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I think he’s right. The tech industry has been trying to commodify devs for a long time (COBOL, Java). But there’s a sort of essential quality that reasserts i

I think he’s right. The tech industry has been trying to commodify devs for a long time (COBOL, Java). But there’s a sort of essential quality that reasserts itself no matter what you abstract. Despite the seemingly simple requirements paired with high level frameworks, a lot of our software still doesn’t even work well. As the author notes. The only real fix is talented devs that care. You can make a career out of that.

steveBK123 3y ago
The problem is that beyond the boilerplate we aren't solving commodity problems most of the time. If you've worked in the same field long enough, you'll see that things certainly rhyme, but everyone has slightly different business requirements. At each level of the stack this grows, and so in total there's a ton of non-commodity, bespoke work to do. That's why no two products are exactly alike and we don't just have 1 giant all world megacorp producing everything.
- booleandilemma 3y ago
  The problem is that beyond the boilerplate we aren't solving commodity problems most of the time. The only people that see it is a problem are the ones that wish programmers were commoditized. Your complexity is my salary.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    That complexity is how companies typically differentiate their product, generally purposely to keep it from interoperability with other software so their entire business is not commodified. Just look at the IOT space to see this in play.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > Your complexity is my salary. Then your salary paid out of broken window fallacy. But that's fine. All the nice, humane things happen where the market optimized things a little bit, but not too much.
- mattgreenrocks 3y ago
  Yep! What the business really needs is something that will do whatever necessary to ensure stuff actually lands. The skills are important for sure, but the responsibility aspect can’t be offloaded to machines well. And even a lot of our boilerplate removal mechanisms (eg frameworks) are not very good either. They’re just slightly less worse than before.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Yes, or better to see these products as time to market reducers. There's plenty of times I have the option of writing my own code or using some good-enough framework that gets me started, and then add my own customizations over time.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  Unless you're SAP, you always need to customise whatever you build for every customer. You can have reusable components, but a full one size fits all solution is really hard.
  - wombatpm 3y ago
    Is there a business that has implemented SAP without customization? My experience has been the opposite and that vanilla SAP is usually stupid and wrong.
    - theshrike79 3y ago
      The #1 rule of taking SAP into use in your organisation (according to multiple actual SAP Consultants I've chatted with) is: your organisation must switch its processes to fit the SAP model, not the other way around. You _can_ customise SAP to fit your way, but it'll be an uphill battle all the way. Every update will also need to be customised, every new feature has to be modified and eventually it'll fail and you'll be out tens or hundreds of millions. You can look up any of the big SAP failures and that's the reason for every one of them.
- lr4444lr 3y ago
  And that software purchasers demand changes. I would imagine we are not far from an AI being able to take over pure Waterfall development methodology. But successful businesses aren't static, nor are their software needs. Once the AI decides on a data layer and you ask it to iterate on the code that interacts with it to meet new use cases and add features, god help you.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    The hardest part is not implementing the specifications as described (maybe AI will do this soon, doubt). The hardest part is taking various competing requests in plain English (often in their second language) from non-technical people, having an interactive conversation to tease out actual needs, and converting that into a specification (if even only in your head) to then implement. When we have an AI that can understand French Quants, let me know.
kelseyfrog 3y ago
Devs even try to commodify devs! I cannot count the number of times that developers have gotten outright giddy when an opportunity for self-commodification comes up usually under the guise of self-taylorization. > I would adore it if the doctors and nurses in my life didn't constantly lament the stream of indignities that their single-neuron administrators heap upon them with each new proprietary system. It's funny - the medical industry is precisely the counter-example I use when the auto-commodification discussion arises. There's two emotional appeals it makes. Patients hate it when they have to bounce from doctor to doctor. They understand that commodification comes with some degree of increased specialization[1] and that each hand-off represents an additional failure point[2]. The second appeal is simply one of status and being able to fashion one's work style in a more high-status form. I lead with the first, and let the second read as subtext and it usually works. Workers tend to maintain more generalization and rely on each other for consults rather than handoffs. 1. assembly lines are sequenced specializations 2. See handoff errors w.r.t. medical resident work hours
- davidgerard 3y ago
  > I cannot count the number of times that developers have gotten outright giddy when an opportunity for self-commodification comes up usually under the guise of self-taylorization. I dunno. I'm a sysadmin, and my job is arguably to replace myself with a small shell script. Somehow I've been at this twenty-odd years and there's still more work than people.
  - kelseyfrog 3y ago
    There's a lot of ways to take this, but just to clarify, you mean automating your work, not your self, right?
- ludicity 3y ago
  Author here. I have some famous-ish (within medical circles) family members, and it's interesting. On one hand, they have a lot of leeway and status, and at least the hotshots in my family are clearly treated as the medical equivalent of professional athletes, with a real craftperson's mindset. On the other hand, I was actually talking about the EMR systems, etc, which are repeatedly purchased at exorbitant prices by vendors that churn out nearly useless products, and insist the staff spend ages doing data entry. I have some pretty horrendous stories in this space, which is why it's my go-to example in most of my posts.

