Hacker News Reader

Comment by shados | Hacker News Reader

Articles like these, while only loosely related, always make me think that the software engineering bubble has to pop. You have people with ton of education busting their behind dealing with little brats all day to try to make sure they have a future... During that time, some bro who read a couple of books and hammered on his keyboard, and MAYBE did a 3 months bootcamp gets bummed if he can't pull in 100k in one of the coasts with a flex schedule and free lunches/coffee/smoothies/whatever. God forbid they get paged in the middle of the night, they'll scream bloody murder. Same contrasts with trade workers: hiring qualified carpenters/plumbers/painters/whatever is becoming incredibly difficult.

Obviously I'm only considering the extremes here, but those extremes are...very common.

Society can't go very far if the ONLY thing people do is write keywords in a text editor all day. We need to properly value other professions too.

View on HN

Most people wouldn't be able to cut it in software dev, whether they did the 3 month bootcamp or even if they managed to pass a 4-year university program. 99% of the time, Little Jimmy's 4th grade English teacher would have a snowball's chance in hell as a professional developer.

This might have been true 20 years ago when software development meant everything from a fundamental understanding of hardware (including how pixels are laid out, how to manage gamma, etc for the front end) to knowing a lot of theory (because you had to implement your collections in house, manage the code base by hand, etc) but nowadays I'm pretty sure at least half of everyone could be pointed at a web framework and bootstrap and make a functional website in half a year.

Sure a professional would have made that in a week, but their next site will take half as long, and then half as long... until they are within striking distance of someone who does still know all those fundamentals. They will mostly be limited in what they can do, but most people don't really need developers that can do anything even if they pay for them without realizing that.

Programming is being commoditized. In the same way you don't see a doctor first thing when you go to one; you see a nurse, tech, or assistant. Not everything requires the most expensive learning investment. Most programming jobs don't require you to be able to write a proof of the code you copy paste from Stack Overflow.

Programming has already been commoditized. No one has to learn anything. Simply outsource the code to a shop in India. Done.

It's easy for those small problems. It's hard when you're designing products that need to get to market quickly and solve a difficult problem without product sinking bugs. That's why developers and engineers get paid a lot more.

It's easy to make a website look pretty - which is what I find bootcamp people can be good at.

That's a very small part of software development.

They've, in my experience, struggled with highly distributed and scalable applications/systems.

Most people don't need to make their own solutions for that anymore either, since we have AWS, GCP, GKE, etc.

However, we software engineers (as well as computer scientists and devs) tend to underestimate how much we've already learned and internalized. It becomes painfully obvious when you try to teach someone, and realize that you need to start at a much earlier point than you expected.

What's funny is that I have only worked for the big tech companies since I graduated and I know how to do all the backend stuff really well and thus I can do it in a few weeks for my side projects. However, the fronted code kills me and I keep stalling and getting confused on my new projects trying to figure out all the js/html/css to make it look really good for normal users...

Just make it functional with react/redux, then hire a designer to give you feedback on it.

Anyone can build an app, just as anyone can build a house. But if you want a roof that won’t rot for 20 years, you need to pay someone who knows how to build a proper house.

By the same token, if you want an app that will still be maintainable in 5 years, you need a professional. An amateur can build most requirements, but the architecture will seize up if it’s just layers of hacks.

It’s sort of an interesting situation for startups, because their business requirements for newly acquired users are often changing on <5 year timeframes. So actually throwing away the whole system every few years turns out to be an OK strategy.

The problem is previously acquired customers, who won’t generally deal well if you tell them half of your products features are going away for 18 months, or maybe forever.

You can sometimes hack around this by basically ditching all of your old customers and taking a high turnover strategy. That can work well for the middle of your growth curve. You burn a chunk of your addressable market in the long term. Also most companies don’t have the nerve to do it.

And it can cause cash problems.

But there are viable strategies that way.

