Software engineering changed my life
technicallychallenged.substack.com
technicallychallenged.substack.com
If I have to point my finger to something it would be housing/land. Housing throghout the west is the instrument that extracts the most from poor and modal income brackets.
Software development is above this misery line for now.
If we want to live in places where all the employees that support your lifestyle can find meaning and means to a decent life, we have to take care about this.
I remember when I was in my small northern Spain faculty, learning about the beginnings of industrialization and urban planning, it was pretty clear to me that there was a sentiment in the ruling class that, for them to have a decent place to live and not being forced to live inside their palaces and houses, social stability was needed. And such goal could only be achieved providing amenities for the common man.
It was for the best interest of the ruling class.
Nowadays it seems to me that one can move up the payscale and forget about it. But I don't want crime in my neighborhood, nor homeless. I don't want to hear that someone I know lost his job and it's on the verge of hitting the street.
A cashier should be able to pay rent, transport, utilities and a decent life.
Unfortunately there's a huge group of people who will vehemently oppose this as they don't see that job as deserving of basic human dignity (rent, transport, utilities, medical). Not just the ruling class, but normal every day folks poop on these people...?!
The older I get the more I'm disgusted at how many people can selectively turn off their empathy for stuff like this. In an equitable society we should take care of each other... I don't understand why a Wally World cashier making a base living wage offends so many people.
Perhaps we’re in a transition period between the legacy system - cashiers a handling one customer at a time, which is not providing much value to the company - and “cashiers” who are self-checkout-sitters handling 8+ customers at a time, which provides much more value and could bargain for a living wage.
That's called collective bargaining and the only way we'll end up there is strong unions. Otherwise, I promise you - most companies will not altruistically ensure their employees are taken care of; exceptions exist like Costco. Someone's going to need to bend their arm, be it a union or the government through regulation.
Also I'm not sure I understand your comment. The first sentence feels like you're devaluing the service employee that helps resolve your self-checkout issues? Then, the next paragraph you posit that we're in a transitionary period from a "legacy system" - this just isn't how I see it.
From convenience stores, to grocery, etc. there will always be the need for traditional cashiers, along side of self-checkout folks. And, personally - I believe they both deserve a dignified wage that covers their base needs (rent, car, medical, etc) without necessarily having to "bargain for a living wage."
IMO - even the most entry-level and lowly of jobs at 40hrs/week should be able to get someone by.
Certainly I don’t devalue the employee, but I don’t value the work they do. This is mostly irritation at not being allowed to just fix my own issues.
> there will always be the need for traditional cashiers, along side of self-checkout folks.
Counterexample, a large convenience store near me just last month tore out all (all!) of the legacy checkout systems and replaced them with about five bays of 4-8x self-checkouts, of different sizes. There’s no option to have a human check you out anymore.
I think it’s glorious.
> IMO - even the most entry-level and lowly of jobs at 40hrs/week should be able to get someone by.
I agree, but I think we’re moving into a world where cashiers (1-to-1) are like elevator operators of old… extinct.
Seeing that local store go all-self, and a few others looking like they’re following suit slowly, has really opened my eyes on how far companies will go to eliminate jobs if paying a true living wage isn’t reflected in the value they provide.
Traditional cashiers are basically automatons which drag items across a barcode scanner, and count change. Shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that those things can be more cheaply performed by a machine, or foisted onto the customer.
And maybe it’s good that those jobs are going away? I’d rather society have to answer some hard questions about UBI than keep humans working in jobs that aren’t necessary. (See: Oregon gas pumps)
> And maybe it’s good that those jobs are going away? I’d rather society have to answer some hard questions about UBI than keep humans working in jobs that aren’t necessary.
Seeing the backlash for just $10k worth of student debt forgiveness I do not think that we're even close to conversations like that. The notion of people's base needs being met regardless of working is even less palatable to the general riffraff because we've been sold such a zero-sum game here. We're crabs in a bucket. People go to lengths to make sure someone they perceive as less-than doesn't get a "handout."
I have grown very, very pessimistic about people's empathy in regards to the ever-growing economic divide. What I've experienced in America is "I've got mine, f u" - I'm a millennial maybe that gives some context.
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> Certainly I don’t devalue the employee, but I don’t value the work they do.
Also, I wasn't going to address this, but... to me that is 100% saying that you devalue the employee. If I devalue someone's labor output, I'm devaluing them as an employee - simple. I find this sentence to be a outright contradiction.
> Also, I wasn't going to address this, but... to me that is 100% saying that you devalue the employee. If I devalue someone's labor output, I'm devaluing them as an employee - simple. I find this sentence to be a outright contradiction.
