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I wouldn't say that coders as an industry are destroying the road behind us, since there isn't really a road between "warehouse worker" and "software engineer",

I wouldn't say that coders as an industry are destroying the road behind us, since there isn't really a road between "warehouse worker" and "software engineer", unless someone has the knack for coding (in which case there's a very clear and well-paved road within the company between those roles) I think the best solution is to empower workers via unions or whatever else. It should be impossible for workers to get ground into dust by companies the way they do now.

grapeskin 5y ago
Massive salaries for programmers won’t last forever. Most people here on HN are self-taught; it’s a skill a large number of motivated people can pick up. Eventually, large corporations will feel comfortable lowering wages once they have a secure grip on the market, and the tools programmers today made will be used against the next generation. It’s no different from millennials resenting boomers for burning economic bridges behind them with outsourcing and so on just to save a few dollars on costs and pull in higher wages for themselves.
- WYepQ4dNnG 5y ago
  and that's why smart sw eng should start transitioning into management...
  - LoveGracePeace 5y ago
    Forget that, approaching 60, still code every day. Management is for those who have management skills and want to do it. Coding is for the rest of us who want it. Saw how strong software would be as a kid in the 1970's and realized it was an industry whose dynamics were unlike any other industry, ever.
    - robertlagrant 5y ago
      I think it's one of the first industries, if not the first, that has the perfect combination of scalable output from workers, workers being potentially smarter than their bosses, and success being much less about relationships than skills, compared to many other industries.
    - WYepQ4dNnG 5y ago
      Unfortunately brilliant software engineers are often managed by, what Steve Jobs called "bozos". That's why eng need to step up and do what they would never otherwise do and start managing. Otherwise bozos will keep gain power and being in control. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JVJdKnbZu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JVJdKnbZu8
      - LoveGracePeace 5y ago
        Wow. Never liked Jobs but never saw that video either. I couldn't stop shaking my head yes slowly.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  > and the tools programmers today made will be used against the next generation You're making me like C all over again.
- chii 5y ago
  > feel comfortable lowering wages once they have a secure grip on the market unless amazon is a monopoly employer, this isn't gonna happen. Or they can collude with other employers to lower wages (or indirectly, like no-poaching policy, or do what google+apple did with their wage collusion). And if programming is valuable, why wouldn't these "low paid" programmers quit and take their skills elsewhere, including starting their own business selling their output?
  - grapeskin 5y ago
    > Or they can collude with other employers to lower wages (or indirectly, like no-poaching policy, or do what google+apple did with their wage collusion). You already provided a real world example of them doing it. So it does happen. And most big companies are now in a phase of buying up disruptive tech companies and extinguishing any competition. That's only going to expand going further. The automotive industry in the US killed public transport to secure their market, they shipped their factories off to other countries, and they still steal subsidies from tax payers. Tech companies are going to happily follow that path.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      > And most big companies are now in a phase of buying up disruptive tech companies and extinguishing any competition Now? I'm old and have heard that constantly my entire life. It still hasn't happened. > The automotive industry in the US killed public transport to secure their market I live in Seattle. The local politicians managed to do that all by themselves. For example, there once was a car tunnel under the city. The city decided to build another tunnel. What to do with the dug out material, what to do ... I know! let's pack it into the existing tunnel! We spend billions and wind up where we started! (The rationale was the old tunnel was, well, getting old. Nobody was able to explain why boring a new tunnel was cheaper than shoring up the old one.)
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    > unless amazon is a monopoly employer, this isn't gonna happen It's already happening. Various FAANGs have been found red handed signing anti-poaching agreements to lower salaries.
- matthias509 5y ago
  High salaries for tech workers are not a new phenomenon. So if programming were truly a skill a large number of people could just “pick up”, it would have happened already.
  - josephg 5y ago
