Early in life, my parents got me one of these Commodore home computers and it transformed something deep inside my brain. Other kids saw it as another device where they could consume a never-ending stream of colorful games, a means to be entertained, and maybe an opportunity to visit other
I read the blog post as part of a grieving process. I’m pretty sure there are jobs out there for the author. But he needs to come to terms with the labor market and his place in it.
Based on his anecdotes he sounds like he’s about my age. When we entered the job market we were the keepers of a secret and arcane art. We were paid well, pampered, treated with regard. Placed in positions of authority just because of childhood hobbies were useful.
Then the suits figured out that for the amount of money they were paying us they could train people with actual work ethic. Actual professionals that come in, crank tickets for 8-10 hours straight, then go home and never think about computers or code again until they sit back down at the desk the next morning. And that’s how software development became just another profession.
The places that still hunt for actual nerds are few and far between, and often have super high skill requirements and/or pay relatively little. The other outfits expect to hire well rounded professionals. Being able to write code is just one of the many job requirements.
I think you hit it right on the head and with far more empathy than I. Well done.
We are one of those “nerd hoarding” shops and I, the CEO, am close to the lowest paid employee. These guys make bank but they are also worth every penny. If people knew how few people keep our world from imploding, they’d be an insomniac like me.
As far as the rest, I wrote an article back in 2008 or 2010 where I outlined how IT was going to become commoditized and many of my colleagues thought I was an alarmist. