That group had to shift overnight (in relative terms) to app development. This might be more foreboding than people realize. Aside from those who need to write complex queries stitching big data together or generating reports, will we need a typical backend engineer ever again? How complex are schemas ever going to get that a UI can’t do it (and generate the corresponding api)?
It happened to the first version of the frontend developer and I think backend is next. Then frontend again at some point, and Data people have another thing coming when the backend folks need to find another job when theirs goes away.
If tech is going to replace industries, it’s going to start with replacing parts of itself first. We’ll be the first to know how this is going to go down.
They have business logic specific to our product, and owned by the company, so although I'm doing a lot of pointless "plug together HTML" work for my learning, I'm also doing stuff that, AFAICT, has to be original code written by me.
Did I manage to successfully duck out the entire web trend already? When I was a kid, the web barely worked. When I was in college, web apps were a strange novelty Google was working on. When I started my career as a developer, I heard murmurs that web was the only kind of developer left. 10 years on, I'm still working steady and still not a web / mobile dev. I learned a little TS and started using Rust for backends, and that's about it. I knew SQL from college. The web trend came and went and I only learned how HTTP works in the last 5 years. Doesn't seem like the hardest thing in the world.
Is it just a combo of luck and privilege that I missed it?
> If tech is going to replace industries, it’s going to start with replacing parts of itself first. We’ll be the first to know how this is going to go down.
Probably. At first it was funny - Software was a coal vein that just kept going deeper and deeper the more we dug, and high-level languages kept lowering the barriers to entry, making more programmers who each made more money.
Some day the vein's either got to run out, or widen so much that everyone is a programmer getting paid nothing. Since I have enough money to save, I'm hoping to retire before the sigmoid inflects fully.
If businesses didn’t start moving their apps off Desktop and into the browser, what the hell were we all going to do? We’d have to goto the Java bootcamps, instead of the web app ones.
Pay attention because I don’t think business wants a fancy new UI and backend every few years (especially in the Enterprise space). I think we’re going to be done with this too.
They will one day just load all that crap into Airtable and standardize business tools industry wide.
The command line can be daunting until you play with it a bit and I know many web devs try to avoid it as much as possible while working.
And yah, there's only so many ways to write CRUD, auth, profile, and presence; backend is already commodified as B2B products.
We have a precedent for dealing with government intervention in established industries which usually involves providing support to transition to other industries. Fisheries management is full of examples of government paying fishermen to fish less for example. Yet somehow coal miners became a target of derision by a certain branch of American politicians who gleefully cackled about regulating them out of work.
Devs have been so resilient because learning new things has been a part of the job description for decades.
It actually has something in common, you still write structured text for living, though your target audience are now people, not machines. Some readers commented that they find my style clear and understandable; maybe it is a carry-over from programming, where you cannot be ambiguous.
But I find writing for people much more enjoyable than writing for computers. As a computer programmer, you mostly receive negative feedback: something stopped working and the users are often angry or frustrated. As a writer for people, you receive more than a few thank-you e-mails from your readers, which brighten your day.
FWIW there are different types of writing and different types of programming.
Writing copy for a bank will probably generate a lot of feedback about mistakes that need to be fixed.
Writing code to reduce annoying monotonous tasks for coworkers so it takes ten minutes instead of two hours will get you a lot thank yous from your coworkers, and will also brighten your day.
It's all about what your job is, and how close you are to the people you are affecting.
The software that I spent most of my time with was a communication tool. So whenever something broke down, people had problems calling or texting one another. This pissed them off, naturally.
OTOH now my bestsellers are about half-forgotten events from world history. Aside from a weird e-mail I received from an even weirder Stalin-apologist, people generally enjoy this kind of reading and do not feel angry about it.
If, on the other hand, I were an investigative journalist and dug out dirt on politicans and mafia, the tone of the e-mails from readers would definitely get rougher, to say the least.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18339067.Marian_Kechli...
Everything I write is in Czech, though. Automatic translation from Czech to English sucks.
I suspect this is literally true, but only because we don't see them. I've heard second-hand the story of a top developer at a famous unicorn who just couldn't keep up with all the stimulants everyone was using to code more and burned out, bought a cabin in the woods, and became a hermit.
That's interesting. Do you mean Adderall/Ritalin?
That stuff has a relatively fixed useful half-life. It doesn't work for as long as people might think. It also doesn't actually make thinking clearer. It makes people feel as if they are thinking more clearly. I don't feel like looking for it, but this has been studied and reported, somewhere.
If you are referring to crank, well, the half-life of that stuff is even shorter...
I thought is was obvious. It’s even some type of cliché.
But... now that I’m writing this. All those folks are either French, German or Central European. I currently lives in the US and I see more folks doing bootcamps to archive better income and address their debts.
Hmm. I would be curious to see number about that, because obviously it’s highly anecdotal.
Exemple :
- starting to roof painting company
- starting a small farm business ( direct to farmer market type )
- starting a goat herding business
- becoming a wood worker
- becoming a car mechanic in a communal garage
- becoming a teacher ( of non tech things )
- become a bootcamp teacher
- becoming a kumbutcha brewer
I know myself that I will burn out ( in a soft way ) of tech roles.
To clarify : those folks where able to do it because :
- their state offer reconversion package
- they have tech money
I've never been on the web side of things, but I knew enough HTML in the early aughts to put up a basic informational website. After digging in to some sites I admired, I decided that it was too much distraction from my actual work to roll my own.
Granted some of this complexity comes from the legitimate need to support mobile gracefully, but damn are there layers upon layers upon yet more layers of stuff just to get some pictures to show up nicely with some text and look consistent across devices.
Props to everyone who does this for reals and does a good job achieving that consistency. For my money, I'll hire it out.