Not the person replied to (And I know you said it was a moot point), but in this case I would say I don't value most cashier positions then. I say most, because not all grocery stores are equal. Specifically, I've always had good experiences at Wegmans, but my local grocery store is now a Shoprite. At Wegmans, cashiers quickly and efficiently scanned and bagged the things I purchased. The Shoprite cashiers, on the hand, don't even bag my goods. All they do is take an item off the conveyer, scan it, and slide it down to the end so I can bag it myself. This is less efficient than just doing everything myself.
The existence of “cashier” as a job is an impediment to my goal: paying and walking out of a store with the goods I want. Any alternative system which involves fewer cashiers works quicker for me, observationally.
I think people - including cashiers - are inherently valuable. But having someone do a 1-1 cashier job is both wasting their time and costing the company (and me) unnecessary time and money. Their (valuable) labor would be better spent elsewhere.
That's not what we were discussing - we were discussing you valuing them as an employee. Which if you devalue their labor output then, yes, you certainly devalue them as an employee. Saying "I value them as a human" is an entirely different concern/conversation IMO.
Sorry about the semantics, but I fully believe you devalue self-checkout cashiers as employees after this conversation.
Regardless - we're off in the weeds. I don't think we're in a productive conversation. Respectfully, I'm bowing out.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you but you need to logically argue why "rent, transport, utilities, medical" are "basic human dignity" and what a "base living wage" is. The fact that you believe everyone should have housing, transport, utilities, or adequate medical care doesn't change the underlying realities of economic scarcity.
There's your logic: at some point, people are done taking the bare minimum and will sow chaos, rebel, retaliate or even just lie flat and (legally) do anything to sour the lives of those they deem enemies. And confronting an ever increasing number of delinquents is far more expensive than preventing the root cause
I would say that our current lifestyle is both inefficient and inequitable.
Housing in the West due to insufficient development is effectively a zero-sum game. So once people have their share, they do everything they can to maintain it's value.
Great HN comment on a recent thread with regards to land and rent-seeking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32961554
While Japan don't get everything right, I think this is one area in which their attitudes/policies are more aligned with the wellbeing of the masses. There, houses are more like cars in that they start deprecating the moment they're moved into and if anything are seen as a value subtract past a certain age, because it's expected that when you buy a plot of land the house on it will be demolished and a new one will be built in its place. Houses are more tied to families that live in them than they are the land they're built on.
This might seem wasteful, but it's kept living costs in the residential outskirts of Japan's urban areas a lot more affordable than they would've been otherwise and also means that housing on average is more up to code, and it drives costs of building down since building is routine instead of something unusual.
I would love to see this come to the US, and I say this despite standing to gain from the present system.
At the end of the day this is all just capitalism and voting for your own interests. We optimize for this.
If a cashier finds out they can make a decent living more will want to be cashier and the cashiers will have less leverage, less salary because they are dime a dozen. This is the reality of this treacherous world.
First worlders offload their less desirable work to poorer 2nd class immigrants, poorer countries. Like it or not, all well intentioned Tesla owning, apartment owning, software engineers are there because someone else in society do the dirty work for them with low pay, indirectly.
We can all pretend we will earn enough money for our families to survive, but the reality is those richer than us will try and find away to extract it somewhere down the line. Whether it's inflation, medical bills, or a financial crash that brings your life savings down to zero.
Without large-scale changes to society the hyper-concentration of wealth will continue and millions will continue to live butchered lives.
In Spain at least, it wasn't always the case that people with low skilled jobs couldn't afford basic stuff. My old brothern could afford an appartment and going out every weekend working in a pizza place when he was in his teens.
Unfortunately, that sentiment was created with a large and long lasting usage of violence by the people.
It would be much better if we get some different way to create it.
Yeah, the dream may be over when Asia gets a high quality development machine in every home.
My observation is that skill, communication and cultural alignment are what puts the West ahead of common outsourcing destinations (at least for Western projects - I would definitely pick a local developer for a local project as their cultural alignment and domain knowledge would be much better than an outsiders').
The problem I see is that access to hardware and educational resources is not enough. I don't believe software engineering as a whole can be taught, there are some things (including unwritten things nobody wants to admit) you only pick up from real-world experience, and some things that have less to do with software and more with culture and the local environment your software will be used in (since software in most cases is there to solve some kind of business problem that might be specific to a certain location or jurisdiction).
Lack of real-world experience in the target environment is what's holding the common outsourcing destinations back. Giving free computers to everyone still won't magically make them competitive in our software engineering market.
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Media/Person...
The problem is the skills and communication, which stem from this situation being the status-quo and there being nowhere for new developers to learn anything better (or even know that their current skills aren't up to scratch, at least not for working on foreign, outsourced projects).
The real reason is that their country of origin just has a massive number of people, and the ones who are able to immigrate to the US are those who have either money or skills that will make them money here. Same goes for Chinese Americans.
