5 ms·

No, the field grew tremendously and you can see a clear generational bias -- by years of experience, not age -- where the cohort from the last 10-15 years has a

No, the field grew tremendously and you can see a clear generational bias -- by years of experience, not age -- where the cohort from the last 10-15 years has a completely different understanding of what the craft is [software engineering vs business development] and how to approach it [optimal solution vs soonest deliverable]. You can also trace personal backgrounds and you'll see a much higher representation in the newer cohort coming from upper middle class backgrounds with families in careers like finance, consulting, medicine/dentistry whereas more in the older cohort came from more modest middle class backgrounds in engineering, academia, or even working class trades. Of course, there were always some of all of these people in the industry, but the balance shifted dramatically during the last couple booms, tracking the atypically high compensation standards set by FAANG's since 2010 or so.

Swizec 2y ago
Speaking as an old school basement nerd (coding since middle school, 90’s): If I can do cool things with code _and_ get paid, I’m gonna go do that. Business constraints make it feel much more interesting than writing code in a vacuum. Also money is nice.
- Aeolun 2y ago
  > Business constraints make it feel much more interesting than writing code in a vacuum. You never write code in a vacuum do you? You always have some kind of goal.
  - nicoburns 2y ago
    I should hope not. Even if your body could withstand the low pressure, you'd suffocate very quickly.
  - Swizec 2y ago
    I don’t know dude, this one time I wrote a LOLCODE compiler into a Babel macro. https://swizec.com/blog/lolcodetojavascript-compiler-babel-macro/ https://swizec.com/blog/lolcodetojavascript-compiler-babel-m... It was pretty fun. Also this other time I wrote a nodejs script to keep my computer at a specific temperature because our office fridge kept freezing my carrots. https://swizec.com/blog/i-built-a-node-app-to-thaw-my-favorite-snack/ https://swizec.com/blog/i-built-a-node-app-to-thaw-my-favori...
    - godelski 2y ago
      > because our office fridge kept freezing my carrots. That sounds like a goal to me
    - ngneer 2y ago
      That's quite nice! You may wish to look into implementing a PID controller, so as to avoid overshoot (your carrots become too thawed initially) and unnecessary oscillation about the setpoint (meaning you are wasting energy on cooling and heating cycles that in the end cancel each other out, where you could have kept the temperature nearly constant during that time). I loved juicing carrots so much my face turned orange from the beta-carotene.
throwaway2037 2y ago
This post is so weird on so many levels. I'll focus on this part: > You can also trace personal backgrounds and you'll see a much higher representation in the newer cohort coming from upper middle class backgrounds with families in careers like finance, consulting, medicine/dentistry whereas more in the older cohort came from more modest middle class backgrounds in engineering, academia, or even working class trades. So, you reach for class warfare? Sheesh. It is anyone's fault that they are born into an upper middle class family? Are people from lower economic circumstances somehow superior, as you imply? This is just bizarre. As a reminder: Bill Gates, who is certainly old school tech, was born and raised in an objectively wealthy, well-connected family, then went to Harvard. This is nearly made-for-TV silver spoon stuff.
- error_logic 2y ago
  It is telling that you considered their post to be about class warfare rather than different values. The original focus of this thread was on technical precision vs. market efficiency, and how quality was sacrificed for faster conversion to sales. That shift compromises products for everyone by creating a race to the bottom toward the minimum viable product and safety standards. When the consequences eventually hit, the aggregate responsibility and emergent effects lose direct attribution...but they exist all the same.
- swatcoder 2y ago
  As the sibling comment noted, I think you might be projecting value judgment onto value distinction. The most salient values of the later cohort are different than those in the prior ones, and those values do track with the values we associate with those different class backgrounds. But there's no ranking being made there. They're just different values. The values of the new cohort have earned the industry a great deal of political, economic, and cultural influence on an international level. The values of the old cohort didn't do that, except insofar as they built a stage for the new one. They made software differently. They designed products differently. They operated businesses on different scales. They hired differently. Indeed some of us from the old cohort don't personally savor all the spotlight and influence and cultural drama that Silicon Valley collectively bears now, and miss the way thing were. And others love it. But that's just personal preference, not class warfare.
Aurornis 2y ago
> No, the field grew tremendously and you can see a clear generational bias -- by years of experience, not age -- where the cohort from the last 10-15 years has a completely different understanding of what the craft is I bet a lot of people 10-15 years older than you would say the same thing - except they'd say it about you and your generation. I'm not that old, but I've been around long enough to hear people of every age over about 30 claim that everything was better back in their day until the new generation came along and ruined it.
- lovich 2y ago
  > I bet a lot of people 10-15 years older than you would say the same thing - except they'd say it about you and your generation. And they’d probably be right! I remember the grognards giving me shit about memory management and me giving it right back by explaining that what they considered a large chunk of memory would be worth pennys next year because of Moore’s law and I wasn’t going to waste time considering something that I literally couldn’t learn faster than it became obsolete knowledge. Quantitative differences can create qualitative differences and I don’t think it’s surprising that we’re in a different age of software engineering than we were 10-15 years ago for any given X year
  - fsloth 2y ago
    As a fun anecdote I think this same rationale - ”next years hardware is so much better” - is why so many desktop softwares 90’s->00’s became slow - ”meh you don’t have to care about performance, next year’s cpu is going to be so much faster anyway”. Then suddenly single threaded speedups didn’t happen anymore (and people realized even though cpu speeds had grown, it was not directly related to Moore’s law). Ofc your rationale used Moore’s law correctly while the ”cpu infinite speed growth rah rah rah” peoples didn’t.
    - Dracophoenix 2y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law And more generally, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
black_13 2y ago
[dead]
asdff 2y ago
This is what happens anytime a field gets large in terms of job applications. Replace software engineer with anything else to that measure and you see the same things with wealthy families being overrepresented in the cohort because they always have an edge in getting the best credentials due to not having to work any part time jobs and having mom and dad (or even a paid advisor) actively working on your behalf to vet potential internships or other opportunities for you. You are essentially out numbered 3:1 or even 4:1 or more, and you can't work a full 1 part anyhow due to the aforementioned other obligations life has saddled on you.
- lovich 2y ago
  I completely agree. Software engineering is just the most recent field I can think of(unless you consider data science a distinct enough portion of software to carve off as a separate field) that has had this pattern occur. Well that and this is a forum for a lot of tech people which means a good number of software engineers here.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  I doubt that has anything to do with getting "large in terms of job applications" alone. It's a correlation, alright, because wealthy families have it easier to get high-status and high-paying jobs for their kids, and if such a field grows, wealthy people flock to it like everyone else. But I sincerely doubt you'll find the wealthy over-represented in physical labor / blue collar jobs, regardless of how the ups and downs in the labor market for those occupations. The way I see it, it's like 'swatcoder and 'lovich said upthread: the field became a money printer, and attracted - not revealed, attracted - a different kind of people, with a different mindset. I too saw this change happening. Applicant pool size? That's a spurious correlation - it's just driven by the same factors that make software industry a money printer.
  - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    > It's a correlation, alright, because wealthy families have it easier to get high-status and high-paying jobs for their kids You have just written down a partial solution to this dilemma: make these high-paying jobs less attractive in terms of status for these wealthy families. :-)
jghn 2y ago
You're not wrong but this is overly reductive. In other words this is more of a sliding scale and not a step function centered on 10-15 years ago. For instance I was a CS undergrad in the mid/late-90s. There was an enormous difference demographically between my incoming freshman class and the incoming freshman class by the time I graduated. And the talking points were exactly the same ones we see in this thread.

