What it means to be a developer is changing

A lot of sterotyping buzzword dropping. Looks like someone scrapped hn comments and have summarized them into some analysis of where we are and going.

It reminds me of reading magazines about music (like rolling stones). Abusing adjectives limits in english peppered along with the surface level traveling common timeline points that when a number of words are hit they reach a premature conclusion and the reader is left wondering what they even read feeling less informed.

"They all now have cool laptop stickers, go to conferences, and are all legally required to wear nice glasses. (Guilty, guilty, and guilty, btw.)"

This is such an incoherent rant about a tiny fraction of history of software industry. Being a developer was always being in a constant flux. The punch card developers were a different breed from the mainframe programmers (mostly women BTW). The age of minicomputers, DOS/Amiga revolution etc were uniquely different from it’s preceding conventions. It goes on and will continue it’s flux.

If the author had peered past the software industry prior to the advent of HN/reddit, it would’ve been clear to them.

The mistake this article does, is presume developers care about the consequences of what they co-create for huge international corporations. Clearly, judging from HN posts, they do not. Those who do, won't stay in those jobs (myself included).

Now, it was a boring read and more about disappointment in politics and corporate promises, so kind of a catch-up of what has been warned about since late 90's and introduction of Facebook. Maybe not many today relate to the reference to "Brave New World", aside from HBO shows, ironically also provided by huge international corporations (not worth the watch IMHO).

It's simply not what developers care about, and that's truly sad and horrifying, but not surprising in the least. It's just not what professionals are paid to care about, or even relevant to the hobby-side of programming.

>where it has become not only cool, but sexy and desirable to be a developer.

developers make a lot of money in comparison to society at large, and it is one of the few occupations relatively open to people not already equipped with all the advantages of a middle class lifestyle. This is the fundamental underpinning of the rest.

A fair portion of this reads like someone recapitulating TechCrunch hype/gossip articles from the early/mid 2010s. “Hyper-orgiastic” Silicon Valley? Maybe for some people, but not for most.

I worked for company that created one of top 10 crypto currencies.

We were fully remote scaterred around the globe. On january 2018 (crypto peak) we organized company meeting to get together. Most employees shared rooms to reduce cost.

Dont believe everything you read in newspapers.

All that Silicon Valley chick / bro culture was never what programming meant to me.

People writing about culture in and around software development are like movies "based on a true story". That is to say: might as well be pure fiction.

It attaches reason and meaning to actions for the purpose of presenting a compelling drama, not for accurate portrayal. It extrapolates from tiny sample sizes and makes blanket statements. There were radically different development subcultures across two buildings set 500 ft away from eachother within one company I worked at. And this washes away the very obvious subcultures based on geography, business domain, tools used by a team, and how much time you spend on Twitter.

It elides parts of culture that aren't easy to write about. Of which there are many flavors: social truths that we understand deeply but do not speak about in polite company, or conflict with the authors thesis, or innocent facts that also happen to carry weight for unfavorable political opinions.

But the end result masquerades as something more meaningful than a nice piece of fiction and creates a feedback loop. Participants in the culture can strongly disagree with the description, and still go on to adjust their behavior expecting that they might encounter it at their next job, their next client, or maybe even with their next hire. And it sets a frame of reference for the next commentator, who will be starting farther from the truth.

Contrary to most people I found this an interesting opinion, if only because it centers so much on SV culture. For those of us working in other countries and in unglamorous companies it has always been a very different kind of culture. Typically SV pioneers new ideas and new ways of working, and then over the next 5 to 10 years this slowly permeates global programming culture, but watered down.

Covid has changed this dynamic because for once everything is changing everywhere all at once. I noticed two major changes already. The first thing was freelance work drying up, because new projects were put on hold. With most of the economic consequences (and bankruptcies) still to happen, this could go either way. Either the tech sector has a lot less work, with wages falling and everyone trying to get the security of a salaried position, or there is a boom of software with businesses trying to retool and freelance work coming back with a vengeance. The second thing is obviously the shift to WFH. This move could conclude with everyone being ordered back to the office (once vaccinated), or with structural WFH being a thing for always, and many if not most developers rarely seeing the inside of an office. I don’t think anyone knows where it is headed, but the global impact of covid makes it that for the first time the changes to programming culture are likely to happen everywhere at once, instead of happening first in SV and then slowly rippling out. That levels the playing field, and it makes for interesting times.

This reminds me of Friedman’s book The World is Flat.

Best practices of remote work will spread. Eventually salaries will flatten as someone in a lower cost of living will be able to do the same job as someone in a higher cost of living.