    Yep. Programming is really hard. The idea that anyone can "learn to code" is a work of fiction. Nobody says that anyone can learn to do surgery, become a fighter pilot or become a barrister. I couldn't do those jobs. And lots of people couldn't do my job. Telling people that effort is the only thing stopping them getting a 6 figure software engineering salary does real harm. Its notable that most people who say this aren't themselves programmers. Its even true amongst programmers. I've struggled to learn modern deep learning. And lots of people here on HN struggle with "leetcode problems" - which is the exact sort of work I can't get enough of. We aren't made the same. Software has been a highly in-demand skill for the last 2 decades, and I bet it'll stay that way for at least the rest of my life. Well, at least until AI gets good enough.
    - deltaonefour 5y ago
      Disagree. Not only can anyone program. But anyone can do surgery, become a fighter pilot and become a barrister. It's the same thing as how anyone can learn mathematics, algebra, biology and any of the typical subjects you learn at school. You struggle with deep learning only because it's a paradigm shift. It's too different from traditional programming so the initial learning curve makes it seem like you're incapable. Given enough time anyone can surpass the hump and become good at deep learning. That is not to say that these skills are trivial. There must be a lot of training time to achieve these skills. But make no mistake... anyone can do it.
      - lostlogin 5y ago
        > But make no mistake... anyone can do it. We have all seen the professionals in action… There may be more people who can do it than one would instinctively think, but it doesn’t take long on a helpdesk or in any public facing role to conclude that many humans are maxed out with tasks that really aren’t that hard.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  Unpopular opinion but you need a certain IQ in order to be able to program effectively. A large portion of the population is not capable of reasoning at the level required to develop. I've organised bootcamps and learning spaces for wannabe developers and there are tons of people which can't get their head around programming. I'm not talking about being able to do algorithms challenge. I'm talking about simple function calling, stacks, for loops, etc That said, I've interviewed several senior programmers with a career who can't program and managed to coast in companies which are not capable or willing to test performances. So the number of "programmers" may increase, given the salaries we can command, but the amount of developers in FANGs or companies that are capable to deliver something effectively won't increase dramatically. FANGs are leaving a lot of good developers on the table with their ridiculous leetcode policies, but the population of effective developers is not as large as you think.
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    I see I.Q. in this thread and think that is a red herring. It's deeper than that: there are a large percentage of people that do not want to code. It would be as artless and soulless to them as perhaps we think pounding nails into boards all day would be. But to plenty of people "an honest day's work" consists of doing with your muscles, your labor — having accomplished something "physical" at the end of the day.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  > Most people here on HN are self-taught; it’s a skill a large number of motivated people can pick up. 1) Self-taught isn't that relevant - where you learn something isn't the most important thing 2) There IS a large ability component to software, as well as education and motivation 3) With the exception that we're in a funny moment where web frontend is simultaneously easy and hard; the concepts are easy, but the proliferation of frameworks and ways of doing things makes skills scarce (though relatively easy to pick up). Once this is resolved, the numbers will drop, as current frameworks will replaced (or enhanced) with something more productive, but harder to use Prognostication over!
- krageon 5y ago
  > it’s a skill a large number of motivated people can pick up. Most people are not very smart (comparatively), but that is what these types of jobs are looking for.
- taylorius 5y ago
  "it’s a skill a large number of motivated people can pick up." Define "large number". You can have millions of programmers and it still be a small fraction of the population at large. Sorry to say it, but a lot of people are never going to become coders - it's our own AI systems that will bring coders down to earth, not the public at large suddenly learning to code.
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  Massive salaries will exist so long as there are 10x and 100x workers and throwing more bodies at a bottleneck scales horribly. Given the normal curve holds for skill distributions companies who look for bulk cheap unicorns will always be disappointed. Remember all of those failed multimillion dollar coding contracts? They were from factory style management trying to apply it to coding. Reality slapped the fools upside the head enough times via absolute fiascos. Even if we take conspiratorial economics as a given we already know how this will end. History indicates their hubris will bring themselves only ruin, just like the legacy rust belt manufacturers. Also how the hell will programming tools used by programmers be used against them? That is a shallow appeal to horror. Even if machine learning became good enough to automate the low end of the programming market that would only raise their salaries even higher. It is not an easy machine learning problem to solve at all. Esoteric, obscure, and highly complex skills which can make businesses have never come cheaply.
