Don't become a software engineer

[Pointedstick]

As a software engineer myself, I am in complete agreement with this article: http://blog.baugues.com/autoworkers

At this particular moment in history, demand for developers outpaces supply. There’s not enough staff to go around, so companies fight for talent: huge salaries, cool offices, flexible hours, in-house chef.

To upset the labor market, one of two things needs to happen: an increase in supply, or a decrease in demand.

The latter happened in the auto industry through automation. Today, you can accomplish with $30/month on Shopify what took $500,000 in custom development ten years ago. WordPress does in fifteen minutes what once kept a freelancer busy for two months. Stripe dropped the cost of credit card integration by five-figures.

[...]

Maybe you don’t think a total n00b can walk out of a nine-week training program and do your job. But there’s something between that and a four-year, $80,000 Computer Science degree that’s going to work. The friction of entering our labor force is diminishing. Even the social stigma of being a programmer that for so long protected our ranks is going away.

No profession stays on top forever… just ask your recently graduated lawyer friends.

[Tortoise]

Today, you can accomplish with $30/month on Shopify what took $500,000 in custom development ten years ago. WordPress does in fifteen minutes what once kept a freelancer busy for two months. Stripe dropped the cost of credit card integration by five-figures.

But weren't Shopify, WordPress, and Stripe all conceived and developed by other software engineers? In the case of automobile factory workers, they were displaced by machines developed by people in a different profession: engineering. In the case of software engineers, some of them are being displaced by software developed by people within the same profession: software engineering. Seems like a slightly different situation to me.

Also, if software engineering may no longer be as great of a profession to get into going forward, what might be some better alternatives for people with math/logic aptitude, and why?

[Pointedstick]

But weren't Shopify, WordPress, and Stripe all conceived and developed by other software engineers? In the case of automobile factory workers, they were displaced by machines developed by people in a different profession: engineering. In the case of software engineers, some of them are being displaced by software developed by people within the same profession: software engineering. Seems like a slightly different situation to me.

Yes. But we're rendering ourselves obsolete. I see this every day as a matter of fact because I write automation software. Six months ago I was indispensable because I was the only person who knew how to run a certain very important system. It was taking up too much of my time so I spent a few weeks automating it and now I rarely need to touch it. But now they don't have any reason to keep me around unless I either find something new to be indispensable at or else leverage my automation skills by eliminating other people's tasks as well...

Also, if software engineering may no longer be as great of a profession to get into going forward, what might be some better alternatives for people with math/logic aptitude, and why?

Other, more hardware-centric engineering disciplines have promise. I think right now petroleum engineering is a great choice even if it won't last forever and electrical engineering is always going to be valuable. Boring math/logic careers like actuaries, accountants, and tax preparers aren't going anywhere either and are sufficiently difficult and mind-numbing to the general populace to present a fairly high barrier to entry.

[Libertarian666]

Disagree. Software "engineering" is actually a misnomer; it should be called software development. Real engineering produces a tangible product; once you have designed a bridge, you can use the blueprints again if you need the same bridge again, but you still have to build the second bridge. Software is different; if you need the same software again, you already have it!

How is this relevant to the original statement? Because the basic nature of software development (that it produces an intangible product) means that it has always been true that it contains the seeds of its own obsolescence. But somehow there is still a need for software developers. That's because we need to solve different problems, not the same ones over and over again.

Do we need more crappy software developers? No, we already have more of those than we need. But we do need lots of good ones. So if you really love software, become a good (or great) software developer.

By the way, where are those companies fighting over developers? In Silicon Valley, or maybe Seattle? I haven't noticed much of that in Dallas.

[notsheigetz]

I've been a software engineer (developer, if you will) since 1978 and over that time I have observed continual efforts to downgrade the profession into a blue-collar job, or at least to put it on a par with that of the office secretary - i.e., nothing but a "coder".

Would you believe that in 1978 when I first started I actually had my own office? I don't mean a cubicle but an actual office with a door and a desk just like the big boys who run the show. Eventually we were downgraded to what were very nice cubicles complete with a window view and potted plants. Then it was the drab, cubicle farm and in the worse case scenario I've yet seen, I worked in a room resembling a cafeteria with rows of "coders" sitting at tables cranking out code, even complete with a monitor walking around observing our work and cautioning us to keep the noise down if we were tempted to talk to our neighbors. It probably won't surprise you that I couldn't have carried on a conversation with most of my neighbors if I wanted to because they didn't speak very good English. I was only a contractor on that job so I only had to endure this indignity for a couple of days each month but I resolved that I was going to find something else to do for a living if I ever found myself having to work full-time in an environment like that.

