9 ms·

I kind of think the whole "Learn to Code" push of the 2010s was one of the worst things that happened to our industry. Call me a gatekeeper if you want but, we

I kind of think the whole "Learn to Code" push of the 2010s was one of the worst things that happened to our industry. Call me a gatekeeper if you want but, we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job. The problem is our industry mostly doesn't have any sort of reasonable mentorship or apprenticeship culture, so we've always left it to the engineers to teach themselves. Sink or swim. The problem is that worked when the industry was mostly composed of people that were implicitly interested in this stuff, but the people that just got in it for a paycheck don't have that motivation, and we don't have a good culture of getting them up to speed. So now we have seniors that can barely write a function, much less reason about a complex system. I remember people used to debate all the time about if there were "10x" engineers or whatever. A few I'm sure, but I think the real problem is we have a lot of 0.1x engineers or worse.

phil21 2mo ago
Or it’s just the largely self-taught intrinsically curious autodidact developers and engineers have always been 10x and the “average” person in it for the paycheck is really what a 1xer has always actually been. I think the industry highly skewed towards the former back in the 90s (and earlier!) when I first entered it. There certainly were vast differences between the best and the worst, but nothing like the gigantic gulf there is today between say a competent kernel driver developer who can get code mainstreamed into Linux vs. a boot camp style disinterested frontend dev who leet coded and brute forced themselves into a FAANG job. Working closely with other white collar “generic” jobs and the folks who just show up each day and are not interested in the fundamentals at all make me believe this is kind of the baseline for most industries. Most folks are in it for the money and are happy to just be good enough to not be fired. Since most middle management is utterly incompetent at performance management the results tend to not be great for pretty much the entire corporate white collar industries. A stellar manager though really stands out in such situations, but they are so rare many won’t work for or with one their entire career.
- wwweston 2mo ago
  I also have a suspicion that people’s microdistributions of talents is underappreciated. Some people are good architects and average at algorithms. Some people are unusually good at debugging or QA. Some can spin out whole systems at an impressive speed that may not be a great long term fit for the larger system. And most businesses aren’t managed in a way that’s interested in adapting to the microshapes of personnel.
  - kian 2mo ago
    I think this is one of the beauties of AI -- filling in the gaps to help people make their microtalents shine.
    - NateEag 2mo ago
      nah, as someone who's driving Claude daily by corporate mandate, AI just shits acceptable mediocrity over everything, and my microtalents don't fit into the org anywhere anymore. They've been replaced by Markdown files asking Claude to burn tokens on doing something deterministic tools already do faster and better, like checking variable names for typoes (I wish I was making this up).
      - kian 2mo ago
        Who said anything about a corporate context? :)
- andrewflnr 2mo ago
  I'm very much a curious autodidact and there are still people who easily 10x me or more. Someone like Fabrice Bellard is an obvious, extreme example.
wseqyrku 2mo ago
In my previous job the entire DevOps team were terminators from the gym. I don't know when or how they were attracted to software, and why. There's so many other jobs they could spend time on and be successful rather than writing yamls.
storyinmemo 2mo ago
"One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year." -John Cook
hn_throwaway_99 2mo ago
The whole "learn to code" and software bootcamp craze always baffled me. Like what other profession markets themselves as "Hey, our job is so easy that any schmuck off the street can enter the career with 4 months of training." Practically every other job I can think of at a similar salary level has entrance requirements (e.g. grad school admissions exams), extensive and expensive training, a lengthy apprenticeship period and follow on licensure exams. And more directly, I believe good software engineering is really hard. I think it takes a certain mindset to begin with that many people just do not and will never possess, and it takes years of experience to get a good sense of what works and what doesn't, especially with respect to the entire relationship between code, business, people and teams. Yet we constantly see all this devaluation of the practice of software engineering ("code was always the easy part" - bull-fucking-shit), often times by our own practitioners of the craft.
- mrguyorama 2mo ago
  I mean, the obvious thing is that the "learn to code quick, code bootcamps!" drive was driven by connected people who were, as they are now, attempting to drive down the cost of software development. Management types really really really loathe software developers for making good money, and have spent decades now jumping at any advertisement that suggests it can undercut the salary of your current crop of engineers. Devaluing software developers has always been the point. Whether you take the cynical view of "They resent us for being expensive" or the apathetic view of "Capitalism simply wants to eliminate any and every cost by definition"
  - bornfreddy 2mo ago
    Exactly this. And now it is AI - I can't wait to see what they will be paying in a few years to those who will be able to clean up the LLM mess.
  - WalterBright 2mo ago
    > Management types really really really loathe software developers for making good money Of course. I bet you loathe having to spend $70,000 to buy a nice car, too! > Capitalism simply wants to eliminate any and every cost by definition You could look up what life was like under Soviet communism. Me, I prefer capitalism.
