Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

I feel like we have so much leverage and don&#x27;t use it at all.<p>We&#x27;re still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor. It&#x27;s nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this.<p>If anyone has read <i>Developer Hegemony</i>, I&#x27;m fully on board with that general premise - we start operating like lawyers with partnerships, and turn bosses into customers. Though that does require us to think of ourselves as professionals not nerds who are too smart for business.

I think it ends with everyone becoming a developer.<p>Making machines do things will never end. However, the tools for making machines do things is evolving very quickly.<p>The general art of being a developer will continue to get specialized and at some point specialists at any field would be expected to be able to program their machines.<p>Very few people are learning how to run their servers and much more are moving into AWS type of infrastructure and “cloud literacy” has become a thing.<p>I would expect layers of abstraction to continue to build up and programming to become something like using spreadsheets to do your actual task.<p>Eventually, “true programming” will scale back to building these tools. It would be rather niche, very high skill serious engineering - an elite, hard to get in profession that continues to fetch high salaries. They probably will have some kind of association similar to the lawyers&#x2F;doctors, the code they write will no longer tolerate bugs as a fact of life but they will be responsible as any other licensed professionals. Skipping unit test will land you in jail or very high fine due to malpractice if something goes wrong.

Programmers are increasingly needed for *everything*.<p>I mean, we&#x27;ve entered an age, where a farmer can&#x27;t milk their cows, if the software of the milking robot has a hitch - can&#x27;t plow their fields, when the gps-software that drives the tractor isn&#x27;t working.<p>Apart from that, programming is becoming <i>every other job</i> - as far as domain knowledge is concerned.<p>I&#x27;ve personally experienced (multiple times!) professional accounting companies complaining about not being able to just modify official invoices (totally illegal) but having to cancel and re-issue them with a new invoice number (how it MUST be done). -&gt; It&#x27;s now the responsibility of the programmers to understand how accounting works. Professional accountants just click a button and expect the software to &quot;do the right thing&quot;. -&gt; As in this case, the professional accountant no longer adds much value, they&#x27;ll probably be entirely replaced by software at some point.<p>A more relatable example might be Taxis drivers. It might take years still, but at some point, all Taxis will be self-driving vehicles, created by robots in a fully automated factory. Programmers will be needed for the driving software and the factory software. You might still need some mechanics to repair the factory robots - until when that job is done by robots as well (that have to be programmed).<p>It currently seems more likely to me, that we are headed towards a future, where programming is the *only* job - and everything else is done by software.

Right now developer salaries have greatly risen at the top end - the max has risen much faster than the median. Much of the top end growth has been at companies benefitting from easy investor capital.<p>I think this will follow a typical business cycle. When the next recession comes, investors and companies will focus on shorter term ROI, and many high end developers and long term projects will seem too expensive. Reduced competition will dramatically affect the top end, and non-salary benefits may drop quite a bit. The median salary will probably remain sticky but lose a bit when adjusted for inflation. Eventually the next expansion starts but it may take a very long time for the top end competition to heat up to this degree again.<p>I don&#x27;t expect low-code, AI, or developer productivity jumps to have any real impact anytime soon; there&#x27;s no real evidence of a true jump in the productivity of the overall project.