steveBK123 3y ago

The problem is that beyond the boilerplate we aren't solving commodity problems most of the time. If you've worked in the same field long enough, you'll see that things certainly rhyme, but everyone has slightly different business requirements. At each level of the stack this grows, and so in total there's a ton of non-commodity, bespoke work to do. That's why no two products are exactly alike and we don't just have 1 giant all world megacorp producing everything.

booleandilemma 3y ago
The problem is that beyond the boilerplate we aren't solving commodity problems most of the time. The only people that see it is a problem are the ones that wish programmers were commoditized. Your complexity is my salary.
- pixl97 3y ago
  That complexity is how companies typically differentiate their product, generally purposely to keep it from interoperability with other software so their entire business is not commodified. Just look at the IOT space to see this in play.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > Your complexity is my salary. Then your salary paid out of broken window fallacy. But that's fine. All the nice, humane things happen where the market optimized things a little bit, but not too much.
mattgreenrocks 3y ago
Yep! What the business really needs is something that will do whatever necessary to ensure stuff actually lands. The skills are important for sure, but the responsibility aspect can’t be offloaded to machines well. And even a lot of our boilerplate removal mechanisms (eg frameworks) are not very good either. They’re just slightly less worse than before.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Yes, or better to see these products as time to market reducers. There's plenty of times I have the option of writing my own code or using some good-enough framework that gets me started, and then add my own customizations over time.
theshrike79 3y ago
Unless you're SAP, you always need to customise whatever you build for every customer. You can have reusable components, but a full one size fits all solution is really hard.
- wombatpm 3y ago
  Is there a business that has implemented SAP without customization? My experience has been the opposite and that vanilla SAP is usually stupid and wrong.
  - theshrike79 3y ago
    The #1 rule of taking SAP into use in your organisation (according to multiple actual SAP Consultants I've chatted with) is: your organisation must switch its processes to fit the SAP model, not the other way around. You _can_ customise SAP to fit your way, but it'll be an uphill battle all the way. Every update will also need to be customised, every new feature has to be modified and eventually it'll fail and you'll be out tens or hundreds of millions. You can look up any of the big SAP failures and that's the reason for every one of them.
lr4444lr 3y ago
And that software purchasers demand changes. I would imagine we are not far from an AI being able to take over pure Waterfall development methodology. But successful businesses aren't static, nor are their software needs. Once the AI decides on a data layer and you ask it to iterate on the code that interacts with it to meet new use cases and add features, god help you.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  The hardest part is not implementing the specifications as described (maybe AI will do this soon, doubt). The hardest part is taking various competing requests in plain English (often in their second language) from non-technical people, having an interactive conversation to tease out actual needs, and converting that into a specification (if even only in your head) to then implement. When we have an AI that can understand French Quants, let me know.

kelseyfrog 3y ago

Devs even try to commodify devs! I cannot count the number of times that developers have gotten outright giddy when an opportunity for self-commodification comes up usually under the guise of self-taylorization. > I would adore it if the doctors and nurses in my life didn't constantly lament the stream of indignities that their single-neuron administrators heap upon them with each new proprietary system. It's funny - the medical industry is precisely the counter-example I use when the auto-commodification discussion arises. There's two emotional appeals it makes. Patients hate it when they have to bounce from doctor to doctor. They understand that commodification comes with some degree of increased specialization[1] and that each hand-off represents an additional failure point[2]. The second appeal is simply one of status and being able to fashion one's work style in a more high-status form. I lead with the first, and let the second read as subtext and it usually works. Workers tend to maintain more generalization and rely on each other for consults rather than handoffs. 1. assembly lines are sequenced specializations 2. See handoff errors w.r.t. medical resident work hours

davidgerard 3y ago
> I cannot count the number of times that developers have gotten outright giddy when an opportunity for self-commodification comes up usually under the guise of self-taylorization. I dunno. I'm a sysadmin, and my job is arguably to replace myself with a small shell script. Somehow I've been at this twenty-odd years and there's still more work than people.
- kelseyfrog 3y ago
  There's a lot of ways to take this, but just to clarify, you mean automating your work, not your self, right?
ludicity 3y ago
Author here. I have some famous-ish (within medical circles) family members, and it's interesting. On one hand, they have a lot of leeway and status, and at least the hotshots in my family are clearly treated as the medical equivalent of professional athletes, with a real craftperson's mindset. On the other hand, I was actually talking about the EMR systems, etc, which are repeatedly purchased at exorbitant prices by vendors that churn out nearly useless products, and insist the staff spend ages doing data entry. I have some pretty horrendous stories in this space, which is why it's my go-to example in most of my posts.