There has always been a bottom-tier category of software development, which is programming at the level of "tweaking wordpress websites". Not that all jobs at this level are doing this, but the technical skill is what it takes to setup, configure, operate, and tweak a wordpress website, which requires some understanding of how websites work, web servers, PHP, JavaScript, CSS, a plugin ecosystem, backups, etc. It is quite simple for a software pro, but light years beyond what someone untrained could do.<p>Also, this can be extremely high-impact to a business. Consultancies exist at this technical difficulty making lots of money but also delivering lots of value. Go into a non-tech business, notice how 1000 man hours per month are essentially updating Excel files, automate most of it with a Python or VB script, and save the company hundreds of thousands of dollars.<p>You don't need to feel attacked or nervous that these jobs exist. "Software [Developer|Engineer|Architect]" has no legal definition and the title is meaningless, which is why hiring developers has overhead where you need to check far beyond what the resume says to assess a candidate's true skill.<p>It's great that $50-80,000 salary jobs can exist for people who have a modicum of software development talent. I'm very happy for these people.
I worked teaching factory workers how to use a software, and can say that no matter how much education and training the majority of these people receive they are not going to become software developers, and it isn't just the older generation. It takes a certain level of abstract thought to be a software developer. The kind of software development jobs that a typical factory worker is capable of are quickly disappearing if they aren't already gone.
"Your job screwing bolts on cars disappeared? Learn to code and be a programmer." Great advice for the typical HN reader, but a lot of people who can learn to screw bolts on cars just don't have what it takes to be a good coder.<p>I don't know if it's due to innate intelligence, upbringing, environment, attitude, or what. But there are millions of people out there who just don't seem to be able to master the abstract thinking required. And I'm not sure they'll ever be able to, regardless of how much education we give them.<p>What should our economy do with those people going forward? For social stability and ethical reasons, we ought to give them a path to decent middle class lives. How do we make that happen?<p>I think the key's that from 1880 to 1980, we invented mainly technologies that pulled more and more people into the labor force. Now we've started inventing technologies that push more and more people out of the labor force.<p>How do we reverse the trend? What kind of technology can we try to invent that pulls in a huge number of people to work, the more laborers, the better?
Remember why Agile/Scrum sucks and you'll see when attitudes started to get out of whack : <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5406384" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5406384</a><p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/44bmmq/why_agile_and_especially_scrum_are_terrible/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/44bmmq/why_agi...</a>
> Training, mentoring and counseling people — often from disadvantaged backgrounds — is not a mass-production process.<p>Yes, yes it is. It literally is. Maybe you need some additional sorting of raw materials in, maybe the machines (the teachers, the mentors) have a relatively low number of cycles in their lifespan (number of students they can teach), maybe there's more sorting on the output (just like chips are sorted after production), but at nation-scale software engineers are definitely mass-producible.
"<i>Today, Mr. Davis, 27, is a cybersecurity specialist working on an incident response team at the company. He earns above $40,000, more than twice his salary in retail.</i>"<p>Isn't that like what people at Costco make for running a cash register and being friendly?<p>And who do you think has more job security?<p>edit: To be less coy about it, if you are any good at this stuff and are only making "above $40k", you are getting f-ed.
I'm tired of the continued devaluation of my profession.<p>Software development (I hate the term "coding") is not a manufacturing job, as much as some company wants it to be. And apprenticeships at body shops isn't going to create software developers, it's just going to create terrible software with obvious rot and decay as the years go own.