Author overlooks three important things.<p>First, with amount of software engineers doubling every ~5 years, there is mostly a shortage in software developers <i>with experience</i>. Someone has to teach. Someone has to steer, make decisions based on knowledge, someone has to design architectures, know what coupling matters, what patterns apply, what type of solutions will haunt you later on, etc. etc. etc. No junior can do these things, because the juniors lack the experience of failing several times or maintaining or replacing legacy over years.<p>Secondly, software development is about so much more than writing code. In fact, I spend least of my time typing in code. If your job really is <i>typing code that others told you exactly how to write</i>, then yes, fear for your job. Not because of copilot or better IDEs but because what you do is easily automated away. If people doubt me, I urge them to look at their git-log over the last weeks. I daresay that most will hardly write&#x2F;edit more than 100 lines of code a day. That&#x27;s less than 5 lines per minute.<p>Nearly all software development is about understanding the domain and applying software to solve problems in that domain. About researching what problems are most urgent and what solutions have which tradeoffs. Which patterns apply, how to decouple, where to draw lines, how to keep the software agile and maintainable over decades, and so on. Hell, even &quot;where to put my code&quot; is a hard problem that copilot and IDEs fail miserably at.<p>Thirdly, the no-code movement is a forever-september thing. It has a niche, but that niche is not as big as the no-code salesmen would like you to believe. I&#x27;ve seen &quot;lo-code&quot; come and go for decades now. Every time it promised to take over all the software development only to carve out a niche and be very good only there. More practially: most such no&#x2F;lo-code systems lack a lot of essential paradigms (source-control, accountability, copyability, testability). But they are either far too generic and therefore just as complex and hard to manage as &quot;real software&quot;, or they have a specific niche and shine there! (but only there).<p>So no. Software engineers, especially those that have been in the trade for years (even more when decades) are in high demand and will remain so. Tools won&#x27;t replace them. If anything, tools (which are build and maintained by those developers) only increase the demand.

&gt; The markets are doing their thing. Everyone sees tech workers making money and just generally having a good time and they think: “Hey that sounds like a good career choice”.<p>It seems like you could replace tech workers with any other profession that sounds like a good career choice.<p>Can literally everyone (or even the majority) learn to code? Do they want to learn to code? In my experience, the answer to both questions is no.

5% speed improvement in my tooling would result in about 0.0000001% improvement in my productivity. first of all, so little of what we do is about the tooling. yes, it&#x27;s very helpful, but no tool, no matter how good, can tell you how to migrate a monolithic service into microseconds microservices with no downtime and no data loss. maybe if we didn&#x27;t fuck up the original implementation such things wouldn&#x27;t be needed but there&#x27;s still trillions of lines of code out there and they aren&#x27;t going to rewrite themselves. Google and Facebook aren&#x27;t going to be overthrown by some hot new IDE with autocode built in.<p>secondly.. 5% is nothing. our tooling is so effing slow it needs a 1000x improvement. not in how fast we can write code, just to compile and test the damn stuff.<p>speaking of, amazons reasoning tech sounds interesting.<p>at best this tech will cut out some L3 maybe L4 jobs, but L5+ isn&#x27;t writing code anymore. which in itself will be interesting because new grads are hired at L3.. how will they ever get hired if those slots are tightened up?

All it takes is two things:<p>1. The investor bubble to bust - and I think this will happen due to the soon to be rising interest rates making capital much more difficult too secure.<p>2. One of the big employers dumps devs into the market - say one of the FAANG companies has a sever downturn and lays of thousands of devs. Don&#x27;t think it can happen - Facebook and Google are just a few regulations away from mass lay offs and downsizing.

I’m coming to the uncomforable conclusion that we’re ALL doing a dance. Programmers make a product, Managers manage the people, HR protects the company, Legal protects HR, the Shareholders leverage the Executive Staff to make their profit margins.<p>But in all of this, very little ACTUAL STUFF happens.<p>(I say this as a security guy, who’s line on the balance sheet is ALWAYS in the cost column.)<p>So much of what we do is bullshitgrinding that it doesn’t really pay to look at the whole thing too closely. So refactor for the 99th time, and review the 12th latest greatest web server or database connector or infrastructure as a service solution and try not to get too hung up on it…

I have depression issues, and have been coding for 10 years now. I don&#x27;t know if I&#x27;m bad at programming, or if it&#x27;s because I lack a degree, or because I have been chronically unemployed and lack experience, or because I&#x27;m too selective with the jobs I apply on (I can&#x27;t bear php or js stuff like angular), or because I live in france or in the wrong city. I may have an atypical profile.<p>Programming has not been very good to me.<p>When I hear &quot;programmers are in high demand&quot;, I don&#x27;t see it applying to me.

Lawyers and doctors have always enjoyed “good times” and there’s no reason to think they’ll stop. Why not programmers, too?

Is this actually true? Are CEOs lamenting their engineering labor costs like this? I feel like by now the cost of engineering labor has demonstrated its value over and over again, to the point where most CEOs accept the cost of engineering is more or less a shared expense across competition, and not really something to be reduced.

