Hacker News Reader

> I think we're starting to see the need for 'laborer' programmers.

The mass offshoring effort in the US through the 00s was exactly this. The problem that many companies discovered is that you really get what you paid for. If you spec something out to a 'T'[1], you'd get exactly what you ask for - warts and all. If you don't provide enough detail to do that, you get to go back-and-forth until you do. And if you want anyone to troubleshoot a mildly complex issue... well, good luck. Maybe one in ten of the people who wrote the code from your spec have that ability.

Some equilibrium has returned, but not before the damage was done - causing a lot of unfortunate misconceptions about the abilities or lack thereof for entire demographics of people.

> code school

For the most part, these are an attempt to create the same thing without the offshoring - 'teaching code' of that sort has been relatively common in offshore markets I've worked with in past jobs. I don't think that's their intention, but it does appear to be the end result.

[1] To the point where you're more or less pseudo-coding the solution

> I think we're starting to see the need for 'laborer' programmers. There's a lot of relatively unskilled glue/laborious coding that needs to be done. When you need someone to hammer a bunch of code out for you, you don't need an experienced and flexible software engineer as much as you need a kid with a well-trodden neural pathway that lights up when they write code in your tech stack.

What do you think those indian programmers were doing for the past decade?

There kind of used to be acceptability for this - i.e. architects designing the class topology and sometimes even method names, and handing it down. From what I've witnessed, this started to fall out of favor around the early 2000's, if not before.

The problem (at least as I imagine it) was that this is inefficient when the designs need to change and one person gets a really soft easy job and the others get a lot of detectable grunt work.

Now we have the opposite problem - the "architect" title is kind of despised by people who know what it means, and everybody designs - but often those designs are at odds with each other, and usually too entwined with ego to come to compromises that make different sections of the code work well together.

There is a complex balance between finding the right level of top-down design and order and using all the assets of the team to make sure things are good and stable, and in particular, maintainable to folks who are going to be new to the code.

> I think we're starting to see the need for 'laborer' programmers. There's a lot of relatively unskilled glue/laborious coding that needs to be done.

I have a computer for that! Seriously, that's one of the things a computer excels at. This is what is so nice about a language with strong dynamic typing: it makes writing the sort of code which writes glue code reasonably easy.

How do you get your computer to solve the problem of "this text needs to be 2 points larger, a darker shade of red and 5 pixels to the right" without involving a programmer?

I've worked on the Avon AU website and we had a few hundred tasks like that. It's why (to link back to my current pet peeve) I'm upset that my relatives are unwilling to learn a tiny bit of web design because "it's too hard". There is a market for people who ONLY know how to do this. (There were two people in the company I was working for and my team only got access to them one hour every week - they were that busy.)

If this is true there's a serious mismatch somewhere.

There a lot of people who can do this work in the UK. Mostly they don't get paid very much at all.