Today I'm back in the cubicle farm nearing retirement. The strategy to turn us into small cogs in a large wheel seems to involve drowning us in bureaucracy and paperwork and something known as "separation of duties". You get assigned to work in one designated area and not only are you discouraged from stepping outside of it you can be "disciplined up to and including termination" if you do (there is rarely a week that goes by in which I don't see at least one warning like this about something - including not locking your laptop).

But I think the thing that most convinced me to discourage others from getting into the profession (I talked my stepson out of it) was an article I read a few years ago about a government program designed to help disadvantaged people acquire computer skills. It specifically involved teaching Java programming because of the great demand for it. Sounds like a pretty good thing with all the unemployment doesn't it? Unfortunately, the disadvantaged people being trained at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer lived in India. The article quoted a government spokesman giving assurances that this program would not eliminate a single American job. That was very reassuring, of course.

[clacy]

This is an interesting time that we live in.  Frankly, automation and technology is turning many professions upside down.  It will be quite interesting to see what kind of work environment there is 20-25 years from now when my kids enter the workforce.

[doodle]

But weren't Shopify, WordPress, and Stripe all conceived and developed by other software engineers? In the case of automobile factory workers, they were displaced by machines developed by people in a different profession: engineering. In the case of software engineers, some of them are being displaced by software developed by people within the same profession: software engineering. Seems like a slightly different situation to me.

Yes. But we're rendering ourselves obsolete. I see this every day as a matter of fact because I write automation software. Six months ago I was indispensable because I was the only person who knew how to run a certain very important system. It was taking up too much of my time so I spent a few weeks automating it and now I rarely need to touch it. But now they don't have any reason to keep me around unless I either find something new to be indispensable at or else leverage my automation skills by eliminating other people's tasks as well...

Yup! I entirely agree, but I don't think this larger trend is apparent yet to most people and it really only has begun to be discussed in earnest as far as I can tell by a small number of economists. However, I think The ramifications of this will be massive in our lifetimes. If the cards are played right and we can jump out of the economic / sociological box we have penned ourselves into, things will turn out great. If we can't get past certain antiquated ideas that have tied work, money and morality together for millennia then I fear this is going to be a very bumpy road.

The reality is that we are going into a future where most work will increasingly be rendered obsolete. How does man find meaning and purpose in such a world? Maybe the best career choice for the future is philosopher because there are going to be some really deep questions that we have to ask ourselves.

[dkalder]

Software development diversified so much in the past 50 years that it's difficult to compare the various areas. These days there are so extremely varying environments and applications, it's stupid to generalize.
E.g. take some code-monkey business logic or web-dev implementation stuff against the latest specialized machine learning or distributed embedded real-time systems engineering. Those have totally different talent and education requirements and totally different job opportunities. The former are basically blue collar jobs, the latter may be rocket science. Job opportunities and comfort differ greatly, accordingly.
If you know your way around the latest technology driving automation, you will be the last one swallowed by it. And of course, you should always know your way around people, sell yourself, network and dance elegantly around the politics - where ever they occur.

[Pointedstick]

Then it was the drab, cubicle farm and in the worse case scenario I've yet seen, I worked in a room resembling a cafeteria with rows of "coders" sitting at tables cranking out code, even complete with a monitor walking around observing our work and cautioning us to keep the noise down if we were tempted to talk to our neighbors.

I interviewed at Amazon a while back and was absolutely shocked to see that their full-time developers worked in such an environment. They ended up making me an (insultingly lowball) offer, but no amount of money would be enough if I had to be working like that for 9 hours a day, 5 days a week. Plus on-call hours, of course!

Doodle's position makes increasing amounts of sense to me. We're already seeing the bottom rungs of the economic ladder get cut off by a whole lot of factors: automation, software, the minimum wage, regulations, etc. So far the least skilled workers have gone on various federal welfare programs, which at least keeps them from going hungry and fomenting revolution. Most of them own guns, after all.

I don't know what a good solution to this might be. If the government implements even more welfare/citizen's dividend type programs, they will have to be very carefully structured so as to not reduce all incentive to work, and I have zero confidence that the government would actually succeed at this task. If suddenly I found myself, right now, receiving $1,000 a month as some kind of guaranteed payment, I'm not sure I would want to go back to work, at least not for a long time.