&gt;&gt; The CEO’s job is to make as much profit as possible. Higher salaries mean less profit. It’s just how the game works.<p>I find this to be too simplified. The CEO&#x27;s job is far beyond salaries alone.<p>&gt;&gt; Even if we enter some new dotcom bubble and a good chunk of our startup ecosystem dies off, demand for tech is spreading across all industries, businesses everywhere are digitizing their operations and these systems will need to be maintained somehow.<p>We&#x27;re not in a bubble. We are in the information era, and cloud computing is helping drive this. The demand for programmers will go away when the human population saturates on robots and AI. We&#x27;ve barely scratched the surface.<p>The only other possible downturn I can think of is a social reaction to reject technology, and enter another type of &#x27;dark age&#x27;.

Boom and bust has always been a part of this business. It was hard to find jobs as a programmer in the early 90es, the early 00es, and around the financial crisis in 2008. You can be sure that there will be a bust again, simply because hype and optimism eventually will overshoot.<p>It has nothing to do with &quot;no code&quot;, more productive development environments, or end-users becomming programmers. That pressure has always been in the business but the increase in productivity has always been gobled up by increase in complexity, expansion of scope, or automatization of new business.

&gt; I can’t think of a single product that was able to get to any meaningful degree of success running on top of some low code platform.<p>I don’t know if this is just wildly ignorant or intentionally misleading, but thousands (maybe millions?) of businesses and organizations run low code platforms to develop their internal DBs and inventory and POS systems, among other things. Access and FileMaker are well known examples that lots of small businesses have used over the years. Bigger corps use all kinds of form generators, DB query systems, RAD tools, and low-code environments. These days devs are now using low code game engines to make games that have hit the top-10 lists on your favorite App Store.<p>Demand for devs is still going up, and low code platforms aren’t going to suddenly change that, but this story point should probably have been left out because low code platforms are hugely successful and are growing, and devs are still in demand <i>despite</i> the success and increasing market for low code platforms. It’d be interesting to explore why, but it’s just wrong to claim low code isn’t successful.

&gt; Developers are expensive. If a new IDE shows up and they can deliver stuff 5% faster, that means you can have 5% less programmers! Of course the IDE has a price, but it is almost certainly cheaper than 5% of a developer.<p>Dev work is nebulous enough that very few companies seem willing to invest in dev tooling.<p>I&#x27;ve heard nothing but good things about JRebel for example and how it keeps people focused instead of sword fighting during long builds.<p>I am aware of one company that uses it, and they only allow it for senior devs.

&gt; No code &#x2F; Low code<p>&gt; People have been trying this for decades and it never really worked out. I can’t think of a single product that was able to get to any meaningful degree of success running on top of some low code platform.<p>Every. Single. Squarespace. Website.<p>You probably interacted with several today without even knowing it. They’re everywhere.<p>No code solutions have almost entirely killed the need for developers of shopping carts for small businesses. That was my bread and butter in the mid aughts.

It seems like the entire economy is like one great big software project, running late, and adding as many people as possible. What did Fred Brooks say about this?<p>I think it will end when the rest of us can&#x27;t produce enough to keep the programmers fed.

A lot of programmers work to automate and manage huge shifting businesses, saving sometimes 100x more than they cost. Many others work in effectively the entertainment industry: social media, actual entertainment, apps, and games.<p>I don&#x27;t think the entertainment industry will ever stop: there&#x27;s always someone with money and an idea to capture the world&#x27;s attention. I don&#x27;t think businesses will ever stop growing and evolving, therefore needing programmers to migrate and rework their systems.

I think it ends with everyone being a programmer of some kind, and with the field splitting into more distinct fields.<p>Like comp sci split from math, and with all the specialisations we see already, it has to go that way.<p>You dont just study to be an engineer or a scientist anymore, you become a &quot;microbiologist&quot; or a &quot;structural engineer&quot;, and a similar thing will happen to CS + IT.<p>Already, around the second or third year of university (if not earlier), someone interested in web dev will have a vastly different skillset than somebody interested in embedded. Someone interested in dev ops may have no clue about how to organize your stack when writing x64 assembly, and some software forensics person may not be able to tell the difference between React and Angular.js.<p>Already you dont hire a &quot;programmer&quot;, you hire a &quot;frontend engineer&quot; or &quot;embedded C programmer&quot; etc.<p>I believe Low- and No-code solutions will continue to be added to any software it can be, making more &quot;regular&quot; people from other jobs aware of what conditions, loops and variables are. They may not ever become programmers the way we know it now, but they will be (and already are) programming their machines.