Swizec 2y ago

Speaking as an old school basement nerd (coding since middle school, 90’s): If I can do cool things with code _and_ get paid, I’m gonna go do that. Business constraints make it feel much more interesting than writing code in a vacuum. Also money is nice.

Aeolun 2y ago
> Business constraints make it feel much more interesting than writing code in a vacuum. You never write code in a vacuum do you? You always have some kind of goal.
- nicoburns 2y ago
  I should hope not. Even if your body could withstand the low pressure, you'd suffocate very quickly.
- Swizec 2y ago
  I don’t know dude, this one time I wrote a LOLCODE compiler into a Babel macro. https://swizec.com/blog/lolcodetojavascript-compiler-babel-macro/ https://swizec.com/blog/lolcodetojavascript-compiler-babel-m... It was pretty fun. Also this other time I wrote a nodejs script to keep my computer at a specific temperature because our office fridge kept freezing my carrots. https://swizec.com/blog/i-built-a-node-app-to-thaw-my-favorite-snack/ https://swizec.com/blog/i-built-a-node-app-to-thaw-my-favori...
  - godelski 2y ago
    > because our office fridge kept freezing my carrots. That sounds like a goal to me
  - ngneer 2y ago
    That's quite nice! You may wish to look into implementing a PID controller, so as to avoid overshoot (your carrots become too thawed initially) and unnecessary oscillation about the setpoint (meaning you are wasting energy on cooling and heating cycles that in the end cancel each other out, where you could have kept the temperature nearly constant during that time). I loved juicing carrots so much my face turned orange from the beta-carotene.

throwaway2037 2y ago

This post is so weird on so many levels. I'll focus on this part: > You can also trace personal backgrounds and you'll see a much higher representation in the newer cohort coming from upper middle class backgrounds with families in careers like finance, consulting, medicine/dentistry whereas more in the older cohort came from more modest middle class backgrounds in engineering, academia, or even working class trades. So, you reach for class warfare? Sheesh. It is anyone's fault that they are born into an upper middle class family? Are people from lower economic circumstances somehow superior, as you imply? This is just bizarre. As a reminder: Bill Gates, who is certainly old school tech, was born and raised in an objectively wealthy, well-connected family, then went to Harvard. This is nearly made-for-TV silver spoon stuff.

