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fschmidt
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Post by fschmidt »

publicduende wrote:Just another form of arbitrage. Why pay £5000 a month to a US, Ivy League graduated software engineer when you can hire an Indian youngster straight from one of the IIT (Indian Institute of Technology, that is) colleges for less than $2000.

The problem isn't the Indian chap, the problem is that software jobs are getting easier due to abstraction and commodity technology that can be integrated with a few lines of code.
Ha ha ha, that's hilarious. You would fit right in with modern tech management.
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publicduende
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Post by publicduende »

fschmidt wrote:
publicduende wrote:Just another form of arbitrage. Why pay £5000 a month to a US, Ivy League graduated software engineer when you can hire an Indian youngster straight from one of the IIT (Indian Institute of Technology, that is) colleges for less than $2000.

The problem isn't the Indian chap, the problem is that software jobs are getting easier due to abstraction and commodity technology that can be integrated with a few lines of code.
Ha ha ha, that's hilarious. You would fit right in with modern tech management.
You're an old school programmer and should be able to understand me. Was that an hysterical laughter? I don't find the state of modern software engineering funny enough...
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Post by momopi »

starchild5 wrote: Its same as China products where Americans are perfectly capable of manufacturing all products Made in China by themselves...The margin of profit that wall mart makes is over 400% ....
Walmart's profit margin is 3.13% (or about 3.5% 4 year historical average).
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Cornfed
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Post by Cornfed »

publicduende wrote:Yeah hang on though, I haven't said somebody is to be blamed for this change. It's a fact deriving from technology evolution. Software development itself is getting easier and easier, and proof of that is that many 25-yo kids with three of four years of learning .NET and scouring Q&A sites like Stack Overflow can "get the job done" just as well if not better than a developer in his 40's who realises 80% of what he learned is outdated or can be done more easily with commoditised tools.

We have to face it. Software engineering is a commodity industry, no longer the secret garden of an elite of nerds. Quality software that solves very complex problems (like big data storage, slicin & dicing and analytics) is now available free of charge or even as open-source, and it's the product of tens of thousands hours of man development by a collective of hundreds of people. You just can't beat that.

An elite of top developers who have the skills, the vision and possibly the courage to productise their idea will always exist, but the remaining 90% will be "technology integrator", a job that doesn't require particular talent, creativity or skill.
So are you saying that innovation and progress within the software industry is neither necessary nor desirable any more? In this is the case, shouldn't the entire industry consist of a handful of polytechnic-educated kids being paid a few dollars above minimum wage?
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Cornfed
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Post by Cornfed »

xiongmao wrote:
Cornfed wrote:Is there any reason tech workers aren't simply funneled into the industry from universities by prior arrangement in the way that med students are (or used to be)?
The problem is that the IT industry doesn't want graduates. It wants the top 10% who are very experienced.
In tech as in much of society, people seem to have given up and are only sticking around to loot what remains. When you cease to bring talented men through the system, you are obviously dooming it to extinction. I wonder why people are doing this.
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publicduende
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Post by publicduende »

Cornfed wrote:
publicduende wrote:Yeah hang on though, I haven't said somebody is to be blamed for this change. It's a fact deriving from technology evolution. Software development itself is getting easier and easier, and proof of that is that many 25-yo kids with three of four years of learning .NET and scouring Q&A sites like Stack Overflow can "get the job done" just as well if not better than a developer in his 40's who realises 80% of what he learned is outdated or can be done more easily with commoditised tools.

We have to face it. Software engineering is a commodity industry, no longer the secret garden of an elite of nerds. Quality software that solves very complex problems (like big data storage, slicin & dicing and analytics) is now available free of charge or even as open-source, and it's the product of tens of thousands hours of man development by a collective of hundreds of people. You just can't beat that.

An elite of top developers who have the skills, the vision and possibly the courage to productise their idea will always exist, but the remaining 90% will be "technology integrator", a job that doesn't require particular talent, creativity or skill.
So are you saying that innovation and progress within the software industry is neither necessary nor desirable any more? In this is the case, shouldn't the entire industry consist of a handful of polytechnic-educated kids being paid a few dollars above minimum wage?
Progress in the software engineering has followed the same curve as most other areas of technology and has now reached a comfortable plateau. Some of the more exciting technologies out there are simply rehashes of things developed and done 20/30 years ago, from functional languages to non-relational databases. Erlang went live in 1986 and it is still as current now as it was then. It's just that, in the start-up and social media frenzy we live now, anything can be given a cool twist with the right amount of fresh buzzwords and marketing.

Developing the foundation, say, high-performance API and frameworks or development tools, still requires top-notch skills. Yet, this duty is usually left to a small number of high priests from specialist software houses or the technology owners (Microsoft).