[Libertarian666]

Then it was the drab, cubicle farm and in the worse case scenario I've yet seen, I worked in a room resembling a cafeteria with rows of "coders" sitting at tables cranking out code, even complete with a monitor walking around observing our work and cautioning us to keep the noise down if we were tempted to talk to our neighbors.

I interviewed at Amazon a while back and was absolutely shocked to see that their full-time developers worked in such an environment. They ended up making me an (insultingly lowball) offer, but no amount of money would be enough if I had to be working like that for 9 hours a day, 5 days a week. Plus on-call hours, of course!

Doodle's position makes increasing amounts of sense to me. We're already seeing the bottom rungs of the economic ladder get cut off by a whole lot of factors: automation, software, the minimum wage, regulations, etc. So far the least skilled workers have gone on various federal welfare programs, which at least keeps them from going hungry and fomenting revolution. Most of them own guns, after all.

I don't know what a good solution to this might be. If the government implements even more welfare/citizen's dividend type programs, they will have to be very carefully structured so as to not reduce all incentive to work, and I have zero confidence that the government would actually succeed at this task. If suddenly I found myself, right now, receiving $1,000 a month as some kind of guaranteed payment, I'm not sure I would want to go back to work, at least not for a long time.

I was getting considerably more than that from Social Security before I started my current position, but I was not particularly tempted to stay retired on that basis.

Of course YMMV.

[Lone Wolf]

Yes. But we're rendering ourselves obsolete. I see this every day as a matter of fact because I write automation software. Six months ago I was indispensable because I was the only person who knew how to run a certain very important system. It was taking up too much of my time so I spent a few weeks automating it and now I rarely need to touch it. But now they don't have any reason to keep me around unless I either find something new to be indispensable at or else leverage my automation skills by eliminating other people's tasks as well...

But software is all about automation, and always has been.  You take some task that is too tedious, error prone, or slow for a human to accomplish as efficiently, and you have the machine do it for you.

If we take a dim view of this process, every system we've built has had a disastrous impact on someone's job.  But freeing yourself from babysitting that system allowed you to do some other task of real value.  If you'd smashed the loom, you'd still be there bored out of your mind, your employer's business running less efficiently than it otherwise could.

More efficient software engineering tools make possible other projects that would have formerly been impractical.  Where would we be without compilers?  Modern debuggers?  High-level UI design tools?  And yes, services like Stripe or Shopify, which allow a small businessperson (like you!) to strike out on their own and build a business without a massive infusion of capital?

When I look out at the software landscape, I see nothing but more mountains to climb.  How does it hurt me if someone makes it easier to throw together a webpage or take credit card orders?  Those tools clear the way for lean and hungry startups.  You can't build those with punch cards and hand-crafted machine code.

Software engineering jobs are more plentiful and higher-paying because our tools have gotten better.  Improving technologies simply make more projects viable that before would have been impossible or exceedingly expensive.  Society is better off and the profession is better off.  IMO.

To me, the question is this: if automation was harmful to our profession, why after 40+years of it, are there more of us making more money at it than ever before?

I interviewed at Amazon a while back and was absolutely shocked to see that their full-time developers worked in such an environment. They ended up making me an (insultingly lowball) offer, but no amount of money would be enough if I had to be working like that for 9 hours a day, 5 days a week. Plus on-call hours, of course!

That's how they do things at Amazon?  I had no idea.  I'd have been shocked, too.  Did they even have the creepy "monitor" person wandering around?

[notsheigetz]

To me, the question is this: if automation was harmful to our profession, why after 40+years of it, are there more of us making more money at it than ever before?

I'll buy the more of us part, but not the money. Admittedly there is still good money to be made in the profession but I'm actually making considerably less in inflation adjusted dollars than I did 15 years ago. A big part of it has to do with the elimination of incentives like stock options and bonuses that used to be given to top developers but even in terms of salary alone, I have been lagging. And the $100/hr contracting gigs I was getting in 1996 have definitely become a thing of the past.

[doodle]

Yes. But we're rendering ourselves obsolete. I see this every day as a matter of fact because I write automation software. Six months ago I was indispensable because I was the only person who knew how to run a certain very important system. It was taking up too much of my time so I spent a few weeks automating it and now I rarely need to touch it. But now they don't have any reason to keep me around unless I either find something new to be indispensable at or else leverage my automation skills by eliminating other people's tasks as well...

