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It also caused the "Golden Age of Programming". It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort. So if their needs change, obviou

by zwnow 1y ago

It also caused the "Golden Age of Programming". It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort. So if their needs change, obviously the industry changes. This article has nothing to say really.

techpineapple 1y ago
Yeah, it says these aren’t a result of the economy, but they’re obviously the result of the economy? I think the difference is just that big tech has bigger boom/bust cycles than most other industries(at least for now) but I wonder if other world-changing industries; like rail were the same, lots of rail companies went under, probably causing a glut of unemployment for certain types of skilled labor. On the flip side couldn’t you say too many people bought into the hype and got a software engineering degree / code school without thinking through if this was really the career for them?
- zwnow 1y ago
  I remember a documentary on people that had no work a while back. It was filmed in a town where sailing boomed. Nowadays there are almost no sailors left, lots of them never learned a different job. And we still need sailors nowadays. Same with mining/miners. Booming industries will always die out eventually.
rkozik1989 1y ago
>It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort. Money is how you define a Golden Age of Programming? I consider the late 1990s and early 2000s more of a Golden Age, and my reasons for it have nothing to do with making money. The time was of Golden Age because that's when programming became more accessible to the masses. Yes it wasn't without its fault, namely with regards to cyber security, but people all of the world suddenly were able to learn how to code and all the needed was an Internet connection. Frankly, all this nonsense about money, total compensation, etc. is the cancer that killed programming.
- lokar 1y ago
  I remember when people paid (a lot of) money for a good compiler / tooling setup.
  - bsoles 1y ago
    I was genuinely excited as a 16 year old, poor kid when I first bought my Borland Turbo C suite/compiler. That was my golden age of programming.
- zwnow 1y ago
  I define golden age by how much I have to do to support my family. How much work there is and ultimately how much $/hr you are paid for it. Your interpretation is also very valid. The article complains about there not being available jobs though, so I went that route.
  - ecb_penguin 1y ago
    That would be a golden economic age. We're talking about the craft of programming. They're different things.
    - surgical_fire 1y ago
      If that's your metric, then the golden age never ended, and we are still in the upward trend. There were never as many tools, programming languages, IDEs, framework, services and tools available for programming. And with the advancement in technology, even a pretty old laptop is still powerful enough to run it all. You now even gave LLMs that are interesting (even if very flawed) code assistants. If anything, the golden age of programming is a tomorrow that is always postponed another day.
      - freedomben 1y ago
        That's true, but I think you need to account for the state of hardware and operating systems too. Unless you're on Linux, the hackability and control over your own computing environment has never been worse (aside from when those things weren't accessible at all). Yes I can build almost anything nowadays, but actually using it is a different story, even just for personal use (ask people with iPhones and increasingly Android about that).
deadbabe 1y ago
It’s not high salary for low effort. It’s high salary for highly leveraged effort: meaning that software engineers have maximized how to achieve big results by applying a small effort through chains of force multipliers. LLMs are now one of the latest tools in that chain. If you do not pay the high salaries, you will end up hiring people who don’t know how to build those chains or what effort to apply to begin the output.
hbn 1y ago
Yeah I'm trying to figure out what exactly the author thinks is the "Golden Age of Programming" if even he recognizes it was just a bunch of high salary workers getting nothing done. Shouldn't this have been written during that time? It sucks that a lot of people in tech got the impression we'd be endlessly hireable, able to hop between 6 figure jobs and raises for our entire career before early retirement. But it seems to me these layoffs are bringing big tech companies down to sizes closer to what they should have been in the first place. The real issue to me is the ever-worsening monopolization, and all the unchecked acquisitions of the past 15 years that kinda killed any hopes for competition. If that wasn't happening, there'd be a lot more jobs available. Maybe not at Google salaries, but at least there would be jobs.
- jaymzcampbell 1y ago
  > a lot of people in tech got the impression we'd be endlessly hireable, able to hop between 6 figure jobs and raises for our entire career before early retirement I've found people that fit this mould to be insufferable to work with
- wnc3141 1y ago
  Decreasing earning power with career progression, while quite possible, is sort of a huge violation of the social contract.

