Edit: Also, for every "life is hard" millennial I have met many hard working, extremely intelligent, and charitable ones. Some of whom need to work multiple jobs dealing with the fact that our generation has almost no upward mobility unless you do something like learn to code. The fact that a terrible houses cost amounts of money that years ago would get you a mansion (even when adjusted for inflation) and where spending $100k on college does not even remotely guarantee you a job. Where pensions don't exist and retirement is a pipe dream. Every millennial I know over 25 has been laid off, some multiple times.
Edit 2: furthermore, in the United States, my generation has never known a time where we were not at war. And we are the ones being sent to those wars.
I don't live in the US... perhaps vote for someone who will help change it to a better system?
Also, to think one person (the president) can magically fix decades of compounding problems is naive. It's also naive to think we are isolated from the rest of the world and we can magically unlink our economy from it. With that said, about 50% of millennials voted last election and 83% are registered to vote. So I'd say a large number of us did vote for the person we think will change things.
Edit: and almost without exception the millennials I know who didn't vote did it because they felt neither candidate was acceptable.
you only get to vote for the president?!
do you live in a democracy where you can vote to get things changed? or perhaps people in america just like it that way.
maybe it is naive, but other democratic countries are moving ahead with more progressive ideas.
Very true
> you only get to vote for the president?!
We vote for the president, senate, congress, and local representatives. We rarely vote for individual issues (like say Brexit) on a national level, those are usually decided for us.
> do you live in a democracy where you can vote to get things changed? or perhaps people in america just like it that way. maybe it is naive, but other democratic countries are moving ahead with more progressive ideas
America is a Constitutional Republic not a true democracy. We don't even get one vote per person. Our votes are broken up into statistical areas that are winner take all. And I can assure you that many Americans don't like it that way but it is very difficult to change in a two party system. Which is why many people (millennials more than any other group) are pushing to end the 2 party system.
What are you saying below that insult and pontificating? "It used to be harder"? "I am better"? "Old people are better"? Honestly I'm not being facetious, I just can't give this comment a constructive spin. What is the essence?
It's not a truth that programming is hard. It might "feel" hard for some, might not be for others. Learning programming is really easy these days, and I'm sure will get even easier.
The hardest thing these days seems to be making choices between the absolute abundance of creations that are available in the world of programming.
Other forms of systems programming that involve concurrency etc are also newer.
So is cloud. The list goes on...
Every generation faces issues and programming IS hard. It is unfair and condescending to write this office as a millennial concern.
I disagree. If only because as programming has gotten easier, what constitutes even a simple app has gotten a lot more demanding.
Maybe building toy application has gotten significantly easier but actually building a useful application on an active platform is much more daunting.
And really debugging a desktop application 20 years ago wasn't much different than it is now. But now I have to connect through emulators, browsers, etc. There's so much more crap in the way.
But you make a good point. But it wasn't easier because the tooling was better (it wasn't) or the debugging was better (it wasn't) or the whole ecosystem makes more sense (it doesn't). It was easier because I could google for every problem, error message, code snippet, or issue. And that Googling was absolutely necessary.
What's interesting is that I really didn't learn much. Without any access to the Internet I couldn't reproduce it.
I think the conclusion isn't that programming is easier, it's that the Internet is awesome. The Internet makes everything easier -- cooking, car repairs, home renovations, physics, chemistry, etc.
Software development is a bit harder.
And the tooling has gotten better, without them you wouldn't be able to debug, test your android app without ever owning a phone. This applies to other fields as well. The thing where internet does help is participating in discussions, whether you are a beginner/expert.
That doesn't mean the technology is easier that just means the reference material is more accessible. In fact, I'd argue that in a lot of cases the technology is harder and therefore more reference material, stack overflow answers, and source code reading is necessary.
> Googling was necessary because you were a beginner.
Of course. But many of the answers I found were sort of black magic. The Android project layout is at least 5 times more complicated than it should be. And even many of the answers were not that old and already out of date. I definitely felt that many of the issues I encountered could not have been just figured out my own.
When getting your developer tools and documentation required a CD there was a lot more care put into everything. It feels these days that everything is built on an ever shifting house of cards.
For many applications parallel and concurrent processing is not a nice to have but mandatory and apps can be distributed across hundreds of machine.
I remember reading RFCs when I was getting started. You could learn all of HTTP by reading two RFCs. Now you have to read a dozen if you want comprehensive knowledge of just HTML.
Very few apps need to be distributed across hundreds of machines, but even there, there's so much tech available to make it pretty easy. No need to deal with the details of the nightmare that was RPC / DCOM / CORBA
You also may be right about hundreds but a great many apps need to be distributed across more than two.
Edit: also, for the record, as a millennial I did have to deal with DCOM. Although granted most are shielded from it.
But yes, in the future I expect we have better ways to approach security that will make it easier too.
The one Meteor project I worked on at scale we specifically wrote integration tests to try to read and write other user's data just to make sure we didn't have a hole open up. Because we did have a whole open up and we learned from our mistake.
Part of the problem of Meteor is that it is "magic" in a lot of ways. Because so many things are so easy, when something doesn't work the way you want (like there is a performance issue) it is often difficult to figure out.