But software is all about automation, and always has been.  You take some task that is too tedious, error prone, or slow for a human to accomplish as efficiently, and you have the machine do it for you.

If we take a dim view of this process, every system we've built has had a disastrous impact on someone's job.  But freeing yourself from babysitting that system allowed you to do some other task of real value.  If you'd smashed the loom, you'd still be there bored out of your mind, your employer's business running less efficiently than it otherwise could.

More efficient software engineering tools make possible other projects that would have formerly been impractical.  Where would we be without compilers?  Modern debuggers?  High-level UI design tools?  And yes, services like Stripe or Shopify, which allow a small businessperson (like you!) to strike out on their own and build a business without a massive infusion of capital?

When I look out at the software landscape, I see nothing but more mountains to climb.  How does it hurt me if someone makes it easier to throw together a webpage or take credit card orders?  Those tools clear the way for lean and hungry startups.  You can't build those with punch cards and hand-crafted machine code.

Software engineering jobs are more plentiful and higher-paying because our tools have gotten better.  Improving technologies simply make more projects viable that before would have been impossible or exceedingly expensive.  Society is better off and the profession is better off.  IMO.

To me, the question is this: if automation was harmful to our profession, why after 40+years of it, are there more of us making more money at it than ever before?

1. Not everyone has the mental capacity to keep up. In the past there were decent jobs available for hard working honest simple people just trying to provide for their family. Today these jobs are increasingly done by R2D2.

2. In a country like the United States, most basic necessities food, clothing, shelter can be easily provided. Perhaps in our modern society these should be considered a guaranteed right afforded all citizens.

3. There are a bunch of spiritual and philosophical questions regarding "progress" that still need to be discussed. Increasingly man is serving a system instead of the other way around. Capitalism has been a fantastic system for increasing mans material well being. However, there does exist too much of a good thing. Likewise, in the development of any system there are marked stages where previous paradigms and organizational structures fail to work correctly. In such cases, organisms must adapt and change or die. Capitalism in my opinion is reaching this adapt or die phase because the capital / labor / money connection is being severed by automation.

[doodle]

To me, the question is this: if automation was harmful to our profession, why after 40+years of it, are there more of us making more money at it than ever before?

Sorry, i didn't directly answer the question. Maybe software engineers will be similar to auto workers. Initially there were few, then the industry expanded and the number increased, then automation really kicked in about 20 years ago and the salaries and workforce declined. Is it not reasonable to suspect software engineering to follow the same path?

Humans are very adaptable creatures (as I am learning in my humankind course) but the speed ourchins in our present system is faster than the majority of us can accommodate. It took thousands of years for humans to migrate out of the warm African savanna into the colder northern regions. From an evolutionary standpoint, it was an amazingly fast adaptation. Today, the economic climate pushes humans to adapt many orders of magnitude faster. Are we able to do that?

In my opinion, the question of morality needs to be removed from the automation discussion. Instead, we should focus on a few fundamental questions that address the mechanics of our system....

Can capitalism function when the labor of 7-9 billion people is increasingly rendered obsolete by automation? Of so, how? If not, what are the options?

Can people adapt to the very fast pace of innovation and what happens to those who can't, or those who simply were not born with the cognitive abilities to keep up?

[blackomen]

Back in 2007 (right before the financial crisis), I was debating what to study in grad school.. my biggest passion was computer science but my folks strongly encouraged me to pursue my other passion: Finance and I chose it.

Still, to this day, I wonder what my life would have been if I had taken the blue pill instead of ending up at a no-name mom and pop investment firm.

[Pointedstick]

It's not too late. One of the nice things about software is that your skills and experience matter far more than any academic credentials. Work on open-source projects, put some cool stuff on github, and you'd be able to quickly make up for lost time if you wanted to make the jump.

[Libertarian666]

It's not too late. One of the nice things about software is that your skills and experience matter far more than any academic credentials. Work on open-source projects, put some cool stuff on github, and you'd be able to quickly make up for lost time if you wanted to make the jump.

So it's not too late not to become a software engineer? 

[Pointedstick]

Well I didn't say that things aren't still pretty good right now, at least for competent developers. And if it's what blackomen wants, it may make him happier than finance even if I'm right an the profession is going to be on the decline.

All the better if you can avoid having to move to the SF bay area to do it.