e2le 2mo ago
> Call me a gatekeeper if you want but, we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job. Increasingly I am of the opinion that software engineering aught to be a licensed profession, similar to civil engineers, medical professionals, or lawyers. A board of peers to hold you accountable and a licence that can be revoked at any time. Additionally, legislation could be written to require such licensed individuals in safety critical roles. I suspect the debate around AI assistance tools would be quite different if there was greater accountability for programmers and a constant threat of losing a licence. If you brick millions of machines impacting hospitals and airports, you should probably never be trusted to write code again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_outages#Impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_ou...
- stronglikedan 2mo ago
  > software engineering aught to be a licensed profession Only in certain industries, where outcomes can hurt people in any way. There's opportunity to engineer software in just about every industry, but I don't think a widget vendor that wants to connect to a WMS should be compelled to hire licensed anything. Of course, licensed engineers should cost more too.
  - wing-_-nuts 2mo ago
    It's not licensed per se, but in certain areas of the defense industry, one is restricted to using the 'DOD approved' subset of C++. Coders that know how to be productive within those constraints (and can pass clearance) are much more rare than your average code monkey
  - f6v 2mo ago
    Some pieces of software are classified as a "medical device" and require certain processes to be in place.
- groundzeros2015 2mo ago
  Credentialing lowers the skill floor and increase every other kind of friction. Civil engineering or medicine is hardly a desirable career model to follow. Btw doctors make mistakes that kill people all the time. It’s a top 3 cause of death in the US AND they often keep their jobs.
nkrisc 2mo ago
But how many of those bootcamp people actually went on to get software jobs? One of the big criticisms of that whole phenomenon that I recall is that people were graduating them and then were unable or unprepared to actually get a job in the industry? So how many people "learned to code" and then ended up back on non-software related careers?
- backwardsponcho 2mo ago
  I think that changed around the time COVID hit and offer was highly surpassed by demand. Lots of overhiring during those days.
scrapedface 2mo ago
Just because you CAN code doesn’t mean you SHOULD code.
fierycatnet 2mo ago
I tried to get a job back then but never could. Its wild to read to me that it was 'sink or swim' back then. Nobody wanted to hire a junior. So I never became a SWE and it was my passion since 14. Now I just don't care and too much time has passed.
- lief79 2mo ago
  When? The specific years and locations matter greatly, there's always been a boom and bust aspect to it.
zabriel_goss 2mo ago
I understand your point and ultimately agree with the systemic problems here. And, as a "Learn to Code" guy who's had a successful and interesting career filled with self-study and continual improvement, I'll call you a gatekeeper.
abustamam 2mo ago
I'm a bootcamp graduate, 10 years of experience. My mentor is a bootcamp graduate. I've worked with him for most of my career and he is a very experienced systems engineer, often mentoring and coaching folks with masters degrees in CS. Together, with a lot of other team members of course, with him being the principal engineer, we've exited multiple companies. We were both fortunate to have mentors earlier in our careers. I've interviewed many bootcamp graduates. You're right. Many of them can't do the job. We don't hire those guys. But that begs the question - what companies are hiring incompetent people?
hdndjsbbs 2mo ago
If compensation for software devs was in line with other profession there wouldn't be bootcamps. The problem is it's an easy job that gets paid a ton of money
Planktonne 2mo ago
> we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job I don't think this is attributable to the 'learn to code' push; I know many fine engineers who came through boot camps, and many, many poor ones who came in the 'official' way. The problem is that we trained too many people, many of them without the aptitude, not how we trained them.
leptons 2mo ago
Maybe you weren't around in the 2000 dot com bubble burst era, but the same thing happened then. Companies hired anyone they could because talent was scarce. A friend of mine who was a substitute teacher got a job as a sysadmin, and he was texting me constantly because he had no clue how to do his job, asking me all kinds of questions. That pretty much ended our friendship when I told him I wasn't going to do his job for him.
analog31 2mo ago
There was a time before "learn to code" when it was even more wide open. My mom taught programming at a community college in the early 80s, after learning it herself a year prior. Many of her students were working manufacturing or clerical jobs. They were able to get programming jobs at Ford's or GM after a year of my mom's class. (At first, they taught PL/1 because it was what they used at Ford's, then switched to Pascal in line with the colleges in the area). My mom did try to teach good practices, but there's only so much you can do in a year. At my workplace, the earliest programmers were a combination of self-taught and people with real CS degrees. The CS people wrote the OS and languages for an in house minicomputer. The apps were written by people with app experience, mostly scientists. And there were a few odd characters like the secretary who learned programming because it was quicker to fix bugs herself than get clarification from the engineers.
oraphalous 2mo ago