As a web&#x2F;fullstack with over 10 years of experience and based in EU, I don&#x27;t have this impression at all. Actively applying and interviewing, still receiving absurd requests to resolve various quizzes, teasers, and assignments. Potential salaries top at miserable 70-80k EUR in countries where monthly salary deductions reach 40%. It&#x27;s better for me to basically seat idle and work on some personal projects.

Regardless of whatever trends exist now, every programmer must spare a thought about their future. Ageism is common in this industry. No matter how great a programmer you are, you will be eventually discriminated. And this area of work is notoriously famous for giving people age related diseases.<p>If you have a gravy train going for you. Ensure you plan your retirement well, take care of your diet, exercise and relationships.<p>Nothing really lasts forever, even if does for a community, individuals always run out of luck. Instead of thinking of yourself as a superman, imagining yourself as a mortal with limited resources, time and luck will have you better placed for the future.<p>YMMV.

When I was 10 years old I sat next to a guy on a plane who sold linoleum tile. He said he used to be an aeronautical engineer, but lost his job when the bottom dropped out of his industry.<p>I&#x27;ve always remembered that, and try not to take the good times for granted. But damn it&#x27;s been going on 25 years now, and except for little hiccups in 2001 and 2008, demand for programmers is still white hot.

Other people know more than me but the times are good now because the VC&#x27;s are playing a ponzi scheme (or greater fool theory). Each VC puts in money simply because the valuation will go up and there would be another VC wanting in, willing to pay more. VC&#x27;s have a lot of cash for whatever reason, low interest rate or Oil money. Hot take: this is not dissimilar to what is happening to crypto.<p>We developers are just part of this game, just incidental to the story. We are paid more simply because a lot of money comes in from top, not for some nonsense like we are &quot;highly skilled&quot; or the supply is less.<p>Yes I do believe that most of tech is a zero sum game, hardly any value is created.<p>Where does it end? It ends when VC&#x27;s get bored of this game and move on to other things

Very few comments in this thread talking about what he concludes as the most likely scenario- &quot;decreased investment&quot;. Just what will happen when the Fed is forced to raise interest rates? What will happen to the unprofitable unicorns or even unprofitable public unicorns, much less all of the no-name startups burning VC capital? Surely not every Uber is going to get the Amazon treatment and allowed to keep burning until it finds a way to profitability.<p>Of course, if ZIRP is reversed, who knows what will become of the economy in general.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.readmargins.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;zirp-explains-the-world" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.readmargins.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;zirp-explains-the-world</a>

Author seems to have a zero-sum world view, and think that everything that goes up must come down. I personally don&#x27;t believe in either. Tech workers will continue to be in increasingly high demand, and automation, AI and &quot;no-code&quot; or &quot;low-code&quot; will only intensify that trend, not diminish it.

For people that are entrenched in the industry, 10+ years of experience, specialized skill sets, etc. I really don’t think the genie will be put back in the bottle. The people that will be burned the worst are newcomers or people with narrow skillsets in areas that fall out of fashion.

It&#x27;s worth considering that the number of programmers&#x2F;technologists working in an organisation serves a signal for the organisation as an financial instrument. An organisation wants to show growth in terms of revenue but also in terms of their capabilities, and frequently the &quot;human capital&quot; of the organisation is a metric that is reviewed here.<p>If you&#x27;ve been in a growing tech company you&#x27;ve probably seen this as colleagues being hire when you&#x27;re not clear why, and the organisation actually preferring solutions that require many more employees.<p>There&#x27;s also just the factor that – today at least – technology management have a lot of social power within their organisations. Most managers wants to grow their little fiefdom – which usually means more headcount.<p>Anywho, I guess I&#x27;m just saying there&#x27;s a lot of factors completely unrelated to automation that incentivize hiring more programmers. Many of these factors are not rational for the organistions themselves – managers growing their headcount to the limit their structure will allow. Some of them are though! I.E. company as a financial instrument rather than as a business.<p>The model of a business selling something and optimizing process for maximum profits is in there for sure, but from my experience there&#x27;s a lot of other factors that end up building a very incoherent whole.