by zwnow 1y ago

techpineapple 1y ago

Yeah, it says these aren’t a result of the economy, but they’re obviously the result of the economy? I think the difference is just that big tech has bigger boom/bust cycles than most other industries(at least for now) but I wonder if other world-changing industries; like rail were the same, lots of rail companies went under, probably causing a glut of unemployment for certain types of skilled labor. On the flip side couldn’t you say too many people bought into the hype and got a software engineering degree / code school without thinking through if this was really the career for them?

zwnow 1y ago
I remember a documentary on people that had no work a while back. It was filmed in a town where sailing boomed. Nowadays there are almost no sailors left, lots of them never learned a different job. And we still need sailors nowadays. Same with mining/miners. Booming industries will always die out eventually.

rkozik1989 1y ago

>It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort. Money is how you define a Golden Age of Programming? I consider the late 1990s and early 2000s more of a Golden Age, and my reasons for it have nothing to do with making money. The time was of Golden Age because that's when programming became more accessible to the masses. Yes it wasn't without its fault, namely with regards to cyber security, but people all of the world suddenly were able to learn how to code and all the needed was an Internet connection. Frankly, all this nonsense about money, total compensation, etc. is the cancer that killed programming.

lokar 1y ago
I remember when people paid (a lot of) money for a good compiler / tooling setup.
- bsoles 1y ago
  I was genuinely excited as a 16 year old, poor kid when I first bought my Borland Turbo C suite/compiler. That was my golden age of programming.
zwnow 1y ago
I define golden age by how much I have to do to support my family. How much work there is and ultimately how much $/hr you are paid for it. Your interpretation is also very valid. The article complains about there not being available jobs though, so I went that route.
- ecb_penguin 1y ago
  That would be a golden economic age. We're talking about the craft of programming. They're different things.
  - surgical_fire 1y ago
    If that's your metric, then the golden age never ended, and we are still in the upward trend. There were never as many tools, programming languages, IDEs, framework, services and tools available for programming. And with the advancement in technology, even a pretty old laptop is still powerful enough to run it all. You now even gave LLMs that are interesting (even if very flawed) code assistants. If anything, the golden age of programming is a tomorrow that is always postponed another day.
    - freedomben 1y ago
      That's true, but I think you need to account for the state of hardware and operating systems too. Unless you're on Linux, the hackability and control over your own computing environment has never been worse (aside from when those things weren't accessible at all). Yes I can build almost anything nowadays, but actually using it is a different story, even just for personal use (ask people with iPhones and increasingly Android about that).

deadbabe 1y ago

It’s not high salary for low effort. It’s high salary for highly leveraged effort: meaning that software engineers have maximized how to achieve big results by applying a small effort through chains of force multipliers. LLMs are now one of the latest tools in that chain. If you do not pay the high salaries, you will end up hiring people who don’t know how to build those chains or what effort to apply to begin the output.

hbn 1y ago

Yeah I'm trying to figure out what exactly the author thinks is the "Golden Age of Programming" if even he recognizes it was just a bunch of high salary workers getting nothing done. Shouldn't this have been written during that time? It sucks that a lot of people in tech got the impression we'd be endlessly hireable, able to hop between 6 figure jobs and raises for our entire career before early retirement. But it seems to me these layoffs are bringing big tech companies down to sizes closer to what they should have been in the first place. The real issue to me is the ever-worsening monopolization, and all the unchecked acquisitions of the past 15 years that kinda killed any hopes for competition. If that wasn't happening, there'd be a lot more jobs available. Maybe not at Google salaries, but at least there would be jobs.

jaymzcampbell 1y ago
> a lot of people in tech got the impression we'd be endlessly hireable, able to hop between 6 figure jobs and raises for our entire career before early retirement I've found people that fit this mould to be insufferable to work with
wnc3141 1y ago
Decreasing earning power with career progression, while quite possible, is sort of a huge violation of the social contract.