avs733 5y ago
>I wouldn't say that coders as an industry are destroying the road behind us What worries me more than it happening is how many seem to either be blind or proud that they are.
sefrost 5y ago
> I wouldn't say that coders as an industry are destroying the road behind us I agree, in fact I would argue the total opposite. Has any industry/skill group in history put so much effort in to getting more people involved than the software industry has?
- ojbyrne 5y ago
  I’m not sure it supports the point you’re rebutting, but my immediate thought was the military. The draft, shooting deserters, press-gangs, etc.
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    Hah possibly a different definition of "getting involved" than intended! Upvoted.
- ohgodplsno 5y ago
  Miserable attempts at getting a bunch of POC to participate in a majorly male dominated industry to get a sign-on bonus is barely effort. The very fact that unionization is a bad word in much of the software industry is proof of how selfish most of us are.
kennywinker 5y ago
A really great way to be able to quit your job and take a coding bootcamp is to make enough money that you’re not living paycheck to paycheck and can survive for a few months while you retrain. Poverty restricts your options and keeps you in survival mode. But the overall point is that unions rely on solidarity, and any coder adding filters to an amazon chat app or whatever dystopian crap amazon is pulling next is displaying a massive lack of solidarity with their fellow humans
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sokoloff 5y ago
  If I was a junior dev who got such a ticket, I can see myself implementing it all the while laughing at the utter ridiculous pointlessness of it. I can also see the ticket being written with examples of “disallow a dictionary of forbidden words”, with a sample dictionary of [“motherfucker”, “slut”, <list of racial epithets>] and then the dictionary function being used later to include “union” etc. If I got a ticket to block the dictionary containing MF and racial epithets, I’d also think it was pointless, would point out it was easily able to be evaded, but would implement it and implementing it would not be obviously evil or showing a lack of solidarity.
  - kennywinker 5y ago
    It’s not just jr devs that should be acting in solidarity with warehouse workers. Their team leads, IT, project managers, etc. I don’t care how much amazon stock you’re getting as part of your comp, until the capital gains on your stock outpaces your salary you’re closer to a warehouse worker than you are to an owner - and your allegiances should be with your coworkers, not jeff. So yeah, this specific case might have flown under the radar - and got implemented unwittingly - but unless a top level exec got in there and edited the dictionary file themselves, there was opportunities in this being implemented to show solidarity and throw some clogs into the machinery
    - sokoloff 5y ago
hef19898 5y ago
Everything at Amazon is a road between software engineers and warehouse workers, because everything SEs at Amazon (with the exception of AWS) are doing is serving its eCommerce business. And that eCommerce business is riding on the back of warehouse workers.
- zeepzeep 5y ago
  It's weird how the hard working people that don't like their job get paid close to nothing and the software people enjoying their jobs get rich. I'm lucky that I could turn my hobby into a well paying profession, but it's kinda weird...
  - saeranv 5y ago
    One of the more compelling framings for democratic socialism to me, is the idea of taking profits from companies and using it to radically raise wages of people with "undesirable" jobs: janitors, garbage-men, warehouse workers. There's no market pressure to do so (not without unions!) but can be regulated.
    - zeepzeep 5y ago
      universal basic income addresses this problem too, but differently and with less paperwork
taylorius 5y ago
Coders may not destroy the road behind us (the software highway) - but much of our effort is spent destroying the roads other people are on. This is called progress, of course - but Amazon's dismal warehouses are 100% a side effect of the extreme efficiency gains we enable and champion.
ericd 5y ago
Better than unions would just be increasing labor scarcity at the low end of skills. Protectionism in the form of a carbon tax with border adjustment would help quite a bit, I think.
- jamincan 5y ago
  If my country (Canada) is anything to go by, instead of allowing market forces to increase low wages, they just change the rules to temporarily import workers instead. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-ottawa-loosens-restrictions-on-temporary-foreign-workers/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-ottawa-loos...
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  Artificial scarcity is a terrible way to generate wealth, and a carbon tax would disappoint given economies of scale in shipping are because per kilogram they are overwhelmingly efficient.

