very little ACTUAL STUFF happens. (I say this as a security guy, who’s line on the balance sheet is ALWAYS in the cost column.) So much of what we do is bullshitgrinding that it doesn’t really pay to look at the whole thing too closely. So refactor for the 99th time, and review the 12th latest greatest web server or database connector or infrastructure as a service solution and try not to get too hung up on it…
  • verisimi 5y ago
    https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/ https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/
  • gureddio 5y ago
    Your final sentence nails the fact of our work (and by proxy, business investment) is short-lived. So many apps that I've contributed to in the business world end up getting tossed after a few years. It's often because of some change in the business - like some new manager wants to deliver some fancy project so they can put it on their CV. So long as this is going on, there will be a need for developers
  • 4gotunameagain 5y ago
    It's why it's called busyness ;)
  • deepsquirrelnet 5y ago
    On any given day, fewer than half of people with jobs really need to work. A lot of people attend their job and don't really do work -- not because they're lazy -- but because deep down they know it doesn't really matter. We (collectively) invent work to slow ourselves down, or create jobs that don't really need to exist. We know that people who want jobs need to have things to do, but maybe that there just isn't that much that needs doing. George Jetson pushed a single red button for a living. There's a certain truth behind why the show's creators gave him that. This has been the case at least long enough before the movie Office Space came out to have been well understood by then.
• BirAdam 5y ago
  It ends the same way it did the last time. A giant tech market crash, more market consolidation, and massive cultural change. At this point, things move so fast that operating systems are shipped with known bugs, security flaws, and half baked ideas. They are then patched via over-the-net updates. I think this will stop. People will go back to more traditional development paradigms out of necessity. They also won’t completely trash code bases that have been patched to the point of being reliable and somewhat secure just to make a new thing no one wanted. My only other prediction is that people will eventually be more conservative about picking tech stacks. They will want proven track records.
  • nigma1337 5y ago
    What/when was the last boom?
    • BirAdam 5y ago
      90s which ended in 2000/2001
  • gilbetron 5y ago
    > At this point, things move so fast that operating systems are shipped with known bugs, security flaws, and half baked ideas. Wait, you think that wasn't the case 10, 20, 30+ years ago? OS releases are far better now than they were pretty much ever.
• sbayeta 5y ago
  This will probably settle with many new small companies succeeding at software products. The interests align beatifully when the SWE are de owners of the business.
• pjmlp 5y ago
  With the prices going down thanks to the comoditization of offshoring, and everyone becomes another cog on the machine.
• berkes 5y ago
  Author overlooks three important things. First, with amount of software engineers doubling every ~5 years, there is mostly a shortage in software developers with experience. Someone has to teach. Someone has to steer, make decisions based on knowledge, someone has to design architectures, know what coupling matters, what patterns apply, what type of solutions will haunt you later on, etc. etc. etc. No junior can do these things, because the juniors lack the experience of failing several times or maintaining or replacing legacy over years. Secondly, software development is about so much more than writing code. In fact, I spend least of my time typing in code. If your job really is typing code that others told you exactly how to write, then yes, fear for your job. Not because of copilot or better IDEs but because what you do is easily automated away. If people doubt me, I urge them to look at their git-log over the last weeks. I daresay that most will hardly write/edit more than 100 lines of code a day. That's less than 5 lines per minute. Nearly all software development is about understanding the domain and applying software to solve problems in that domain. About researching what problems are most urgent and what solutions have which tradeoffs. Which patterns apply, how to decouple, where to draw lines, how to keep the software agile and maintainable over decades, and so on. Hell, even "where to put my code" is a hard problem that copilot and IDEs fail miserably at. Thirdly, the no-code movement is a forever-september thing. It has a niche, but that niche is not as big as the no-code salesmen would like you to believe. I've seen "lo-code" come and go for decades now. Every time it promised to take over all the software development only to carve out a niche and be very good only there. More practially: most such no/lo-code systems lack a lot of essential paradigms (source-control, accountability, copyability, testability). But they are either far too generic and therefore just as complex and hard to manage as "real software", or they have a specific niche and shine there! (but only there). So no. Software engineers, especially those that have been in the trade for years (even more when decades) are in high demand and will remain so. Tools won't replace them. If anything, tools (which are build and maintained by those developers) only increase the demand.