Learn to code wasn't just about careers though. It was also about individual empowerment. Everything goes through computers, and having the power to understand that domain increases agency. For a lot of people, they have no need to ship production grade software that scales to babel. But a custom script that solves an immediate business need is a common thing. I think that aim is more important than the harm learn to code might have caused our profession. And for similar reasons, I feel the agency AI brings to individuals is something that shouldn't be discounted either. No idea what the total calculus on cost benefits turns out to be, but I would hope this benefit is not missed.
- analog31 2mo ago
  "Programming is too important to be left to the programmers." -- apologies to Clemenceau
myth2018 2mo ago
This. For a certain class of professionals, slowness is a kind of superpower able to restrain their damage. LLMs have turned off those guardrails. On one hand, I'm not fully surprised -- LLMs are powerful tools, but of course they can be misused. On the other hand, I'm impressed by how fast things are deteriorating in some shops. At my job they got encouraged, over-confident even, to finally do some long-awaited major overhaul in the code base. I'm genuinely concerned about our ability to continue maintaining this mess in the mid and long-term.
sleight42 2mo ago
I agree completely and have said similar. Yet this is what happens when supply tries to catch up to demand. There were not enough software chefs to keep up with the patrons appetites. We started minting more cooks. Instead of Culinary Institute of America candidates and autodidacts, we got what the customers wanted: people who would just churn out more. Blame the patrons for demanding more with little care to the quality. I mostly gave up on software development roles in business when the vast majority of developers and, particularly management and executives, made clear that they couldn't give a fuck about craftsmanship. It was just about shipping, good, bad or otherwise. AI in software development predates on that appetite for MORE at any cost. When the business doesn't really care about quality, because, let's be honest, most don't, this is what you get. You get massive volumes of garbage.
dismalaf 2mo ago
Is the problem the self taught programmers or the people who would have gone the finance or law route in university doing CS and then not caring?
BrenBarn 2mo ago
> The problem is that worked when the industry was mostly composed of people that were implicitly interested in this stuff, but the people that just got in it for a paycheck don't have that motivation That is a problem whenever people do things for money. It suggests that a big problem with our society is people are encouraged (in some cases effectively forced) to want money too much.
voidhorse 2mo ago
Eh, not all software engineering is made equal. To work on engineering real time communications systems, banking systems, or transit systems and low level infrastructure, you definitely need some chops. To design and build out core network infra at the web giants, chops also certainly required. To build out a basic crud app, pwa, or the next feature in the massive products that major companies ship? Yes you need some understanding but it really isn't that difficult or onerous. TBH if you ask me the profession always had a problem where the term "engineer" was a tad over applied. The boot camps are mostly churning out people who can write basic apps, not (hopefully) anyone being placed into a a senior IC and systems design role.
- sgarland 2mo ago
  As someone who works in fintech, I assumed the same; alas, I was wrong.
n0rand0 2mo ago
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tiew9Vii 2mo ago
Previously it felt like there was a lot more nerds who were in it for the interest instead of today for the career path and fast track higher salaries. 2010’s was when more traditional CS courses also started moving from traditional languages and content to JS etc…following industry demand. A lot of tech conferences were pure tech. Now a lot of them are agile, soft skills based, introverted nerds pushed out. It’s certainly a different place from the 2010’s.
mancerayder 2mo ago
I've uncovered some -2x engineers recently - who cause long-term problems with their changes that more than one person has to unravel. It's usually comes as a surprise, some going back to look at who approved MRs, and loud ranting and cursing as you find a murder trail of laziness or incompetence. It's breathtaking. I'd trust some people with AI as much as I'd trust myself operating a machete - a tool best left to someone else.
monksy 2mo ago
> whole "Learn to Code" push of the 2010s was one of the worst things that happened to our industry I would also throw in the toxic positivity and gas lighting sorrounding that. We got a lot of churn on "we have to be nice to everyone" and fears that people weren't "being included." I'm not saying you have to go all Linus on everyone, but it really catered to those who didn't want to learn a lot of the details or were resistent to testing their own code.
noduerme 2mo ago
One thing is for certain... the "learn to code" movement was a smug, pompous, and deeply unsympathetic response by privileged knowledge workers toward blue collar workers who experienced mass unemployment a couple times in the last decade, beginning in 2008, and it really pissed off a lot of the people it was directed at. I know a lot of people who did move out of trade and service jobs and learn to code, but very very few who made it far enough to keep those jobs. The guys in the trades are having the last laugh now, and there's no sympathy for coders whose jobs are being taken by AI... largely as a result of the attutide that came with that prescription.
- ofjcihen 2mo ago
  I have yet to know anyone who’s lost their job to AI. On the contrary, because juniors are being hired less, the ladder on a well-paying job in knowledge work is essentially being pulled up (by the Csuite mind you). So unfortunately, for those like me who spent a decade in the trades, saw that it could destroy your body by your 40s and decided I’d like to not have that happen to me the number of exits into knowledge work is shrinking.