error_logic 2y ago
It is telling that you considered their post to be about class warfare rather than different values. The original focus of this thread was on technical precision vs. market efficiency, and how quality was sacrificed for faster conversion to sales. That shift compromises products for everyone by creating a race to the bottom toward the minimum viable product and safety standards. When the consequences eventually hit, the aggregate responsibility and emergent effects lose direct attribution...but they exist all the same.
swatcoder 2y ago
As the sibling comment noted, I think you might be projecting value judgment onto value distinction. The most salient values of the later cohort are different than those in the prior ones, and those values do track with the values we associate with those different class backgrounds. But there's no ranking being made there. They're just different values. The values of the new cohort have earned the industry a great deal of political, economic, and cultural influence on an international level. The values of the old cohort didn't do that, except insofar as they built a stage for the new one. They made software differently. They designed products differently. They operated businesses on different scales. They hired differently. Indeed some of us from the old cohort don't personally savor all the spotlight and influence and cultural drama that Silicon Valley collectively bears now, and miss the way thing were. And others love it. But that's just personal preference, not class warfare.

Aurornis 2y ago

> No, the field grew tremendously and you can see a clear generational bias -- by years of experience, not age -- where the cohort from the last 10-15 years has a completely different understanding of what the craft is I bet a lot of people 10-15 years older than you would say the same thing - except they'd say it about you and your generation. I'm not that old, but I've been around long enough to hear people of every age over about 30 claim that everything was better back in their day until the new generation came along and ruined it.

lovich 2y ago
> I bet a lot of people 10-15 years older than you would say the same thing - except they'd say it about you and your generation. And they’d probably be right! I remember the grognards giving me shit about memory management and me giving it right back by explaining that what they considered a large chunk of memory would be worth pennys next year because of Moore’s law and I wasn’t going to waste time considering something that I literally couldn’t learn faster than it became obsolete knowledge. Quantitative differences can create qualitative differences and I don’t think it’s surprising that we’re in a different age of software engineering than we were 10-15 years ago for any given X year
- fsloth 2y ago
  As a fun anecdote I think this same rationale - ”next years hardware is so much better” - is why so many desktop softwares 90’s->00’s became slow - ”meh you don’t have to care about performance, next year’s cpu is going to be so much faster anyway”. Then suddenly single threaded speedups didn’t happen anymore (and people realized even though cpu speeds had grown, it was not directly related to Moore’s law). Ofc your rationale used Moore’s law correctly while the ”cpu infinite speed growth rah rah rah” peoples didn’t.
  - Dracophoenix 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law And more generally, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

black_13 2y ago

[dead]

asdff 2y ago

This is what happens anytime a field gets large in terms of job applications. Replace software engineer with anything else to that measure and you see the same things with wealthy families being overrepresented in the cohort because they always have an edge in getting the best credentials due to not having to work any part time jobs and having mom and dad (or even a paid advisor) actively working on your behalf to vet potential internships or other opportunities for you. You are essentially out numbered 3:1 or even 4:1 or more, and you can't work a full 1 part anyhow due to the aforementioned other obligations life has saddled on you.

lovich 2y ago
I completely agree. Software engineering is just the most recent field I can think of(unless you consider data science a distinct enough portion of software to carve off as a separate field) that has had this pattern occur. Well that and this is a forum for a lot of tech people which means a good number of software engineers here.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
I doubt that has anything to do with getting "large in terms of job applications" alone. It's a correlation, alright, because wealthy families have it easier to get high-status and high-paying jobs for their kids, and if such a field grows, wealthy people flock to it like everyone else. But I sincerely doubt you'll find the wealthy over-represented in physical labor / blue collar jobs, regardless of how the ups and downs in the labor market for those occupations. The way I see it, it's like 'swatcoder and 'lovich said upthread: the field became a money printer, and attracted - not revealed, attracted - a different kind of people, with a different mindset. I too saw this change happening. Applicant pool size? That's a spurious correlation - it's just driven by the same factors that make software industry a money printer.
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > It's a correlation, alright, because wealthy families have it easier to get high-status and high-paying jobs for their kids You have just written down a partial solution to this dilemma: make these high-paying jobs less attractive in terms of status for these wealthy families. :-)

jghn 2y ago

You're not wrong but this is overly reductive. In other words this is more of a sliding scale and not a step function centered on 10-15 years ago. For instance I was a CS undergrad in the mid/late-90s. There was an enormous difference demographically between my incoming freshman class and the incoming freshman class by the time I graduated. And the talking points were exactly the same ones we see in this thread.