grapeskin 5y ago

Massive salaries for programmers won’t last forever. Most people here on HN are self-taught; it’s a skill a large number of motivated people can pick up. Eventually, large corporations will feel comfortable lowering wages once they have a secure grip on the market, and the tools programmers today made will be used against the next generation. It’s no different from millennials resenting boomers for burning economic bridges behind them with outsourcing and so on just to save a few dollars on costs and pull in higher wages for themselves.

WYepQ4dNnG 5y ago
and that's why smart sw eng should start transitioning into management...
- LoveGracePeace 5y ago
  Forget that, approaching 60, still code every day. Management is for those who have management skills and want to do it. Coding is for the rest of us who want it. Saw how strong software would be as a kid in the 1970's and realized it was an industry whose dynamics were unlike any other industry, ever.
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    I think it's one of the first industries, if not the first, that has the perfect combination of scalable output from workers, workers being potentially smarter than their bosses, and success being much less about relationships than skills, compared to many other industries.
  - WYepQ4dNnG 5y ago
    Unfortunately brilliant software engineers are often managed by, what Steve Jobs called "bozos". That's why eng need to step up and do what they would never otherwise do and start managing. Otherwise bozos will keep gain power and being in control. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JVJdKnbZu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JVJdKnbZu8
    - LoveGracePeace 5y ago
      Wow. Never liked Jobs but never saw that video either. I couldn't stop shaking my head yes slowly.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
> and the tools programmers today made will be used against the next generation You're making me like C all over again.
chii 5y ago
> feel comfortable lowering wages once they have a secure grip on the market unless amazon is a monopoly employer, this isn't gonna happen. Or they can collude with other employers to lower wages (or indirectly, like no-poaching policy, or do what google+apple did with their wage collusion). And if programming is valuable, why wouldn't these "low paid" programmers quit and take their skills elsewhere, including starting their own business selling their output?
- grapeskin 5y ago
  > Or they can collude with other employers to lower wages (or indirectly, like no-poaching policy, or do what google+apple did with their wage collusion). You already provided a real world example of them doing it. So it does happen. And most big companies are now in a phase of buying up disruptive tech companies and extinguishing any competition. That's only going to expand going further. The automotive industry in the US killed public transport to secure their market, they shipped their factories off to other countries, and they still steal subsidies from tax payers. Tech companies are going to happily follow that path.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    > And most big companies are now in a phase of buying up disruptive tech companies and extinguishing any competition Now? I'm old and have heard that constantly my entire life. It still hasn't happened. > The automotive industry in the US killed public transport to secure their market I live in Seattle. The local politicians managed to do that all by themselves. For example, there once was a car tunnel under the city. The city decided to build another tunnel. What to do with the dug out material, what to do ... I know! let's pack it into the existing tunnel! We spend billions and wind up where we started! (The rationale was the old tunnel was, well, getting old. Nobody was able to explain why boring a new tunnel was cheaper than shoring up the old one.)
- goodpoint 5y ago
  > unless amazon is a monopoly employer, this isn't gonna happen It's already happening. Various FAANGs have been found red handed signing anti-poaching agreements to lower salaries.
matthias509 5y ago
High salaries for tech workers are not a new phenomenon. So if programming were truly a skill a large number of people could just “pick up”, it would have happened already.
- josephg 5y ago
  Yep. Programming is really hard. The idea that anyone can "learn to code" is a work of fiction. Nobody says that anyone can learn to do surgery, become a fighter pilot or become a barrister. I couldn't do those jobs. And lots of people couldn't do my job. Telling people that effort is the only thing stopping them getting a 6 figure software engineering salary does real harm. Its notable that most people who say this aren't themselves programmers. Its even true amongst programmers. I've struggled to learn modern deep learning. And lots of people here on HN struggle with "leetcode problems" - which is the exact sort of work I can't get enough of. We aren't made the same. Software has been a highly in-demand skill for the last 2 decades, and I bet it'll stay that way for at least the rest of my life. Well, at least until AI gets good enough.