  - noduerme 2mo ago
    Not to sound bleak, but you're describing what things looked like to me 18 months ago. The C-suite's gonna keep pulling that ladder up until the loss of layers of knowledge come back to bite them in the ass in six years. If it ever does. I'm not the best person to talk to, because I'm not a salaried programmer for some corporation, and I'm not looking for a job from a startup or something. I'm in a unique position where I wrote a suite of proprietary software that clients pay for that they would have a hard time replicating or migrating away from, even if AI helped them. Lucky me, I happened to get into a specialized industry and start writing code for it 20 years ago, and I kept all the data and code logic in my own silos and never shared anything with anyone. So I am somewhat protected because it would cost 3x more to replace what I wrote than to just pay me for the rest of my life to maintain what I built. By the way, I started this software in my 20s when my body was already being destroyed by physical jobs. I started it while I was driving a taxi and waiting tables at the same time. I learned by reading books in my cab. I don't think that's an option for people anymore. My best friend worked for a massive multinational similar to Salesforce and he ran a team of 60 people under him until last year. He was not AI-proof. They laid off everyone on his team except for him and 3 helpers, and told him to use AI to do everything else. After awhile, they laid him off too. After interviewing for a couple months, he found a new job, and his job is to manage two people running AIs. It was a 30% pay cut and he feels lucky to have it. Under any external hierarchy, where I didn't have this lifetime of private code and clients in my pocket, his job would have been way, way above mine. I would have been one of the 60 people laid off. Okay, so I'm going to say something about this "knowledge work" thing because I've known a lot of people who took courses and transitioned to it from the trades. Almost all of them did not get decent jobs. One of them was a bartender who just somehow got it. This was around 2018. Her husband works in construction. She just sat down and it clicked, she learned to write javascript in 3 months. I'd sit at her bar and tell her what to improve and she'd write it down and memorize it. In six months she was writing like a native, and she got a job at [huge multinational retail company] working on their website. And somehow she survived round after round of layoffs to keep going and become the only person left on her team. I'm immensely proud of her. And she will still probably lose her job in the next six months. But my ex-girlfriend tried to learn to code at exactly the same time, and it went nowhere. Just didn't make sense to her. So that's why I wouldn't recommend it. Honestly, if I didn't have the little pile of code I was sitting on that pays my bills, I would go to school to be a plumber or air conditioning specialist, or to repair helicopters or be a car mechanic. That's basically what I do anyway, I just do it in code instead of parts. At one time, what I did was equivalent to building custom cars and engines, only in code. At this point, fixing a car would be more satisfying. No one's paying to build their hot rod in code anymore, that's all being thrown at AI. And the rest of the jobs suck.
BatteryMountain 2mo ago
I've seen a lot of Wordpress theme jockies in my country call themselves engineers and demand very high fees.. yet half of them do not know how the db works, when/how/when not to use queues, do not care about security ("the client will pay us to upgrade the site to be more secure"), do not know anything about real compilers, type safety etc. In my mind they were a scourge because we are not at the same level at all yet some of them earned more money/status than my peers. Some cases they have caused harm but nothing ever happened to them. So yeah, good the frog is being boiled now. Same with consultancies. They've been milking the system for 20 years, selling "dev hours". They are all getting eaten alive and I'm here for it.
dijit 2mo ago
“learn to code- everyone should code-“ pushes always seemed like a way of trying to suppress wages for tech workers. I’m not in it for the money, and that I can make a good (better than most) living from it is just pure luck and I am genuinely thankful. But there are lots of people in it only for the money, and they will be very disappointed when it dries up, because the #1 thing these bosses want is for us to have less leverage.. They want it even more than they want revenue.
ChrisRR 2mo ago
The issue was that it was "learn to code" and not "learn to program", as if the only thing you needed was a month of training and then you were just as good as someone with 20 years of experience. It's similar to why there's hundreds of books about learning the basics of a language, but comparatively few books about good software architecture/design
thr0w 2mo ago
> Call me a gatekeeper if you want but, we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job. The vast majority! I think I've come across 1 or 2 competent engineers in 20+ years. It's a miracle that software works, ever. Increasingly, it doesn't.
sleepycat801 2mo ago
"learn to code" is just learning to read and write in a software language. But the industry expected those with basic literacy to perform any specialised task related to reading and writing. Meanwhile, software engineering courses taught it as abstractions and algorithms, and electronic engineering taught control flow on bare metal. No one, it appears, is taught design or system architecture outside the context of operating systems. Even requirements engineer is a rare job title. As more complexity has fallen into the domain of software, nobody has been given responsibility for it. The way we treat junior developers now would be like expecting a carpenter or bricklayer to figure out building architechure and structural engineering, without formal training.