The vast majority of commercial developers do not have the time, and perhaps the talent, to dig into the foundation. They build on top of it. This pattern is nothing new, though. Who wants to develop a Wi-fi communication stack in mixed hw/sw when they can buy an all-in-one chip from China for $2?

So yes, I do see the progressive dumbing down of the software industry, with only marketing and the "cool factor" to sustain its descent into yet another commoditised industry ready for full outsourcing. Most large software companies have been using a pyramid model for the best part of 20 years: product managers a few top-notch architects and engineers in first-world locales (US, UK, Germany, Sweden etc.), and an ocean of contractors and sub-contractors in India, Czech Republic and Bulgaria, Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania etc.

One of the few industries that refused to bend to this model was financial services, for two reasons: 1) their profits were so fat they could afford to stay asleep and not smell the coffee, 2) they lived (and still live) in the delusion that whatever software they develop is a proprietary IP of such value and strategic importance, that they cannot entrust anybody else than their own developers with creating and running it.

And now things are changing in this happy island as well, and fast. Banks are cutting operations (including IT) people to the tune of tens of thousands every year, while massively curtailing salaries and expectations to those who remain.

I give it another 5 years maximum, then not even those young Chinese kids fresh out of a London Masters will want to work 12/14 hours a day for an investment bank for a salary that is a mere 5/10% higher than what a software house of a non-financial house will offer.

And I give it another 20 years maximum, after which the robots will take over and software engineering will go from a human craft to a highly industrialised, conveyor belt activity merely monitored by a few sparse white-apron monkeys.
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Post by Moretorque »

I read they predict coming up shortly over 40% of jobs will be obsolete because of automation?

I find what usually kills innovation is lack of input from inventors not being able to keep and grow the fruits of their labor by the state ?
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Cornfed
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Post by Cornfed »

publicduende wrote: So yes, I do see the progressive dumbing down of the software industry, with only marketing and the "cool factor" to sustain its descent into yet another commoditised industry ready for full outsourcing.
When I said in another thread that the software industry was mostly bullshit and produced little of real value, you seemed to disagree with me. Aren't you now confirming what I was saying?
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publicduende
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Post by publicduende »

Cornfed wrote:
publicduende wrote: So yes, I do see the progressive dumbing down of the software industry, with only marketing and the "cool factor" to sustain its descent into yet another commoditised industry ready for full outsourcing.
When I said in another thread that the software industry was mostly bullshit and produced little of real value, you seemed to disagree with me. Aren't you now confirming what I was saying?
I wouldn't say software engineering doesn't produce real value. A hair drier has value whether it's made in Germany or China, but virtually all manufacturers have long since outsourced their production to China because that value can be had at a fraction of the cost of a German worker.

IT is still a staple of our (functioning) economy and daily life, and will be so forever. The dramatic difference is who craft that software and maintains those IT systems. It used to be an extremely qualified elite of first world scientists and engineers, then, more democratically, a larger proportion of scientists and engineer, and now the shift is clear towards second and third world staff.

Extrapolate the trend towards diminishing cost of labour (with little regard to skills, let alone the benefits to the local economy) and you'll see self-maintaining, self-repairing IT infrastructure and even robots and computers programming other computers.
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Post by fschmidt »

Cornfed wrote:
publicduende wrote: So yes, I do see the progressive dumbing down of the software industry, with only marketing and the "cool factor" to sustain its descent into yet another commoditised industry ready for full outsourcing.
When I said in another thread that the software industry was mostly bullshit and produced little of real value, you seemed to disagree with me. Aren't you now confirming what I was saying?
Let me clarify this. What publicduende is saying is just crap. What has happened to development is that development tools have turned to shit, so development has become the process of using shit. This has made real development harder, not easier. I am developing real products everyday, so I know. One project is my dating app. This needs to work on Android and iOS (Apple). Both of these development environments are absolute crap. Even developing simple things on them is painful, but doing anything creative is a nightmare. The same applies to other areas of development.

One other point is that this isn't just a corporate problem. All programmers, including open-source programmers, are now producing shit. They simply reflect modern culture and they have absolutely no sense of good design.

All this will show up in the real world with increasingly unreliable software. Expect an increasing number of failures and disasters caused by malfunctioning software.
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Post by Cornfed »

I have often thought that modern society was run like a company that was expected to go out of business in a few years. This seems to confirm that. Better be prepared to bug out.
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Post by fschmidt »

Below is my latest interaction with an open-source mailing list. These days I just write almost everything from scratch instead of dealing with these morons.