Everyone in the US or a wealthy country pushing for &#x27;remote work&#x27; is outsourcing themselves, ultimately.<p>In the short term we get &#x27;remote work&#x27; which some see as a benefit.<p>In the medium term, absent the apparent advantage&#x2F;willingness of people to be &#x27;on prem&#x27; (in the minds of employers), it&#x27;s just as easy to hire someone at 3&#x2F;4 price from Europe, 1&#x2F;2 price from E. Europe, 1&#x2F;4 the price from India.<p>While &#x27;language and custom&#x27; do present real challenges, let&#x27;s not kid ourselves: the CFO can use very, very powerful language to push for &#x27;offshoring&#x27; because they will talk in terms of &#x27;raw dollars&#x27;.<p>The &#x27;advantage&#x27; of devs. from wealthier nations is abstract. Their costs are not.<p>In much the same way companies made a fairly narrow choice to jam everyone into &#x27;open work spaces&#x27; - which drives a lot of people nuts and I think harms productivity, but is quantifiably cheaper ... companies may opt to &#x27;cheap out&#x27;.<p>Many will.<p>I&#x27;m wary that the material realities of on&#x2F;off prem, language, culture, time-zones, communications etc. will be lost in the mix.

Despite efforts to make the job of programming easier, the reality is that it has just expanded the scope. The cloud made it so you had to learn cloud computing in addition to Linux management. Containers add a whole other vertical of problems. It just goes on and on. The need for expertise doesn’t go away with more abstraction

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.

Short of a dot-com burst I don&#x27;t see a glut of software engineers. However, as the career prospects are better known there are more people thinking they want to be a software developer, will this increase the talent pool and decrease demand?

I can&#x27;t remewthe last time my job bottleneck was writing code to implement requirements.<p>The bottleneck is almost always migrating a legacy system, getting buy-in, interviewing users to design the system, or waiting on requirements to be finalized.

More code is being written every day than is being retired. With an ever-growing code base, comes the requirement for more resources to maintain it. Demand for developers is outpacing supply.

I think the current bubble is very short-term. It has been caused by 10 years of low interest rates pushing a lot of capital into startups. The recent &quot;next level&quot; hysteria in the market has been caused by stimulus packages in the US and elsewhere. A lot of what we&#x27;re seeing is very reminiscent of the .com bubble.<p>That said, I do think underlying the froth is a genuine increased societal demand for tech and programmers, so I don&#x27;t expect the collapse to be as bad as .com outside of crypto and other hyper-bubbles. Yes, there will be a lot of job losses, but most engineers will just experience a salary correction rather than years of unemployment.<p>In the long-term, a move away from traditional programming will be necessary to solve the supply problem. Tools like SquareSpace, which are really awful but do genuinely replace a lot of low-end web dev work, will eventually mature and begin to eat up a decent amount of engineering demand. We&#x27;ll see lots of these Excel-like apps that can serve low-end business needs reasonably well and remove the need for engineers.<p>I think there are a lot of opportunities making great creative tools for programming-like tasks, just as we&#x27;ve had a few decades of innovation in graphic design or publishing tools - there are lots of very valuable startup opportunities waiting for those who have the motivation and patience to figure out how to help non-nerds do nerdy things.

If you look at the data, software jobs are growing far faster than new graduates in computer science. A quick google search just found well over 250,000 open positions in the US, with about 50,000 new graduates per year. I&#x27;d bet we have decades more of high demand and high salaries for people with CS degrees. I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if low-code tools get good enough to power many websites though, so I wouldn&#x27;t be quite as bullish on code-camp graduates seeing the same growth in salaries.