phil21 2mo ago

Or it’s just the largely self-taught intrinsically curious autodidact developers and engineers have always been 10x and the “average” person in it for the paycheck is really what a 1xer has always actually been. I think the industry highly skewed towards the former back in the 90s (and earlier!) when I first entered it. There certainly were vast differences between the best and the worst, but nothing like the gigantic gulf there is today between say a competent kernel driver developer who can get code mainstreamed into Linux vs. a boot camp style disinterested frontend dev who leet coded and brute forced themselves into a FAANG job. Working closely with other white collar “generic” jobs and the folks who just show up each day and are not interested in the fundamentals at all make me believe this is kind of the baseline for most industries. Most folks are in it for the money and are happy to just be good enough to not be fired. Since most middle management is utterly incompetent at performance management the results tend to not be great for pretty much the entire corporate white collar industries. A stellar manager though really stands out in such situations, but they are so rare many won’t work for or with one their entire career.

wwweston 2mo ago
I also have a suspicion that people’s microdistributions of talents is underappreciated. Some people are good architects and average at algorithms. Some people are unusually good at debugging or QA. Some can spin out whole systems at an impressive speed that may not be a great long term fit for the larger system. And most businesses aren’t managed in a way that’s interested in adapting to the microshapes of personnel.
- kian 2mo ago
  I think this is one of the beauties of AI -- filling in the gaps to help people make their microtalents shine.
  - NateEag 2mo ago
    nah, as someone who's driving Claude daily by corporate mandate, AI just shits acceptable mediocrity over everything, and my microtalents don't fit into the org anywhere anymore. They've been replaced by Markdown files asking Claude to burn tokens on doing something deterministic tools already do faster and better, like checking variable names for typoes (I wish I was making this up).
    - kian 2mo ago
      Who said anything about a corporate context? :)
andrewflnr 2mo ago
I'm very much a curious autodidact and there are still people who easily 10x me or more. Someone like Fabrice Bellard is an obvious, extreme example.

wseqyrku 2mo ago

In my previous job the entire DevOps team were terminators from the gym. I don't know when or how they were attracted to software, and why. There's so many other jobs they could spend time on and be successful rather than writing yamls.

storyinmemo 2mo ago

"One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year." -John Cook

hn_throwaway_99 2mo ago

The whole "learn to code" and software bootcamp craze always baffled me. Like what other profession markets themselves as "Hey, our job is so easy that any schmuck off the street can enter the career with 4 months of training." Practically every other job I can think of at a similar salary level has entrance requirements (e.g. grad school admissions exams), extensive and expensive training, a lengthy apprenticeship period and follow on licensure exams. And more directly, I believe good software engineering is really hard. I think it takes a certain mindset to begin with that many people just do not and will never possess, and it takes years of experience to get a good sense of what works and what doesn't, especially with respect to the entire relationship between code, business, people and teams. Yet we constantly see all this devaluation of the practice of software engineering ("code was always the easy part" - bull-fucking-shit), often times by our own practitioners of the craft.

mrguyorama 2mo ago
I mean, the obvious thing is that the "learn to code quick, code bootcamps!" drive was driven by connected people who were, as they are now, attempting to drive down the cost of software development. Management types really really really loathe software developers for making good money, and have spent decades now jumping at any advertisement that suggests it can undercut the salary of your current crop of engineers. Devaluing software developers has always been the point. Whether you take the cynical view of "They resent us for being expensive" or the apathetic view of "Capitalism simply wants to eliminate any and every cost by definition"
- bornfreddy 2mo ago
  Exactly this. And now it is AI - I can't wait to see what they will be paying in a few years to those who will be able to clean up the LLM mess.
- WalterBright 2mo ago
  > Management types really really really loathe software developers for making good money Of course. I bet you loathe having to spend $70,000 to buy a nice car, too! > Capitalism simply wants to eliminate any and every cost by definition You could look up what life was like under Soviet communism. Me, I prefer capitalism.

