Thanks to low interest rate and phenomenal paradigm changes in the last 15 or 20 years, the tech sector has grown so much that engineers with three years of experience can become "tech leads" or "staff engineers" who spend most of their time drawing boxes or "aligning" whatever in meetings. Day in and day out, the most valued engineers are either in meetings or on their way to meetings. To this point, these engineers are ally TPMs and PMs with engineering background. For some reason, companies value such positions more, probably because managers are not into hard technical or product decisions and therefore relied on smooth communicators to feed them digested information, or worse, opinion.
Now that the golden 10 years is in the rear view, maybe programmers will once again be valued more, as only the companies can really build fast and well will stand out.
The issue is that the average skill level for programmers is so low that if you have someone with genuine skill you want them guiding the rest.
I just watched a developer get promoted to tech lead for no other reason than his output was literally 4x everyone else on his team. He's either going to continue doing what he's doing now and continue running circles around everyone or he's going to actually attempt to improve them and his own productivity is going to plumet.
I don't want to take away from this developers skill, he's a very competent developer, but he's not a diamond in the rough, everyone around him is just that fucking bad. We're talking "lets send this list into an API via json as a comma delimited list instead of a JSON array and manually split it out in the code" levels of bad.
Before experiencing this I never fully understood why people treat developers the way they do. You can't trust these jackasses for shit and what makes it worse is that everyone has gotten so used to their slow output that they think it's normal and that this 4x developer is a phenom.
you really could probably replace these jackasses with a single strong developer and AI, and it's no wonder people are so excited to do so.
good developers will always be valued, the issue is that when tech became a popular career we got a glut of shit.
> He's either going to continue doing what he's doing now and continue running circles around everyone or he's going to actually attempt to improve them and his own productivity is going to plumet.
I’m working on a developer collaboration tool that might solve this pain point through frictionless push to screen record collaboration. Reharp.com if you wanna check it out
Hmm - isn't it often the same for non-software engineers (civil, mechanical, eletcrical)? They do technical work on projects for just a few years before becoming e.g. project managers or team leads for said projects etc.
If so, I wonder if this is some kind of "expected steady state". We've solved a lot of the low hanging fruits of stuff you can do with computers, now its about optimizing for very particular problems and businesses (each having lots of human- and organization-driven messiness).
I kinda question how many project managers we really need. My role models in non-software engineers are Kelly Johnson, Wernher_von_Braun, and Oppenheimer. They are world-class experts in their own fields, down to theories. They tinkered, they invented, they deeply understood theories, and they advanced their own fields. Kelly was known for solving or estimating solutions of complex equations of aerodyanmics in his head. Wernher was known for ingenious design of rocket engines. Oppenheimer was a world-class physicist. In the meantime, they wielded sufficient power to lead complex projects.
All three of those men were backed by the most powerful states of their day.
Oppenheimer in particular is interesting because he headed up the most important, but least expensive and labor intensive part of the project. He was also not the main project manager, he only managed the lab. Groves filled the role of the main project manager, and was not a physics expert. In fact his expertise was project management. Groves book emphasizes that his role was to delegate to the correct people, and use his influence to get things done. In other words it was PMs all the way down.
Constant media bombardment about ai replacing them and hordes of baristas rejoicing that programmers will lose jobs seem to indicate that programmers are highly unlikely to be valued, for a while. Something tells me though that all this will backfire and that indeed companies will need people to build things really fast. Even if ai did manage to write more than code at the level of an ai researcher, once everyone can do it, those that will do it faster will be again in demand. And those are, naturally, people with a programmer’s mindset.
Reddit and social media are filled with low wage workers celebrating what they think is the demise of the tech industry. Not to mention ai workers who made it a mission to replace software engineers. Apparently tech workers are overpaid. Probably, the logic is that being a software engineer requires the same level of effort as writing a script to ingest a data file or serve drinks. Strange times when the masses celebrate the closure of one of their only ways out of poverty.
> And those are, naturally, people with a programmer’s mindset.
Digging this line! Even in the craziest hustle, there's still space for some healthy competition. At least there are still jobs for us humans. I seriously can't wrap my head around how our civilization will cope when AI robots snatch up all the human jobs.
I expect it's the same way civilization coped with all the housewifes that automated their job with household machines in the 1960s, and all the jobs for computers (the people) that got replaced by calculators and digital computers, and all the secretaries that got replaced by Microsoft Word.
This kind of an old axe to grind at this point, many engineers involved in these kinds of choices would rather be coding but see the need for good navigation. It is hard to decide when to differentiate roles as a company grows.
