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.
It's turning out to not really be the case and the successful stories are comparatively few and far between, while the rest of America falls further and further behind for reasons largely not of their own making.
Should that not be talked about?
I fully agree, FWIW. Perhaps it's where my interests have typically lain, but as a developer whose primary job has been to automate other tech people--sysadmins mostly, but developers as well--this has been on my mind for about a decade now.
I don't know what the solution is.
Well, if we're intellectually honest as software developers, we also "...create terrible software with obvious rot and decay as the years go on [sp]..."
Sometimes, we are our own worst enemies.
I work with a bunch of data analysts teaching them programming for data analytics and machine learning. If I use the term "software development" the managers think it is out of scope for their job ("that's something IT does, not our group"). But when I use the term "coding" the managers don't seem to mind. They need to grow up and appreciate what it takes to develop analytics software.
I like what you said "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." These junior apprentices produce stuff that barely works, and it is rotting crap whose "technical debt" never disappears, and eventually requires a senior software engineer to rewrite it after it fails.
Then again I've never strived for comfort, just the rarest thing of all... equality.
As far as creating software that last for years, I also think you overestimate the longevity of most software that is being used today.
Sure, the professional developers are paid well. However the more Jira and agile ideas takes over, you become more replaceable. Why? You're just a card-filling machine dealing with feature requests or problem reports.
And sure, the next developer may fill less cards, but they will improve with time.
And if you don't work in a protected area (federal, etc), then you can buy card-filling devs for 1/5 to 1/8 of US... And have them QA'ed for less than 1 USA dev.
Face it: I, a sysad, am a service worker. And devs are line workers. We're well paid, but so were factory workers at one time.
There is constant, never-ending pressure to turn it into line work and we need to be aware of it. A lot of software running (barely) in the real world is written this way.
We should not build complex systems that way, but plenty of systems are not very complex.
It's fine if line work + hardcore CS positions exist simultaneously. This fighting over the boundaries of where the profession starts and ends is tiring and we should just accept there's a stratification of developer skill levels and start adjusting our attitudes and training accordingly. Development is all of these things because development is a huge job market.
You can't abstract your way out of doing the line work and only have hardcore CS positions in the job market.
Huh, it is already happening. I see everyday so many web services are created via auto generating scaffolding tools like Spring boot etc. One just fill in environment details, bits of JSON parsing and service is ready to be deployed.
Good for you that where you work people are intelligent enough to read Fred Brooks. Most places, including the ones with fancy gleaming buildings, open office floors, lounges with couches and organic smoothie bars are just making CRUD services with some cloud backed data storage. More so terminology I see at work is more inspired by factory floor not some intellectual venture.
If all it took was some scafolding, some database columns and some html and sprinkle, you should be a millionare by now?
To write good code, you need to understand the whole program (or at least a very substantial part of it), why certain decisions were made in the past, the potential ripple effects of a “simple” change, etc.
This means that it’s impossible to just swap devs out like factory line workers, otherwise you’re just creating more bugs.
For similar reasons, you can’t paint half a canvas and then hand it over to another painter and have him finish it...
Agile do not make developer replaceable. If anything it empower developers to become on equal footing with everyone else.
> And sure, the next developer may fill less cards, but they will improve with time.
I saw projects outsourced to huge teams in India failing to deliver. Reality of software development is that unless you have right mix of experience, skill and people you might never deliver.
Programming require both engineering and creative skills. Some class of problems cannot be brute forced by large number of young bodies.
I'm not saying that this actually works better, to be clear. But I would bet it works cheaper for the time horizons that the folks making those decisions care about.
Toxic companies will twist a good process and make it horrible. It is not Agile or Scrum to blame.
Doing so in an attempt to commodify its application is not inherently bad.
Doing so in an attempt to commodify its application is definitely bad for developers' careers.
"Commodify of application" is a good thing. This means that your team is flexible and can adapt to changes. It mean that there little of key person dependencies. It makes you go for holidays without worrying that your team will be able to finish a new service because you are one of two people that can navigate AWS :P
Just a perspective thing I wonder
That's why I equated Sysads as service workers. Some assistance may be 5m, and others may have looked like a 10m issue but turns into 3h timesink. We're serving others, or serving machines for serving others.
Whereas I see Agile, or the Kanban system, to be set up to send work to either internal or external devs. The only reason why real factories don't use international work is because sending lines and parts is onerous on a short cycle... Whereas software Kanban seems fit for each other.
Sure there's dev work that requires specialty knowledge, but most dev work is a CRUD web app with a DB backend. And those jobs are especially prone to outsourced via a thousand cuts.
It's easy to write them, but writing the right ones is much harder. Automate or outsource that and you become a trillionaire. Yes, seriously.
The typical tech job is more like someone getting paid 30k a year to delete porn from Facebook or draw boxes around pictures of stop signs.
No it's not.
There are approximately ~1.3 million people in the US doing software development at extremely high income levels for the top 3/4. Median pay $107,000.
840,000 computer support specialists ('tech support') earning a median of $54,000.
600,000 computer systems analysts earning a median of $90,000.
300,000 computer programmers, earning a median of $84,000.
170,000 Web developers with a median pay of $70,000 per year.
165,000 computer network architects earning a median of $110,000.
120,000 database admins earning a median of $90,000.
100,000 information security analysts earning a median of $100,000.
28,000 Computer and Information Researchers, earning a median of $120,000.
like I love people praising the maw of capital (startups rule the world yay!) and simultaneously inveighing against. you have an issue? unionize (but you'll be excommunicated from the church of capital for trying to).