e2le 2mo ago

> Call me a gatekeeper if you want but, we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job. Increasingly I am of the opinion that software engineering aught to be a licensed profession, similar to civil engineers, medical professionals, or lawyers. A board of peers to hold you accountable and a licence that can be revoked at any time. Additionally, legislation could be written to require such licensed individuals in safety critical roles. I suspect the debate around AI assistance tools would be quite different if there was greater accountability for programmers and a constant threat of losing a licence. If you brick millions of machines impacting hospitals and airports, you should probably never be trusted to write code again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_outages#Impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_ou...

stronglikedan 2mo ago
> software engineering aught to be a licensed profession Only in certain industries, where outcomes can hurt people in any way. There's opportunity to engineer software in just about every industry, but I don't think a widget vendor that wants to connect to a WMS should be compelled to hire licensed anything. Of course, licensed engineers should cost more too.
- wing-_-nuts 2mo ago
  It's not licensed per se, but in certain areas of the defense industry, one is restricted to using the 'DOD approved' subset of C++. Coders that know how to be productive within those constraints (and can pass clearance) are much more rare than your average code monkey
- f6v 2mo ago
  Some pieces of software are classified as a "medical device" and require certain processes to be in place.
groundzeros2015 2mo ago
Credentialing lowers the skill floor and increase every other kind of friction. Civil engineering or medicine is hardly a desirable career model to follow. Btw doctors make mistakes that kill people all the time. It’s a top 3 cause of death in the US AND they often keep their jobs.

nkrisc 2mo ago

But how many of those bootcamp people actually went on to get software jobs? One of the big criticisms of that whole phenomenon that I recall is that people were graduating them and then were unable or unprepared to actually get a job in the industry? So how many people "learned to code" and then ended up back on non-software related careers?

backwardsponcho 2mo ago
I think that changed around the time COVID hit and offer was highly surpassed by demand. Lots of overhiring during those days.

scrapedface 2mo ago

Just because you CAN code doesn’t mean you SHOULD code.

fierycatnet 2mo ago

I tried to get a job back then but never could. Its wild to read to me that it was 'sink or swim' back then. Nobody wanted to hire a junior. So I never became a SWE and it was my passion since 14. Now I just don't care and too much time has passed.

lief79 2mo ago
When? The specific years and locations matter greatly, there's always been a boom and bust aspect to it.

zabriel_goss 2mo ago

I understand your point and ultimately agree with the systemic problems here. And, as a "Learn to Code" guy who's had a successful and interesting career filled with self-study and continual improvement, I'll call you a gatekeeper.

abustamam 2mo ago

I'm a bootcamp graduate, 10 years of experience. My mentor is a bootcamp graduate. I've worked with him for most of my career and he is a very experienced systems engineer, often mentoring and coaching folks with masters degrees in CS. Together, with a lot of other team members of course, with him being the principal engineer, we've exited multiple companies. We were both fortunate to have mentors earlier in our careers. I've interviewed many bootcamp graduates. You're right. Many of them can't do the job. We don't hire those guys. But that begs the question - what companies are hiring incompetent people?

hdndjsbbs 2mo ago

If compensation for software devs was in line with other profession there wouldn't be bootcamps. The problem is it's an easy job that gets paid a ton of money

Planktonne 2mo ago

> we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job I don't think this is attributable to the 'learn to code' push; I know many fine engineers who came through boot camps, and many, many poor ones who came in the 'official' way. The problem is that we trained too many people, many of them without the aptitude, not how we trained them.

leptons 2mo ago

Maybe you weren't around in the 2000 dot com bubble burst era, but the same thing happened then. Companies hired anyone they could because talent was scarce. A friend of mine who was a substitute teacher got a job as a sysadmin, and he was texting me constantly because he had no clue how to do his job, asking me all kinds of questions. That pretty much ended our friendship when I told him I wasn't going to do his job for him.

analog31 2mo ago

There was a time before "learn to code" when it was even more wide open. My mom taught programming at a community college in the early 80s, after learning it herself a year prior. Many of her students were working manufacturing or clerical jobs. They were able to get programming jobs at Ford's or GM after a year of my mom's class. (At first, they taught PL/1 because it was what they used at Ford's, then switched to Pascal in line with the colleges in the area). My mom did try to teach good practices, but there's only so much you can do in a year. At my workplace, the earliest programmers were a combination of self-taught and people with real CS degrees. The CS people wrote the OS and languages for an in house minicomputer. The apps were written by people with app experience, mostly scientists. And there were a few odd characters like the secretary who learned programming because it was quicker to fix bugs herself than get clarification from the engineers.

oraphalous 2mo ago

Learn to code wasn't just about careers though. It was also about individual empowerment. Everything goes through computers, and having the power to understand that domain increases agency. For a lot of people, they have no need to ship production grade software that scales to babel. But a custom script that solves an immediate business need is a common thing. I think that aim is more important than the harm learn to code might have caused our profession. And for similar reasons, I feel the agency AI brings to individuals is something that shouldn't be discounted either. No idea what the total calculus on cost benefits turns out to be, but I would hope this benefit is not missed.