  - deltaonefour 5y ago
    Disagree. Not only can anyone program. But anyone can do surgery, become a fighter pilot and become a barrister. It's the same thing as how anyone can learn mathematics, algebra, biology and any of the typical subjects you learn at school. You struggle with deep learning only because it's a paradigm shift. It's too different from traditional programming so the initial learning curve makes it seem like you're incapable. Given enough time anyone can surpass the hump and become good at deep learning. That is not to say that these skills are trivial. There must be a lot of training time to achieve these skills. But make no mistake... anyone can do it.
    - lostlogin 5y ago
      > But make no mistake... anyone can do it. We have all seen the professionals in action… There may be more people who can do it than one would instinctively think, but it doesn’t take long on a helpdesk or in any public facing role to conclude that many humans are maxed out with tasks that really aren’t that hard.
jokethrowaway 5y ago
Unpopular opinion but you need a certain IQ in order to be able to program effectively. A large portion of the population is not capable of reasoning at the level required to develop. I've organised bootcamps and learning spaces for wannabe developers and there are tons of people which can't get their head around programming. I'm not talking about being able to do algorithms challenge. I'm talking about simple function calling, stacks, for loops, etc That said, I've interviewed several senior programmers with a career who can't program and managed to coast in companies which are not capable or willing to test performances. So the number of "programmers" may increase, given the salaries we can command, but the amount of developers in FANGs or companies that are capable to deliver something effectively won't increase dramatically. FANGs are leaving a lot of good developers on the table with their ridiculous leetcode policies, but the population of effective developers is not as large as you think.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  I see I.Q. in this thread and think that is a red herring. It's deeper than that: there are a large percentage of people that do not want to code. It would be as artless and soulless to them as perhaps we think pounding nails into boards all day would be. But to plenty of people "an honest day's work" consists of doing with your muscles, your labor — having accomplished something "physical" at the end of the day.
robertlagrant 5y ago
> Most people here on HN are self-taught; it’s a skill a large number of motivated people can pick up. 1) Self-taught isn't that relevant - where you learn something isn't the most important thing 2) There IS a large ability component to software, as well as education and motivation 3) With the exception that we're in a funny moment where web frontend is simultaneously easy and hard; the concepts are easy, but the proliferation of frameworks and ways of doing things makes skills scarce (though relatively easy to pick up). Once this is resolved, the numbers will drop, as current frameworks will replaced (or enhanced) with something more productive, but harder to use Prognostication over!
krageon 5y ago
> it’s a skill a large number of motivated people can pick up. Most people are not very smart (comparatively), but that is what these types of jobs are looking for.
taylorius 5y ago
"it’s a skill a large number of motivated people can pick up." Define "large number". You can have millions of programmers and it still be a small fraction of the population at large. Sorry to say it, but a lot of people are never going to become coders - it's our own AI systems that will bring coders down to earth, not the public at large suddenly learning to code.
Nasrudith 5y ago
Massive salaries will exist so long as there are 10x and 100x workers and throwing more bodies at a bottleneck scales horribly. Given the normal curve holds for skill distributions companies who look for bulk cheap unicorns will always be disappointed. Remember all of those failed multimillion dollar coding contracts? They were from factory style management trying to apply it to coding. Reality slapped the fools upside the head enough times via absolute fiascos. Even if we take conspiratorial economics as a given we already know how this will end. History indicates their hubris will bring themselves only ruin, just like the legacy rust belt manufacturers. Also how the hell will programming tools used by programmers be used against them? That is a shallow appeal to horror. Even if machine learning became good enough to automate the low end of the programming market that would only raise their salaries even higher. It is not an easy machine learning problem to solve at all. Esoteric, obscure, and highly complex skills which can make businesses have never come cheaply.