  • 88913527 5y ago
    If a low code tool can overcome the inner platform effect, then they'd win. But if you want all the paradigms like version control and what not, then code is the best tool for a representation that interop's with the rest of your non-functional requirements. Maybe we need to embrace coding a little more. Not the people in this forum, but the people trying to show us some sort of better "no code" way.
• hamilyon2 5y ago
  If a company is doing something remotely cutting-edge, no amount of low-code tools and low-skilled labour is going to help. Information retrieval, PB-scale data processing, robotics, embedded, graphics and video at any significant scale are all still too cutting-edge and will be for next decade as far as I can see. You hit performance and architectural limits pretty quickly when doing things naïvely. At this rate, growth at tech sector is going to create more demand (than created supply) for able programmers for at least a few decades into future.
• rizkeyz 5y ago
  Every company that hires three junior developers today will need one senior developer in a year or two. It's great to be a developer today, even better, if you are a senior dev.
• blindmute 5y ago
  As far as I'm concerned, the ride stops when the masses realize how easy the profession actually is. You can take any office worker and train them to an entry level competency in 3-5 months, when they will get a job for at least $75k. They are then in a new career path and will soon make 100k. I find it impossible to convince non devs that being a developer is easy. They can't fathom why we get paid so much if it's easy. They think I must be lying, or lucky, or too smart. No! It's fucking easy! As soon as people catch on to this, and start doing bootcamps with the same frequency that they do weird "side hustles", it's over. The current scarcity is mainly because people don't realize they can become developers.
  • blaser-waffle 5y ago
    I don't know if I buy that. The better bootcamps now have a screening process -- I don't know if they'll just take any office worker. And the crappy ones just churn out schmucks who can't get hired. Statistics for boot camps are kept pretty tight, and a lot of the "we can get you a job!" claims only come true if/when the bootcamp hires you to teach after you graduate, thus allowing them to puff their numbers. Anecdote: I know 3 bootcamp grads, and only 1 of them is working as a coder. She had a BA from a good school in Econ before doing the BC, and is now a senior dev. The other two weren't technical or math-y, though at least one was able to turn the BC into a STEM Recruiter job since he had an HR background. The 3rd, a Sales guy trying to change careers, is, as of today, still not a coder; I think he's doing some sort of IT support, and could have gotten an A+ and Net+ and been as competitive for that gig -- at a fraction of the price of a bootcamp.
  • aor215 5y ago
    I used to think the same. I too find my job to be easy and sometimes feel like we have this secret in the software industry that our work really isn't all that difficult these days, with so many hard problems having already been solved. I say this as a senior SDE in big tech. But, after watching a close friend, who is brilliant—she had gone to a top 30 college undergrad and had top SAT scores—go to a coding bootcamp (the same one I went to) and fail to switch careers I started to think differently. For some reason, I find the work easy and interesting, but many others do not. I do agree that many more people are capable of becoming developers than choose to do so. But this fact may not be as interesting as it sounds. Many people just don't like coding. Many just don't want to spend their days writing code, even if it pays well. I don't mean to downplay irrational reasons why people choose not to pursue software. The industry still has a lot of negative stereotypes about what the work is actually like that prevent people from giving it a try, but, more and more, I've noticed that, even among people who know such stereotypes are false, many just don't want to do the job, even if they could.
• phkahler 5y ago
  >> I think this is the most likely scenario. Much of the demand for programmers right now stems more from expectations of future profits than from profits being currently made. This is certainly true for companies that sell software. Revenue comes from sales of software that already exists and developers are paid to create the next version. Software companies are in effect charging rent for something they have already developed that has zero production cost. SaaS takes this to the next level. Most of these companies are ripe for destruction by Free Software unless they provide something of exceptional value that is hard to replicate. To me the examples are things like Mathematica, or high end CAD or FEA software. PCB design has recently been conquered by KiCAD 6, though there are (apparently) some very high-end tools that have exotic capabilities still. Blender is really taking a shot at animation software, but there is still plenty of room for the high-end. Most software written today is not product software, but internal software to automate things, or otherwise make a business run. Until FLOSS takes over in this space there will always be a need for programmers simply because new companies are always being created that need automation.