analog31 2mo ago
"Programming is too important to be left to the programmers." -- apologies to Clemenceau

myth2018 2mo ago

This. For a certain class of professionals, slowness is a kind of superpower able to restrain their damage. LLMs have turned off those guardrails. On one hand, I'm not fully surprised -- LLMs are powerful tools, but of course they can be misused. On the other hand, I'm impressed by how fast things are deteriorating in some shops. At my job they got encouraged, over-confident even, to finally do some long-awaited major overhaul in the code base. I'm genuinely concerned about our ability to continue maintaining this mess in the mid and long-term.

sleight42 2mo ago

I agree completely and have said similar. Yet this is what happens when supply tries to catch up to demand. There were not enough software chefs to keep up with the patrons appetites. We started minting more cooks. Instead of Culinary Institute of America candidates and autodidacts, we got what the customers wanted: people who would just churn out more. Blame the patrons for demanding more with little care to the quality. I mostly gave up on software development roles in business when the vast majority of developers and, particularly management and executives, made clear that they couldn't give a fuck about craftsmanship. It was just about shipping, good, bad or otherwise. AI in software development predates on that appetite for MORE at any cost. When the business doesn't really care about quality, because, let's be honest, most don't, this is what you get. You get massive volumes of garbage.

dismalaf 2mo ago

Is the problem the self taught programmers or the people who would have gone the finance or law route in university doing CS and then not caring?

BrenBarn 2mo ago

> The problem is that worked when the industry was mostly composed of people that were implicitly interested in this stuff, but the people that just got in it for a paycheck don't have that motivation That is a problem whenever people do things for money. It suggests that a big problem with our society is people are encouraged (in some cases effectively forced) to want money too much.

voidhorse 2mo ago

Eh, not all software engineering is made equal. To work on engineering real time communications systems, banking systems, or transit systems and low level infrastructure, you definitely need some chops. To design and build out core network infra at the web giants, chops also certainly required. To build out a basic crud app, pwa, or the next feature in the massive products that major companies ship? Yes you need some understanding but it really isn't that difficult or onerous. TBH if you ask me the profession always had a problem where the term "engineer" was a tad over applied. The boot camps are mostly churning out people who can write basic apps, not (hopefully) anyone being placed into a a senior IC and systems design role.

sgarland 2mo ago
As someone who works in fintech, I assumed the same; alas, I was wrong.

n0rand0 2mo ago

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tiew9Vii 2mo ago

Previously it felt like there was a lot more nerds who were in it for the interest instead of today for the career path and fast track higher salaries. 2010’s was when more traditional CS courses also started moving from traditional languages and content to JS etc…following industry demand. A lot of tech conferences were pure tech. Now a lot of them are agile, soft skills based, introverted nerds pushed out. It’s certainly a different place from the 2010’s.

mancerayder 2mo ago

I've uncovered some -2x engineers recently - who cause long-term problems with their changes that more than one person has to unravel. It's usually comes as a surprise, some going back to look at who approved MRs, and loud ranting and cursing as you find a murder trail of laziness or incompetence. It's breathtaking. I'd trust some people with AI as much as I'd trust myself operating a machete - a tool best left to someone else.

monksy 2mo ago

> whole "Learn to Code" push of the 2010s was one of the worst things that happened to our industry I would also throw in the toxic positivity and gas lighting sorrounding that. We got a lot of churn on "we have to be nice to everyone" and fears that people weren't "being included." I'm not saying you have to go all Linus on everyone, but it really catered to those who didn't want to learn a lot of the details or were resistent to testing their own code.

noduerme 2mo ago

One thing is for certain... the "learn to code" movement was a smug, pompous, and deeply unsympathetic response by privileged knowledge workers toward blue collar workers who experienced mass unemployment a couple times in the last decade, beginning in 2008, and it really pissed off a lot of the people it was directed at. I know a lot of people who did move out of trade and service jobs and learn to code, but very very few who made it far enough to keep those jobs. The guys in the trades are having the last laugh now, and there's no sympathy for coders whose jobs are being taken by AI... largely as a result of the attutide that came with that prescription.