avs733 5y ago

>I wouldn't say that coders as an industry are destroying the road behind us What worries me more than it happening is how many seem to either be blind or proud that they are.

sefrost 5y ago

> I wouldn't say that coders as an industry are destroying the road behind us I agree, in fact I would argue the total opposite. Has any industry/skill group in history put so much effort in to getting more people involved than the software industry has?

ojbyrne 5y ago
I’m not sure it supports the point you’re rebutting, but my immediate thought was the military. The draft, shooting deserters, press-gangs, etc.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  Hah possibly a different definition of "getting involved" than intended! Upvoted.
ohgodplsno 5y ago
Miserable attempts at getting a bunch of POC to participate in a majorly male dominated industry to get a sign-on bonus is barely effort. The very fact that unionization is a bad word in much of the software industry is proof of how selfish most of us are.

kennywinker 5y ago

A really great way to be able to quit your job and take a coding bootcamp is to make enough money that you’re not living paycheck to paycheck and can survive for a few months while you retrain. Poverty restricts your options and keeps you in survival mode. But the overall point is that unions rely on solidarity, and any coder adding filters to an amazon chat app or whatever dystopian crap amazon is pulling next is displaying a massive lack of solidarity with their fellow humans

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sokoloff 5y ago
If I was a junior dev who got such a ticket, I can see myself implementing it all the while laughing at the utter ridiculous pointlessness of it. I can also see the ticket being written with examples of “disallow a dictionary of forbidden words”, with a sample dictionary of [“motherfucker”, “slut”, <list of racial epithets>] and then the dictionary function being used later to include “union” etc. If I got a ticket to block the dictionary containing MF and racial epithets, I’d also think it was pointless, would point out it was easily able to be evaded, but would implement it and implementing it would not be obviously evil or showing a lack of solidarity.
- kennywinker 5y ago
  It’s not just jr devs that should be acting in solidarity with warehouse workers. Their team leads, IT, project managers, etc. I don’t care how much amazon stock you’re getting as part of your comp, until the capital gains on your stock outpaces your salary you’re closer to a warehouse worker than you are to an owner - and your allegiances should be with your coworkers, not jeff. So yeah, this specific case might have flown under the radar - and got implemented unwittingly - but unless a top level exec got in there and edited the dictionary file themselves, there was opportunities in this being implemented to show solidarity and throw some clogs into the machinery
  - sokoloff 5y ago

hef19898 5y ago

Everything at Amazon is a road between software engineers and warehouse workers, because everything SEs at Amazon (with the exception of AWS) are doing is serving its eCommerce business. And that eCommerce business is riding on the back of warehouse workers.

zeepzeep 5y ago
It's weird how the hard working people that don't like their job get paid close to nothing and the software people enjoying their jobs get rich. I'm lucky that I could turn my hobby into a well paying profession, but it's kinda weird...
- saeranv 5y ago
  One of the more compelling framings for democratic socialism to me, is the idea of taking profits from companies and using it to radically raise wages of people with "undesirable" jobs: janitors, garbage-men, warehouse workers. There's no market pressure to do so (not without unions!) but can be regulated.
  - zeepzeep 5y ago
    universal basic income addresses this problem too, but differently and with less paperwork

taylorius 5y ago

Coders may not destroy the road behind us (the software highway) - but much of our effort is spent destroying the roads other people are on. This is called progress, of course - but Amazon's dismal warehouses are 100% a side effect of the extreme efficiency gains we enable and champion.

ericd 5y ago

Better than unions would just be increasing labor scarcity at the low end of skills. Protectionism in the form of a carbon tax with border adjustment would help quite a bit, I think.

jamincan 5y ago
If my country (Canada) is anything to go by, instead of allowing market forces to increase low wages, they just change the rules to temporarily import workers instead. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-ottawa-loosens-restrictions-on-temporary-foreign-workers/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-ottawa-loos...
Nasrudith 5y ago
Artificial scarcity is a terrible way to generate wealth, and a carbon tax would disappoint given economies of scale in shipping are because per kilogram they are overwhelmingly efficient.