On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 12:22 PM, Jason Dillon wrote:
> Not a very friendly or helpful email, but I moderated it through anyways.
>
> * * *
>
> You can find a site here with javadocs etc:
>
> http://jline.github.com/jline2/
>
> Most users of jline consume this via maven? So its generally not a big deal
> to not have a download the jar link, you can fine the latest release on the
> central maven repository:
>
> http://central.maven.org/maven2/jline/jline/2.11/
>
> —jason
>
>
> On May 30, 2014 at 11:19:13 AM, Franklin Schmidt wrote:
>
> Why was jline moved to that cesspool GitHub? GitHub is unusable, populated
> by sadists who refuse to include usable JARs with their projects. I used
> the original jline which is here:
>
> http://jline.sourceforge.net/
>
> Note how easy it is to download the JAR and to see the javadoc. GitHub
> projects never do this. Developers there hate their users. Since the jline
> developers have gone to the dark side, maybe someone can suggest a similar
> project that still avoids sadistic development practices.
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "jline-users" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
> email to jline-users+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
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publicduende
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Post by publicduende »

fschmidt wrote:Let me clarify this. What publicduende is saying is just crap. What has happened to development is that development tools have turned to shit, so development has become the process of using shit. This has made real development harder, not easier. I am developing real products everyday, so I know. One project is my dating app. This needs to work on Android and iOS (Apple). Both of these development environments are absolute crap. Even developing simple things on them is painful, but doing anything creative is a nightmare. The same applies to other areas of development.

One other point is that this isn't just a corporate problem. All programmers, including open-source programmers, are now producing shit. They simply reflect modern culture and they have absolutely no sense of good design.

All this will show up in the real world with increasingly unreliable software. Expect an increasing number of failures and disasters caused by malfunctioning software.
That's it fschmidt, you've exhausted my respect pool. You're clearly a shadow of your former self, an ex-competent programmer who traded his rational mind and passion for keeping abreast with technology developments with the usual mix of religious paranoias and racist banter. And let's add complete sexual starvation, for completeness. You're no more no less than a slightly more technically competent version of Cornfed.

If you bothered to peek into the "now" you would realise that development tools are now far more sophisticated than they were when you stopped learning about software development, about 20 years ago. So sophisticated that even a monkey could grab a PC and craft a multi-platform mobile app without much effort. Software engineering being more democratic and open to more people inevitably means a drop in code efficiency, or elegance, or correctness. In short: quality.

Your poor arse is probably stuck with C and eMacs and Fortran 77 if it can proclaim that a "dating app" on Android and iOS is an insurmountable task that you can't be bothered handling and you have to sit down in despair and complain about. Sour grapes anyone? You prefer glorifying your past and the tools of yore rather than learning about the new ones and get productive with them. As a fellow developer, you probably know how knowledge staleness is detrimental to our profession. I would add that even worse is the arrogance to judge the new tools before even trying them!

Ever heard of Xamarin/Monotouch to cross-develop your dating app (God knows the world needs another one) on Android and iOS? Whoops, sorry. To use that you would need to learn C#/.NET, and you haven't even tried to master Java because you are so happy to cloak your intellectual laziness with the blanket statement that all which happens today is shit, and there's no point learning it. Sour grapes anyone (part II)? If you focused less on building virtual synagogues and fantasising about Filipino poon and more on updating your skills, you would realise that tools are there, and easier than ever to use an do useful stuff with.

Which brings me back to my initial point, that the crux of the matter isn't the quality of the tools, which are always made by an elite of good to great devvies, but the quality of the average person who uses them to deliver software that has less and less innovation, creativity and productivity value, and by extension monetary value. To the point that every Indian or Thai freelancer can create a product that ticks all the boxes without having to know too much about relational databases, concurrent programming or Agile.

It's quite sad, because you were one of the few people left on HA whose good judgment I could trust, if anything because you do sound like you had a good career behind you. Oh well, some wines age well, some others turn straight into vinegar.
Last edited by publicduende on May 30th, 2014, 5:38 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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publicduende
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Post by publicduende »

fschmidt wrote:Below is my latest interaction with an open-source mailing list. These days I just write almost everything from scratch instead of dealing with these morons.
...which probably explains why you're still stuck with your "dating app". You don't trust the BSD guys and need to program another socket library from scratch? LOL
fschmidt
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Post by fschmidt »

Yup, publicduende must be a middle manager somewhere. Liberals love the word "sophisticated" which they can't distinguish from "pointlessly complicated". publicduende writes "you haven't even tried to master Java" when I have bunch of projects on Google Code in Java. He assumes I don't use cross-development tools when in fact I am using one, Codename One, for my dating app. In fact I report and fix bugs in that project. Because it is incomplete, I still have to deal with horrors of Android and iOS. Anyway, I don't want to waste my time arguing with idiots, I have code to write. Anyone who likes modern software is basically the same as someone who likes modern culture, utterly clueless.
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