Well that and this is a forum for a lot of tech people which means a good number of software engineers here.
The way I see it, it's like 'swatcoder and 'lovich said upthread: the field became a money printer, and attracted - not revealed, attracted - a different kind of people, with a different mindset. I too saw this change happening. Applicant pool size? That's a spurious correlation - it's just driven by the same factors that make software industry a money printer.
You have just written down a partial solution to this dilemma: make these high-paying jobs less attractive in terms of status for these wealthy families. :-)
Also money is nice.
You never write code in a vacuum do you? You always have some kind of goal.
https://swizec.com/blog/lolcodetojavascript-compiler-babel-m...
It was pretty fun.
Also this other time I wrote a nodejs script to keep my computer at a specific temperature because our office fridge kept freezing my carrots.
https://swizec.com/blog/i-built-a-node-app-to-thaw-my-favori...
> because our office fridge kept freezing my carrots.
I bet a lot of people 10-15 years older than you would say the same thing - except they'd say it about you and your generation.
I'm not that old, but I've been around long enough to hear people of every age over about 30 claim that everything was better back in their day until the new generation came along and ruined it.
And they’d probably be right!
I remember the grognards giving me shit about memory management and me giving it right back by explaining that what they considered a large chunk of memory would be worth pennys next year because of Moore’s law and I wasn’t going to waste time considering something that I literally couldn’t learn faster than it became obsolete knowledge.
Quantitative differences can create qualitative differences and I don’t think it’s surprising that we’re in a different age of software engineering than we were 10-15 years ago for any given X year
Then suddenly single threaded speedups didn’t happen anymore (and people realized even though cpu speeds had grown, it was not directly related to Moore’s law).
Ofc your rationale used Moore’s law correctly while the ”cpu infinite speed growth rah rah rah” peoples didn’t.
>FATAL ERROR: CALL_AND_RETRY_LAST Allocation failed - JavaScript heap out of memory > 1: node::Abort() [/usr/bin/node]
Is what made me decide it might finally be worth the time to actually learn how memory worked
And that's why all applications are laggy as shit these days.
But ignore memory at your peril. I have one proj that has a 256GB instance. For a fairly boring CRUD app. I am asking a lot of questions as apparently we are having the yearly 'we need more memory' questions. Things that are leading to speedups. Just by using less memory. At the bottom of that stack is a L1 cache with less than a hundred KB. It doesnt matter right up until it does. I have seen huge 300+ item string classes that needed maybe 10 of the fields. They threw it in 'just because there is enough'. Yet something has to fill in those fields. Something has to generate all the code for those fields. The memory mangers have to keep track of all of that junk. Oh and all of that is in a pipeline of a cascade of applications so that 300+ class is copied 10 times. Plus the cost to keep it on disk and shove it thru the network.
People that stopped running tests because they were configured to make 10,000 API calls in one minutes and it crippled the app until everything was restarted.
"Add some more memory to your database instance....poof"
Honestly, I think so much of this comes from the belief of needing to move fast because. Because why? That would require direction. I think the money motivation is motivating speed but we've lost a lot of vision. Moving fast is great for learning but when you break things you got to clean it up. The problem is that once these tech giants formed they continued to act like a scrappy developer. To not go back and fix all the mess because we gotta go fast, we gotta go forward. But with no real vision forward. And you can't have that vision unless you understand the failures. We have so many low hanging fruits that I can't figure out why they aren't being solved. From deduplicating calendar entries, automatically turning off captioning on videos when a video has embedded captioning so you don't just overlay text on top of text, searching email, or even setting defaults to entry fields based on the browser data (e.g. if you ask for user's country, put the one the browser is telling you at the top of the fucking list!). These are all things I think you would think about if you were working in a space where you needed to consider optimization, if you were resource constrained. But we don't and so we let it slide. But the issue is a death by a thousand cuts. It isn't so bad in a few cases but these things add up. And the great irony of it all is that scale is what has made tech so powerful and wealthy in the first place. But no one stops to ask if we're also scaling up shit. If you printing gold but 1% of your gold is shit, you're still making a ton of shit. The little things matter because the little things add up. You're forced to deal with that when you think about memory management but now we just don't
> You can also trace personal backgrounds and you'll see a much higher representation in the newer cohort coming from upper middle class backgrounds with families in careers like finance, consulting, medicine/dentistry whereas more in the older cohort came from more modest middle class backgrounds in engineering, academia, or even working class trades.
As a reminder: Bill Gates, who is certainly old school tech, was born and raised in an objectively wealthy, well-connected family, then went to Harvard. This is nearly made-for-TV silver spoon stuff.
The original focus of this thread was on technical precision vs. market efficiency, and how quality was sacrificed for faster conversion to sales.
That shift compromises products for everyone by creating a race to the bottom toward the minimum viable product and safety standards. When the consequences eventually hit, the aggregate responsibility and emergent effects lose direct attribution...but they exist all the same.
I'm only a little younger than Gates, and it seemed like, what else would you do? PCs were revolutionizing the world.
For about a decade I worked as an engineer in a field where the expectation (at least starting) was that metal gets cut, stuff gets built, and there's physical hardware.
Those existed. May have actually had more hardware interaction than many in engineering. Yet much of the day to day rapidly became computer simulations of the metal that might get cut someday.
In many fields, the organizational choice decrement on anything involving capital expenditure or purchase was so severe that usually the obvious choice was to run a computer model, and simulate what might occur. What else would you do?
Boy is this true. I don’t think we ever recovered. Imagine trying to start a capital intensive business like mining in 2025.
Even for the folks that have an ecological focus, there's quite a few methods developed with limited degradation of the landscape, and reclamation of the mining sites into alternative uses (park, forestry, entertainment, tourism). The Wieliczka saltmine in Poland's an especially impressive example [1]
[1] https://www.wieliczka-saltmine.com/individual-tourist/touris...
And these days, there's also a huge number of resources in terms of mineral identification and site mapping. The EMIT Imaging Spectrometer from NASA's a cool example that does remote satelite mineral identification from orbit. [2]
The most salient values of the later cohort are different than those in the prior ones, and those values do track with the values we associate with those different class backgrounds.
But there's no ranking being made there. They're just different values.
The values of the new cohort have earned the industry a great deal of political, economic, and cultural influence on an international level.
The values of the old cohort didn't do that, except insofar as they built a stage for the new one. They made software differently. They designed products differently. They operated businesses on different scales. They hired differently.
Indeed some of us from the old cohort don't personally savor all the spotlight and influence and cultural drama that Silicon Valley collectively bears now, and miss the way thing were. And others love it. But that's just personal preference, not class warfare.
To be fair, I don't see any value judgements in the post you're replying to. He doesn't say if it's a good or bad thing, it's just a thing. But what I think this means is that field became more popular, entry filters became more competitive, and families with less resources to invest in their offspring became filtered out.
There's nothing good or bad about it.
For instance I was a CS undergrad in the mid/late-90s. There was an enormous difference demographically between my incoming freshman class and the incoming freshman class by the time I graduated. And the talking points were exactly the same ones we see in this thread.
You can also trace personal backgrounds and you'll see a much higher representation in the newer cohort coming from upper middle class backgrounds with families in careers like finance, consulting, medicine/dentistry whereas more in the older cohort came from more modest middle class backgrounds in engineering, academia, or even working class trades.
Of course, there were always some of all of these people in the industry, but the balance shifted dramatically during the last couple booms, tracking the atypically high compensation standards set by FAANG's since 2010 or so.