&gt;The CEO’s job is to make as much profit as possible<p>It doesn&#x27;t have to be, especially if the company isn&#x27;t public. Their job is to run the company successfully. Part of that is keeping their employees happy and retaining talent.<p>&gt;If a new IDE shows up and they can deliver stuff 5% faster, that means you can have 5% less programmers!<p>That&#x27;s never how it works though. As workers have become more efficient they have been required to output more and more.<p>Overall a lot of claims in this blog are unsubstantiated

&gt;&gt; I think this is the most likely scenario. Much of the demand for programmers right now stems more from expectations of future profits than from profits being currently made.<p>This is certainly true for companies that sell software. Revenue comes from sales of software that already exists and developers are paid to create the next version. Software companies are in effect charging rent for something they have already developed that has zero production cost. SaaS takes this to the next level. Most of these companies are ripe for destruction by Free Software unless they provide something of exceptional value that is hard to replicate. To me the examples are things like Mathematica, or high end CAD or FEA software. PCB design has recently been conquered by KiCAD 6, though there are (apparently) some very high-end tools that have exotic capabilities still. Blender is really taking a shot at animation software, but there is still plenty of room for the high-end.<p>Most software written today is not product software, but internal software to automate things, or otherwise make a business run. Until FLOSS takes over in this space there will always be a need for programmers simply because new companies are always being created that need automation.

Although there’s a constant supply, there’s still an exponential demand.<p>Programming has already created two classes of developers for many years. Those blue collar type programmers who translate requirements into code. And those white collar type engineers who design &amp; gather requirements into concepts.<p>I think the big divide here has always been for the latter, but companies still need the former to train &amp; skill up to the latter.<p>I don’t see this trend slowing down for the next 20-30 years. Hell, even by 2025 there will be a deficient of over 150 million. I don’t think we can train nor repopulate fast enough for that demand which will only increase each year in addition.<p>Times will be great for knowledge work jobs in the tech industry. Not just programming. Programming experience will only become more required for non-coding jobs. Especially any people management or leadership type role.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.microsoft.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;30&#x2F;microsoft-launches-initiative-to-help-25-million-people-worldwide-acquire-the-digital-skills-needed-in-a-covid-19-economy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.microsoft.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;30&#x2F;microsoft-launch...</a>

&gt; No code &#x2F; Low code...But hey, deep learning was in a similar spot in the 90s and now we have real products that use it and it mostly works.<p>The major difference is deep learning because viable because parallel computing became 3+ orders of magnitude cheaper. Low-code isn&#x27;t limited by technical limitations, so I don&#x27;t see anything changing anytime soon.

As to what might happen regarding &quot;Decreased Investment&quot;, this article [1] has an interesting analysis for those working in rapidly funded startups. In short it predicts a Minsky moment, but in relation to funding &quot;speed&quot; rather than &quot;value&quot;.<p>&gt; Does the compression of timelines in venture change the distribution of terminal outcomes for venture-backed companies? [1]<p>&gt; A Minsky moment is a sudden, major collapse of asset values which marks the end of the growth phase of a cycle in credit markets or business activity.[2]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pivotal.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;minsky-moments-in-venture-capital" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pivotal.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;minsky-moments-in-venture-cap...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Minsky_moment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Minsky_moment</a>

It doesn’t.<p>Software has been eating the world, and there’s no sign of it stopping.<p>Software gave people like me a way to escape dire economic situation, and is the main reason for increased social mobility as in having lots of options. That is attractive to every young person out there, and the demand goes up and to the right.

I prefer to see it in terms of power hierarchy. Programmers gained a massive advantage in the past decades because they got to dictate to everyone how to work - they went higher in the power hierarchy. This has taken the wages of everyone else lower and lower and lower, while tech companies have been making absurd margins (yes there is a lot of zero sum in it). But now free money is over and inflation is showing its teeth very sharply -- here in europe it is going to be a massive problem.<p>What you will see is more and more tech-savvy business owners in all other sectors that will reign-in the overpriced-snake-oil salesmen of the big tech and will put developers back in the lower ranks of the cogs hierarchy.