Eh, I haven’t seen any evidence that experienced professionals can build a website that will last for 5 years either. Business requirements inevitably requires hacks and kludges, and abstraction layers implemented to deal with the problems of today become tomorrow’s layer that everyone wants to rewrite or refactor.

Refactoring over the five years is the opportunity a good developer gives you.

When I say the architecture “seizes up” I mean it gets to the point where

1) a refactor that would shave 100 points off your annual planned work costs more than 100 points

and 2) hacks are slowing your pace to the point that a realistic estimate for your annual planned work is growing faster than your team is working it down.

Note that in such a situation you will still be “getting things done” but your costs are rising while your output is decreasing. Eventually that grinds to a halt and your team will demand a costly and often fatal 2.0 cycle.

A good developer can refactor as they work, and say no to unworkable plans, such that your cost per point grows only linearly, so you can maintain stable feature output while growing your staff linearly.

> I haven’t seen any evidence that experienced professionals can build a website that will last for 5 years either

You need a team of experienced professionals, which virtually no longer exists. You could work at 10 different companies back to back and not come across a team that can do it. That's the industry now.

> if you want an app that will still be maintainable in 5 years

That's part of the issue. People have been making teams who CANT build apps still maintainable in 5 years. Everyone has and only a select few remember/know that it's possible.

At a previous job, I was in a meeting where we pointed out an app had become unmaintainable to the point of requiring a rewrite. One of the engineers who built it pointed out "Well, we built this app a year and a half ago, of course it's unmaintainable, what do you expect?". I choked on my drink.

Very true. The most important thing you mentioned is this one IMO:

> even if they pay for them without realizing that

In health care, you have doctors, physician assistants, nurses, administrators, etc. They have very different background, schooling and certifications as well as salaries.

In software, you have some differences (individual contributors, tech leads, managers, etc), but it's not granular at all within the categories. While the self taught html dev is making 90-100k, the MIT graduate builting complex systems with 5 years of experience is making 150k (Using round numbers here, don't read too much into it), when the difference is significantly bigger.

People are quick to point out at flukes: there's totally exceptions, the CMU grad who can't code themselves out of paper bag, and the random highschool dropout who has been coding since they were 7 who are now world famous geniuses...but they're exceptions yet treated as the rule.

Agreed. I've seen people trained as other engineers (EE,ME) who have taken one programming class, get jobs at similar salaries as CS grads, but then need a long time to ramp up and are a "burden" to their coworkers who have to train them while also doing their own work. It's strange how much leeway people can get in this field. I understand anyone can be trained, but still is a luxurious field.

Oh hell, software dev is so, so very overloaded with underskilled programmers with fragile egos. They come out of college knowing a little python and javascript and can't do jack shit for at least a year, and just come to a screeching halt with every tough issue they encounter. I'm a project manager box in an org-chart to help un-flatten the management hierarchy (I manage 20+), I am constantly having to re-assign tickets because they linger too long due to inexperience. Our review system is a joke and i have zero authority to fire, I'm supposed to "onramp" them, especially kids who just will never understand how to do this job (I give classes one week a month and they blow them off). I'm not in charge of hiring, if I was, half these kids (and I say "kids" because the 20 somethings are really immature compared to the mid-30 devs, but the latter ain't much more actualized) would have NEVER made it past the phone screen.

TL; DR - New college CS grads are mostly children who know very little and expect huge paychecks immediately because they watched Mr. Robot and maybe opened a browser on an RPi. Once.

Unless your shop literally hires every warm body that walks in the door, you're still seeing things through survivor bias lenses. Even those inept kids are better than what you'd get if you opened the floodgates.

But since not everyone that would be or could become a good software developer takes that path there are also a lot of people out there better than the CS grads described here.

A lot of companies in tech hotbeds have a hire rate of 25 to 50% of the people who make it in person. It's not "hiring every warm body", but it's pretty damn close in my book, if you consider that resume screening and phone screens might as well be random considering how poorly it's done in the industry.

