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Programming is fundamentally different from most other occupations. We are actually building factories - automating manual tasks. If developer jobs start to bec
by unono 13y ago
Programming is fundamentally different from most other occupations. We are actually building factories - automating manual tasks. If developer jobs start to become scarce, we'll be nearing a situation where there are no jobs at all for anyone. So, as a programmer, you're never at risk of falling into poverty.
- btilly 13y agoSo, as a programmer, you're never at risk of falling into poverty. I'm guessing you aren't old enough to remember the dot com bust then...
- simias 13y agoProgrammers fell into poverty after the dot com burst? That seems a bit extreme. Lost very high paying jobs, maybe.
- btilly 13y agoI personally knew competent programmers who, a couple of years after, I would describe as living in poverty. I believe that I am able to judge programming competence, and my bar for labeling poverty is not inaccurate.
- unono 13y agoI wasn't working then, but from my understanding (might be wrong), it was 'html coders' that had difficulty finding jobs, not actual coders.
- btilly 13y agoI personally knew a number of competent programmers who ran into extreme financial difficulty in that time period. However they didn't like to talk about it then or now, so I can't give names. They were, of course, a drop in the bucket compared to the number of people who had no business calling themselves programmers having trouble. But there were still lots of them. How do I know this? When I went to move from New York to the west coast in 2003, I took the precaution of taking a month to travel up down down the coast, so I could meet with people I knew and respected from online interactions. What I learned was that at the time, Portland was a disaster zone, Seattle almost as bad, Silicon Valley still had a huge hangover but was slowly on the road to recovery, and I should have no problem landing a job in Los Angeles. I therefore moved to Los Angeles and landed a job in about a week.
- unono 13y agoInteresting. I'd never have thought of LA as a tech hub, but it kind of makes sense. Defense and tv/movies are big in LA and they never have recessions.
- berntb 13y agoI can confirm that there were a big dot com death and hangover the first years of the millennium. Specifically, for Sweden. The rest of the Swedish economy was quite OK. The takeaway lesson you should get kids, is that there is a boom/bust cycle for programmers/developers -- but it isn't necessarily in phase with the general economy. (Some corollaries about how to handle this were listed in the article.)
- tomjen3 13y agoBack then IT wasn't big enough to contain all the programmers who had moved into it due to the bubble. Heck most smaller shops wouldn't have IT or a complicated website then. Today there are so many businesses that needs IT to stay competitive that we would need a bubble of incredible epic propertions to knock us all out. And honestly I doubt there are enough people who can pass as devs that it would even be possible.