*flippant comment warning...<p>three things coming together: 1.things like sharepoint and powerapps getting better 2.more exposure to programming&#x2F;abstractions&#x2F;scripting in the general populous 3.widespead documentation &#x2F; agreement of standard business processes (maybe in the form of templates for number 1)<p>underlying all of this is when people wake up to the fact that data and process matters, software doesnt.<p>there will still be developer jobs but they will look more like how infra jobs look under cloud computing - higher skilled, harder, bigger implications when you mess up.<p>There is value in a few amazing coders out there but IMHO most developers add most value by getting to know how to abstract thier particular customers business.<p>EDIT:formatting

The article claims &quot;Supply goes up&quot; and &quot;Every year we get more Computer science graduates.&quot;<p>Except, that isn&#x27;t true. The number of CS graduates as a proportion of all graduates is actually falling, while the need for programmers is steadily rising.

I don&#x27;t know if it will happen, but a thing that <i>needs to happen</i> that will probably tamp this down: Liability, and&#x2F;or other real consequences, for bad programming.<p>We have this for construction and other fields, and it&#x27;s basically nonexistent here.

It ends the same way it did the last time. A giant tech market crash, more market consolidation, and massive cultural change.<p>At this point, things move so fast that operating systems are shipped with known bugs, security flaws, and half baked ideas. They are then patched via over-the-net updates. I think this will stop. People will go back to more traditional development paradigms out of necessity. They also won’t completely trash code bases that have been patched to the point of being reliable and somewhat secure just to make a new thing no one wanted.<p>My only other prediction is that people will eventually be more conservative about picking tech stacks. They will want proven track records.

Talking specifically about the web: We&#x27;re still not there with no code tools and I don&#x27;t know if there&#x27;s a future where the very specific needs of businesses could be met with building blocks. Sure, designs, basic features--but there always seems to be the one feature that is outside of the scope of what the tool can provide and it can send the project tumbling down trying to shoehorn it in. The tools are getting better, but I think we&#x27;re a long way away from where developers, at least strong backend or full stack developers need to worry about their job security.

Standups with the entire team of say 5 or more people are usually a waste of time for most of the attendees. Most attendees are simply listening to updates and questions between the lead and the other team members. Sure, sometimes an unrelated developer might have insight but it is rare and can cause rabbit hole conversations that waste other team member’s time.<p>Would prefer a structure where an experienced developer (preferably in area of work) meets one on one for 10-15 mins max with each team member, provides advice or refers the team member to resources to aid if needed.

I&#x27;m amazed that web site development and web servers are still so complicated. I expected that to be all drag and drop by now. Most of it isn&#x27;t very original.<p>As for programmer employment, we&#x27;ve seen that collapse before. Go read SFGirl from 2001.[1] Check out the Pink Slip Parties.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20010302012226&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sfgirl.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20010302012226&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sfgirl...</a>

If a company is doing something remotely cutting-edge, no amount of low-code tools and low-skilled labour is going to help. Information retrieval, PB-scale data processing, robotics, embedded, graphics and video at any significant scale are all still too cutting-edge and will be for next decade as far as I can see.<p>You hit performance and architectural limits pretty quickly when doing things naïvely. At this rate, growth at tech sector is going to create more demand (than created supply) for able programmers for at least a few decades into future.

It won&#x27;t end for anyone who can stay relevant and adopt to the new tech.<p>It will end for everyone who is stuck at current tech which will be &quot;past&quot; in the future, both for tooling&#x2F;tech and most importantly mindset.<p>For example, React Native and Solidity pays well nowadays. I know they will probably be replaced with something else (in terms of demand, not necessarily an immediate technical successor). If I don&#x27;t start learning whatever-comes-next-in-my-field, I&#x27;d stay in the past, no matter how good I get on React Native or Solidity.

This is such a childish view of the matter. Imagine if a scribe in medieval times wrote an article. &quot;Times are great for people who know read and write now. How does it end?&quot;

&gt;&gt; Higher salaries mean less profit. It’s just how the game works.<p>This is a false premise. As a counter argument it would be easy for a rational CEO to pay higher salary if the net incremental ROI on that salary is positive.<p>Then there are second order benefits. A players attract A players, and so on. So you have to also consider the non-financial ROI on the higher salary to attract the best talent.<p>There is a reason why the top companies are willing to pay higher salaries ...