ofjcihen 2mo ago
I have yet to know anyone who’s lost their job to AI. On the contrary, because juniors are being hired less, the ladder on a well-paying job in knowledge work is essentially being pulled up (by the Csuite mind you). So unfortunately, for those like me who spent a decade in the trades, saw that it could destroy your body by your 40s and decided I’d like to not have that happen to me the number of exits into knowledge work is shrinking.
- noduerme 2mo ago
  Not to sound bleak, but you're describing what things looked like to me 18 months ago. The C-suite's gonna keep pulling that ladder up until the loss of layers of knowledge come back to bite them in the ass in six years. If it ever does. I'm not the best person to talk to, because I'm not a salaried programmer for some corporation, and I'm not looking for a job from a startup or something. I'm in a unique position where I wrote a suite of proprietary software that clients pay for that they would have a hard time replicating or migrating away from, even if AI helped them. Lucky me, I happened to get into a specialized industry and start writing code for it 20 years ago, and I kept all the data and code logic in my own silos and never shared anything with anyone. So I am somewhat protected because it would cost 3x more to replace what I wrote than to just pay me for the rest of my life to maintain what I built. By the way, I started this software in my 20s when my body was already being destroyed by physical jobs. I started it while I was driving a taxi and waiting tables at the same time. I learned by reading books in my cab. I don't think that's an option for people anymore. My best friend worked for a massive multinational similar to Salesforce and he ran a team of 60 people under him until last year. He was not AI-proof. They laid off everyone on his team except for him and 3 helpers, and told him to use AI to do everything else. After awhile, they laid him off too. After interviewing for a couple months, he found a new job, and his job is to manage two people running AIs. It was a 30% pay cut and he feels lucky to have it. Under any external hierarchy, where I didn't have this lifetime of private code and clients in my pocket, his job would have been way, way above mine. I would have been one of the 60 people laid off. Okay, so I'm going to say something about this "knowledge work" thing because I've known a lot of people who took courses and transitioned to it from the trades. Almost all of them did not get decent jobs. One of them was a bartender who just somehow got it. This was around 2018. Her husband works in construction. She just sat down and it clicked, she learned to write javascript in 3 months. I'd sit at her bar and tell her what to improve and she'd write it down and memorize it. In six months she was writing like a native, and she got a job at [huge multinational retail company] working on their website. And somehow she survived round after round of layoffs to keep going and become the only person left on her team. I'm immensely proud of her. And she will still probably lose her job in the next six months. But my ex-girlfriend tried to learn to code at exactly the same time, and it went nowhere. Just didn't make sense to her. So that's why I wouldn't recommend it. Honestly, if I didn't have the little pile of code I was sitting on that pays my bills, I would go to school to be a plumber or air conditioning specialist, or to repair helicopters or be a car mechanic. That's basically what I do anyway, I just do it in code instead of parts. At one time, what I did was equivalent to building custom cars and engines, only in code. At this point, fixing a car would be more satisfying. No one's paying to build their hot rod in code anymore, that's all being thrown at AI. And the rest of the jobs suck.

BatteryMountain 2mo ago

I've seen a lot of Wordpress theme jockies in my country call themselves engineers and demand very high fees.. yet half of them do not know how the db works, when/how/when not to use queues, do not care about security ("the client will pay us to upgrade the site to be more secure"), do not know anything about real compilers, type safety etc. In my mind they were a scourge because we are not at the same level at all yet some of them earned more money/status than my peers. Some cases they have caused harm but nothing ever happened to them. So yeah, good the frog is being boiled now. Same with consultancies. They've been milking the system for 20 years, selling "dev hours". They are all getting eaten alive and I'm here for it.

dijit 2mo ago

“learn to code- everyone should code-“ pushes always seemed like a way of trying to suppress wages for tech workers. I’m not in it for the money, and that I can make a good (better than most) living from it is just pure luck and I am genuinely thankful. But there are lots of people in it only for the money, and they will be very disappointed when it dries up, because the #1 thing these bosses want is for us to have less leverage.. They want it even more than they want revenue.

ChrisRR 2mo ago

The issue was that it was "learn to code" and not "learn to program", as if the only thing you needed was a month of training and then you were just as good as someone with 20 years of experience. It's similar to why there's hundreds of books about learning the basics of a language, but comparatively few books about good software architecture/design

thr0w 2mo ago

> Call me a gatekeeper if you want but, we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job. The vast majority! I think I've come across 1 or 2 competent engineers in 20+ years. It's a miracle that software works, ever. Increasingly, it doesn't.

sleepycat801 2mo ago

"learn to code" is just learning to read and write in a software language. But the industry expected those with basic literacy to perform any specialised task related to reading and writing. Meanwhile, software engineering courses taught it as abstractions and algorithms, and electronic engineering taught control flow on bare metal. No one, it appears, is taught design or system architecture outside the context of operating systems. Even requirements engineer is a rare job title. As more complexity has fallen into the domain of software, nobody has been given responsibility for it. The way we treat junior developers now would be like expecting a carpenter or bricklayer to figure out building architechure and structural engineering, without formal training.