I wish this culture would die. The sooner we realize that most programming is a skills trade and not a profession, the better it will be for the industry.
I see this as part of the decline of hacker culture and rise of brogrammers. I see very few people programming for fun, everyone seems to be looking for a monetization opportunity for every breath they take.
The reviled part of it is going to come from the bottom 2/3 of people writing code today getting brutalized economically (permanent job destruction and the lowering of income for those in that segment that manage to find jobs writing code and or managing AI that writes the code).
The median software developer in the US is solidly earning six figures. That's going away, and hundreds of thousands of people are going to be angry about it. Their previously solid path up and out of the middle class is about to vanish. They were betting on that. A large number of people are in school today thinking that median software developer job, writing code, paying $110k per year + great benefits, is still going to be there in 2033.
I am constantly worried about this. We (as software developers) are in a time where the ability to code is scarce, and very valuable. But, at some point in time so was being a carpenter, or a toolmaker, or any other skilled profession whose value over time has diminished. In 5 or 10 years, the sole ability to code will probably diminish in value, become more of a commodity, easier to learn, and maybe even become a low-end profession.
However, the ability to create a product from scratch, using programming as your toolkit, will always remain valuable. Focus on that - using programming as a means to an end of creating useful products - and you can't be marginalized by a glut of programmers.
People who made fun of me in high school for being interested in programming are now trying to get programming jobs. People I know who flunked out of college or were expelled for cheating are now programmers. I'm now the only programmer at my company with a math or CS degree. (The others have degrees, but in biology, history, etc. -- they were all career switchers.)
That's how pervasive it's becoming. If there's any sort of contraction in the industry, the situation will be bad.
On the economic note, I'm actually quite surprised at the level of altruism present in the industry. Although most won't become professionals, the rate of matriculation into the workforce will still be greater than that of football players, and will still have adverse effects. Proliferation of programming can only lead to a more saturated labor force and lower wages. Yet, people still enthusiastically champion programming education...
It just seems odd to me. Very few other professions are keen on diminishing their employment prospects in the name of education.
The fact that it's getting worse says to me that we're just returning to the human mean. For decades programming was seen as the purview of nerds and geeks so the only people who turned to it tended to genuinely like it and master their craft as much as exploit it. Now everyone and their grandma use software so programming has become one of those semi-prestigious professional career paths but without the crazy expensive barrier to entry or restrictions in supply that doctors, lawyers, etc have. Even though programming is largely problem solving and "intellectual" rather than menial physical labor, the field has become so accessible with the internet that the distribution of engineering ability is starting to look a lot more like the usual bell curve centered on "just average".
I actually think high quality programmers will always be in high demand. Poor programmers will get found out sooner, as the general population becomes more technical.
Companies hate any skills set that can hold them hostage in the long run. Today that is the need for programming skills which is why salaries are so high. But the moment that a replacement for most programmers occurs, whether automation, AI, or zero code needed, employers will dump programmers before they can compile their last line of code successfully. In essence, this is the golden age for programming and the cliff could be just over the horizon.
I'm painfully aware. Programmers aren't special snowflakes but they have traditionally been well off in this regard. My worry is that if they are being targetted by these kinds of decisions that it legitimises efforts to increase actions against who don't traditionally have as much social mobility.
Massive salaries will exist so long as there are 10x and 100x workers and throwing more bodies at a bottleneck scales horribly. Given the normal curve holds for skill distributions companies who look for bulk cheap unicorns will always be disappointed.
Remember all of those failed multimillion dollar coding contracts? They were from factory style management trying to apply it to coding. Reality slapped the fools upside the head enough times via absolute fiascos. Even if we take conspiratorial economics as a given we already know how this will end. History indicates their hubris will bring themselves only ruin, just like the legacy rust belt manufacturers.
Also how the hell will programming tools used by programmers be used against them? That is a shallow appeal to horror. Even if machine learning became good enough to automate the low end of the programming market that would only raise their salaries even higher. It is not an easy machine learning problem to solve at all. Esoteric, obscure, and highly complex skills which can make businesses have never come cheaply.
Programmers have been destroying programmer jobs since those jobs exist. Up to now it has meant we have enough productivity for going into more markets, but that will not last forever.
The way society's going, we're heading towards nothing. Even in the tech industry, if you're not a coder, you're going to be dealing with a completely different sort of life. Support people, entry level IT people, etc are brought in as contractors, which means that the protections that you get as a programmer are things they don't have. As your company makes more and more money, they are stuck with a barely livable wage, because too many CEOs don't want to think about those jobs that "anyone" can do. This stratification is getting worse, and something really does need to change.
I've stopped visiting /programming a long time ago, but just wanted to say (and I've said it before in here) that the status of the computer programmer has been on a downward trend since just before the pandemic, I'd say 2017-2018 (maybe a little earlier than that, maybe just going into the pandemic, but that's the general timeframe).
There are many reasons for that, partly the "normies" realising that most of what we, programmers, do at our day-jobs is detrimental to the society as a whole (see Facebook, see all the jobs lost to automation, see the kafkaesque world brought about by digitising almost every interaction between a human being and the State/Government), it's partly because some of us, computer programmers ourselves, have realised the same thing, it's partly because of how many computer programmers are now financially way better off compared to the normally employed people, it's partly because of the smugness that some of us, the computer programmers, brandish in many social contexts, and there are countless other similar reasons.
maybe the projection that programming jobs will disappear in 10 years is due to a programming 'error' ... it would be a genius move to discourage people from becoming programmers in order to decrease supply and drive programmer salaries up
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