No argument here. I was just describing an organizational pattern instead of lamenting on personal choices. To be fair, even though I personally think building is more important, the companies may well need those kind of "coordinating" roles, as large organizations do bring lots of friction.
I found the "On job hopping, backstabbing, and the lack thereof" section a bit odd. The argument seems to be that your co-workers aren't your friends (in general, of course there will be exceptions), and you'll move on in a few years, so it doesn't matter. And the counterargument is that the reason they're not your friends is because you're going to move on in a few years, so you don't bother to form stronger relationships, and that if you stay at a company for much longer (say, 10 years or so), then your co-workers will be your friends.
I just don't think whether or not your co-workers are or will be friends has anything to do with any of that. I stayed at my last company for 10 years, and ended up with quite a few real, non-work friends from that job. And those friends are mix of people: some were only with the company another year or two after I joined, whereas others had longer tenures.
If you are going to make sustainable friendships with your co-workers, you need to know them in more context than seeing them at the office or on video calls. If you do things with them outside the office, and actually develop real friendships with them, then you are likely to remain friends after one or both of you leaves the company. And so the length of time you spend at a company is pretty much irrelevant.
> The argument seems to be that your co-workers aren't your friends
I find strong friendship in small companies and fast-growing companies with a reasonable culture. When a company grows fast and establishes a reasonably fair culture, there will be more collaboration and comradeship. The sense of we having achieved something together is common. In contrast, in a company that has little growth or more people than the quantity of work, people play for a zero-sum game, power struggle ensues, and friendship disappears in the air. It's kinda like Robert Owen's Community Experiment. In the end of the short 2-year life of Owen's community, the neighbors hated each other, even though they went to Owen's community to build a more fair and just society.
agree, I make friends within a year working at a company. Even after I moved on I am still friends with some of them. However, I think that's irrelevant. your goal is to work and make money, save for retirement, have money for good experiences during. I can make friends regardless, but if it was a choice, I'd take the money and just make friends outside of work.
I read this in 2013 and remember enjoying the back-and-forth. Some reflections, a decade of life experience and a tech cycle later:
1. I'm with McKenzie on the coworkers aspect of the dialog. More separation from coworkers is better. In the Good Times (2013-2019,2021) it seems "right" to trade some comp for familiarity and good work vibes, and almost... inhuman... not to. But in the Bad Times you're reminded that an Excel formula could cost you not just your job but also a big chunk of your personal social network. Diversification is good.
2. I now realize what both sides of this are getting at is basically: "how to progress from Junior/Mid Engineer to something after that". There are many paths. The conclusion of the article is good, in that respect. Also: you can just stay a Mid/Senior Engineer. That's okay.
3. Call yourself whatever you want/need to stay employable. Be a good colleague/person. Work is work.
There should remain some cachet when it comes to actually working directly with code that directly impacts software functionality. I love it. Coder, programmer, electron magician, logic monkey, or perhaps my favorite, Techpriest, call it whatever you want... at the end of the day this is the only job where you get paid to build completely nonphysical machines. I press keys that go clack clack, logic gates go flip flop, the electrons go zoom zoom, and my bank account goes ding ding.
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine.
Your kind cling to your flesh, as if it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass that you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal…
> at the end of the day this is the only job where you get paid to build completely nonphysical machines. I press keys that go clack clack, logic gates go flip flop, the electrons go zoom zoom, and my bank account goes ding ding.
From this day, this is going to be my life motive. I've been reading philosophy since i was 18. Stoics were my favourites and helped me through hard years and situations. But now, everything makes sense.
lol, glad it was inspiring. honestly it's wizardry when you really think about it.
there's two roads that diverge in this wood, though. you can look at the nonphysicality of it and call it nothingness and become somewhat of a materialist nihilist. Or you can decide to do what I did and come to the conclusion that the physical that we think is real is in fact the unreal or at least the "less real" (since I want to dodge the issue of dualism for now), and that thought is the only thing that actually exists or matters- which would make programming (and arguably things like music production, digital art, etc.) the "most real" of the jobs. I mean... all human valuation is fundamentally irrational (and yet quite real... why, for example, from a purely rational basis and without asking a human, is Taylor Swift making such a gigantic amount of money? Why can the game "The Finals" be free, but charge money for skins, and people will actually pay money for them?)
> at the end of the day this is the only job where you get paid to build completely nonphysical machines. I press keys that go clack clack, logic gates go flip flop, the electrons go zoom zoom, and my bank account goes ding ding.
Now that the golden 10 years is in the rear view, maybe programmers will once again be valued more, as only the companies can really build fast and well will stand out.