There is a source country with a massive number of people, and the target country (with a fraction of the residents of the source country). The target country filters immigration for high skill and/or high income. Just through the sheer numbers game, you get the outcome you described.
Of course, it is more nuanced in terms of the overall development level of the source country (e.g., this probably wouldn't work if pretty much no one in India was able to afford a computer or if India had almost no internet connectivity). But with how high the Indian level of development is as a country (compared to the minimum required for the numbers game to start working), it shouldn't matter.
General-purpose computing devices are less and less popular and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of developing countries have better smartphone penetration than computers, partly because smartphones offer better opportunities for rent-seeking and the attention economy where as general-purpose computers hamper those things, so the former are being pushed more and potentially subsidized.
This is even a problem in Western countries - a lot of kids/teenagers today feel at home on a phone yet don't even understand the concept of a file.
A lot of people got into software engineering by learning it themselves because they had access to a general-purpose computer, since back in the day it was the only computer you could get. Nowadays, a lot of families might be satisfied with a phone, tablet and games console - those offer zero opportunities for learning programming.
They definitely do, such as in many African and Asian countries, although not for the reasons you state. Phones are simply cheaper in these countries than computers. They're getting devices for 200 dollars from Chinese manufacturers mainly, not the 1k iPhones that are popular in the West.
Let's look at a purely western example - implementing a billing system for a company serving the US market. A developer from the UK will assume that every bank account holder can do free, easy and instant wire transfers, yet in the US that's (still!) not the case and most people use Zelle or Venmo or PayPal for those things instead, which now significantly increases complexity (both engineering and potentially regulatory).
Beyond software engineering jobs, having those skills means you can easily build all kinds of services and put them out there for prospective customers to buy. You can also automate your own repetitive, annoying and boring shit instead of spending time doing it manually or paying someone else (or a service) to do so.
Besides making software products, software engineering expertise will also help you make other jobs more efficient, sometimes automating them away. If shit hits the fan and developers are no longer in demand and selling software products/services doesn’t work out, you can just look for any kind of computer-based, repetitive job such as data entry and automate it away.
Benefits I didn't expect:
* Forced me to confront lifelong imposter syndrome.
* Forced me to slow down and pay attention to details, step through a process sequentially during debugging, etc.
* Forced me to take ownership of finding the answer when I didn't know the answer.
* Forced me to convert theoretical "I solved it in my head" into practical application.
* Forced me to overcome "math anxiety," the fear of not finding the "right" answer.We're already seeing this with FAANG layoffs. I'd like to believe "it's different this time" but I don't have anything I can point to as a logical basis for that belief. And it really scares me.
As far as energy goes, software also helps to optimize oil exploration, and software is clearly involved in optimizing solar efficiency and production of solar cells. It's also involved in nuclear facilities, power distribution networks, charging stations, grid management systems, etc.
The limits of software haven't even begun to be tapped yet.
But it's possible to be in the vast network of services that people can not eat very well without.
These aren’t the base level on Maslow’s pyramid of needs (food water shelter), but software can solve/facilitate the solving of higher level problems of human existence.
I've see things getting worse for a lot of people for a while. I think we just like to pretend it's all good in white-collar land because of the heavy stigma of being poor. We need to unionize. Many 'poorer' and 'less-skilled' workers have already realized this(e.g. nurses strike, teachers strike and recent vote by railroad union to strike).
"The top 1% owned a record 32.3% of the nation's wealth as of the end of 2021, data show. The share of wealth held by the bottom 90% of Americans, likewise, has declined slightly since before the pandemic, from 30.5% to 30.2%.Apr 1, 2022"
There may have been occasional downturns, but less than most other professions. And compensation has grown much faster than most other fields.
This has already happened in India, and competition to get into top tier tech companies is insane.
So much organisational friction is from people who don't want to destroy work/life balance with early/late meetings.
Now any low tier laptop with zoom will give you a proper videoconferencing experience, infrastructure is all cloud based, there are 10x more fiber cables connecting the planet, there are lots of well documented open source projects for almost everything, and for learning there is youtube and MOOCs.
Also, foreign schools are getting better, and many alumni of offshored companies are now founders. The silicon valley model of financing is being replicated abroad too.
Believe me when I tell you: the castle walls are falling apart and soon wages will go down.
People that got comfortable writing average CRUD applications are about to be stomped by a massive stampede.
Also the cost in India is also increasing and running your operations remote is not simple.
I dream of the day when the student in cs for the money will reject the faangs of today during poor races, and instead join a home grown startup.
After which software salaries continued to rise dramatically.
Take for example: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/visa-inc-interview-experience-...
Now employers face a difficult situation: do you want your interview to be published on the Internet? should you design a unique interview for each candidate? should you enforce interview NDAs?