Yeah, the person who barely has the skill to pump gas probably won't make it (they probably have some bigger problems, too), but...

Compared to the post dotcom crash (where it was a buyer's market) where you could pick the best and brightest and make super teams, there's a stark contrast in 2018, and it shows in the quality of the products.

My god I hope you're correct. The problem is I'm not given a "new employee time buffer": the SLA is king, and even though I get budget to train (free lunches!!!) it isn't fully internalized that increasing customers at a rate faster than growing / training tech support is untenable.

I've been here 4 years, and some of the new-hires that came on my first year are now able to support mutliple projects and getting their sea-legs, but the burden on the senior programmers is still heavy, and I'm doing my best to retain those saints! Perhaps there will be an inflection point that doesn't involve customers and managers freaking out.

Or, heh, perhaps I'M the weak link.

If this a symptom of bad hiring practices in your organization of representative across the tech industry? How do you know your org isn't to blame?

Can't talk for the person you're replying to, but in my case at least I worked for a LOT of companies (did consulting for a while, and switched jobs probably more than I should have had), AND so did my SO, so while it's anecdotal, it's a LOT of orgs, including some of the big names everyone have heard of, as well as some smaller ones, and my friends have the same experiences. It might just be insanely bad luck since that's not a significant sample, but it makes us think.

That's entirely possible. The founders are promising customizations as a way of getting new sales, and I think that is the main problem here: trying to grow business faster than support. I kinda see their dilemma: they don't want to grow the # of employees TOO fast, but right now we're not growing fast enough, and the complexity of customizations is non-trivial. This might be early growing pains in an immature business. But I was bitching about the self-starter trends among new hires.

I won’t make any predictions about the future of software engineering opportunities, but your line of reasoning will never have any inherent connection to job opportunities. As the cliche goes, life’s not fair, and working harder preparing yourself for your career has never meant that you will make more money than someone who didn’t work as hard.

Absolutely, there's no full correlation between how hard you work and how successful you are, there are situations where the contrast is totally out of wack. We're (unfortunately) used to execs taking home insane pays for dubious reasons, but right now we're seeing something similar with every day people.

The supply of people who can reliably turn time at a keyboard into code that solves problems people are willing to pay to have solved is wildly outstripped by demand. You're just continuing to see that in a world where most other industries don't have a supply problem.

Also, as rationale people will be happy to tell you, buying my employees lunch is a screaming deal.

An employee going to lunch takes at least an hour: walk to takeout, wait in line (everyone gets hungry at the same time), walk back and eat. I can recover at least 30 minutes by paying to have lunch delivered every day. Plus, for better or for worse, it costs me roughly $16 pp per day but it would cost me probably $25 to pay an employee $16. I didn't write the tax rules, but I can optimize within them.

Note there is also not a single person in my company who makes less than $32 (16*2) per hour. So I'm very happy to pay $16 to recover, on average, 30 minutes of their time.

Why not make them work through lunch and provide overhead delivery of liquid nutritional supplements and coffee through a rubber tube? And you could have their desk chair plumbed to the sewer line so they would not need to take bathroom breaks. You might recover another 60 minutes of time during the day.

You snark, but the lunches are a thing. I had mine provided by the company for this exact reason.

Unfortunately this particular company had a penchant for saving every possible penny, so the quality of the food wasn't too good either.

Dude, people die in ditches far from their home for a tenth of what I make in a year living in comfort. Society values people based on perceived economic impact not perceived job difficulty. And that’s probably a good idea.

No, it's less than half who could do it with a gun to their head, less than a quarter who would choose to over pretty much anything else.

Those are very loose upper bounds, too.

I think we should treat teachers better and pay them more. I agree we should value other professions too. That being said, I’m not following how attitudes in software engineering are related to the topic of this post.

The freebies, on call outrage, etc is inherent to the tech industry with venture capitalist money or otherwise insane net profits... the longer term sustainability is questionable, but fresh college grads or others early in their careers having unreasonable expectations of reality are not so different than your average political science or psychology major taking on egregious levels of debt only to struggle with making student loan payments.