“If the economic conditions change and investors decide they don’t like tech companies anymore, many of them will inevitably close. Less companies hiring also means less demand.”<p>This is a cyclical phenomena, but most likely the factor listed to have the greatest impact on developers.<p>As for high developer salaries, scarcity of knowledge with newer languages and frameworks along with the demand for experienced candidates with those skills certainly has an impact.

&gt; Much of the demand for programmers right now stems more from expectations of future profits than from profits being currently made.<p>That&#x27;s a big assumption to make.

Programmers enable a lot of bullshit jobs indirectly. And it&#x27;s easy to write software that serves no purpose whatsoever without everyone noticing.<p>The most famous business failures were hardware or offline companies like Juicero, WeWork or Theranos. Software companies tend to survive, grow and &quot;produce&quot;.<p>The end of great times for programmers will be the end of bullshit jobs for everyone else, and that crisis will be much bigger.

&gt; Higher salaries mean less profit. It’s just how the game works.<p>Software is sold at massive markup. No sane tech company is complaining about profits at the moment. Sure they&#x27;d pay less but if they bump our salaries they&#x27;re still making insane profits. At the moment it&#x27;s COGS for any CEO and they&#x27;ve already accepted it&#x27;s high for software.

I remember reading almost the exact same post around 15 years ago. Back then, the boogyman was outsourcing to India rather than code bootcamps. I am not saying programmer salaries will never go down but my feeling is that demand will keep outpacing supply for a while. Software is eating the world after all.

Are they really though? I&#x27;m nearly ready to call it once and for all, toxic and disruptive industry, after 12+ years in it. Expectations are unfairly high, salaries make absolutely no sense, 60+ hours a week are expected even though contracts talk about 37&#x2F;40hrs&#x2F;week on average. Meh.

Every company that hires three junior developers today will need one senior developer in a year or two. It&#x27;s great to be a developer today, even better, if you are a senior dev.

This will probably settle with many new small companies succeeding at software products. The interests align beatifully when the SWE are de owners of the business.

If it ends, it could end with companies asking for more experience. Everybody in the current group would be okay but new grads would find salaries lower.

&gt;I can’t think of a single product that was able to get to any meaningful degree of success running on top of some low code platform<p>Microsoft Office&#x2F;Excel

When the easy money stops. Web&#x2F;mobile tech is subject to vast over investment in the USA relative to the real economic value it creates.

Programmers will end like most factory workers: there is no reason most of the current programming can&#x27;t be automated at some point.

I&#x27;ve been hearing op topics, exact things more or less, in differen shapes or forms for over 3 decades. And yet here we are.

With the prices going down thanks to the comoditization of offshoring, and everyone becomes another cog on the machine.

It ends with ecological and societal collapse. While the party lasts tech will increase. But eventually in the next 20-50 years tech will mean very little given we don&#x27;t have the resources to continue growth exponentially.<p>In the interim, programming is a great way to make money, but at some point it&#x27;s going to lose its prominence.

&gt;&gt; The CEO’s job is to make as much profit as possible. Higher salaries mean less profit.<p>Such a silly reductive view, if this was the case Facebook&#x2F;Meta engineers wouldn&#x27;t be some of the best paid in the world.

i am a programmer but don’t get paid for it yet. hopefully i can get out there before the crash (if any)

uh, with more greatness?

The super volcano under Yellowstone explodes, triggering end times.

Epic Solar flare or some capitalist downfall is more likely than those lame-from-the-same-pre-2000 book of predictions that servers wouldn’t need IT staff as they get easier to manage (that didn’t age well!).

times are great? why?

As far as I&#x27;m concerned, the ride stops when the masses realize how easy the profession actually is. You can take any office worker and train them to an entry level competency in 3-5 months, when they will get a job for at least $75k. They are then in a new career path and will soon make 100k. I find it impossible to convince non devs that being a developer is easy. They can&#x27;t fathom why we get paid so much if it&#x27;s easy. They think I must be lying, or lucky, or too smart. No! It&#x27;s fucking easy!<p>As soon as people catch on to this, and start doing bootcamps with the same frequency that they do weird &quot;side hustles&quot;, it&#x27;s over. The current scarcity is mainly because people don&#x27;t realize they can become developers.