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.
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.