Again, I agree with valuing other disciplines. I think there’s also something to be said about supply and demand. The Googles and Amazons of the world typically hire people at least somewhat competent in CS. Sure you could pick up pick up Ruby on Rails or whatever framework to join the gig economy, but your chances won’t be great at becoming a engineer at a Google caliber company.

The issue with teacher pay isn’t just about what society values but is more nuanced. My conservative friends don’t see the value in public education and insist on sending their kids to private schools. I don’t know how those teachers are paid, but for the public school system that I participated in, the argument becomes well my kid doesn’t attend so why should I pay for it?

In my opinion, it’s very short sighted and destructive for the country in the long term. It’s not only teachers we are devaluing but an entire generation of children whose parents are not able to absorb the exorbant costs of private schools.

I think we should pay teachers more as well, but not the same teachers we have now. Based on my experience in public school (and my own opinion, obviously), teachers on average earned what they deserved, or more than they deserved.

> That being said, I’m not following how attitudes in software engineering are related to the topic of this post.

Sorry, I probably made my point poorly. It wasn't about attitude in software engineering. It was how insanely overvalued the field is, with a completely out of wack investment to reward ratio. Few to no other fields come even close, and its siphoning people from all other fields as well as creating unreasonable expectations from them. That's obviously not the root cause, but it's something to ponder.

Essentially, all I was saying is that the article made me think about how crazy the contrast between those 2 professions is.

The worst part is that on average developers are still often underpaid. In some cases grotesquely. Some individual engineers can easily account for millions in revenue in a year to the company they work for, but they are only paid upwards of a few hundred thousand. On the flipside there are certainly a lot of people employed in industry making their companies negative revenue - costing developer hours to make up for their mistakes or ineptitude worth less than the working code they produce.

Software is eating the world in almost all regards. Being able to perform that act - the eating part - makes you way more valuable than the effort required. But so long as characters can translate into dollars for someone the one making the characters will remain very valuable.

Don't for a second be "ashamed" if someone is offering to pay you large sums of money for what you think isn't worth it - the ugly fact of reality is that we don't get to set the value of our time, those with the money to buy it do. Society is offering little money to teachers and that sucks, but that has nothing to do with code being so valuable as to justify abnormal incomes relative to the average of the rest of the working class.

The “out of whack investment to reward ratio” is the fundamental mechanism of capitalism. It’s how we get enough of what we need, motivating self interested actors to provide it. We should be terrified if it isn’t happening somewhere, or else rejoice that every demand everywhere has already been met.

Is this a product of supply and demand?

This is a very valid point. While I don't have all the answers, but it seems like if a person is pulling an honest 40 hour week they should afford at the very least a real minimum standard of living, regardless of what that person does. I know this sounds hairy and anti-capitalist and "who is going to pay for this", etc. But this is what real value is in my opinion.

What if I spend 40 hours a week making paper hats? Should I be entitled to a living wage?

Yes.

If you choose to dedicate the bulk of your waking life to creating wealth for your employer, you should be compensated, at a minimum, well enough to feed, clothe and house yourself.

or there should be something like UBI in place to allow employers to decouple the cost of keeping their employees alive from the cost of doing business.

How does that change if 100m people want to live in a city that realistically houses 10m?

A bit of an unrealistic scenario, but my city has a very low vacancy rate, and you can't live there on minimum wage / just above. There are just too many people making more money.

The point of this example is that making paper hats creates little to no wealth. No one is going to compensate you handsomely for whatever random activity you choose - there has to be demand.

A living wage, or even minimum wage, isn't being "compensated handsomely," it's being compensated at least enough to survive.

If having someone make paper hats 40 hours a week is a bad business model, that's not the employee's concern. Why should the person running the paper hat making business expect to make a living at it, but not the person making the hats?

If there was enough demand for 40 hours worth of folded paper hats, yes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com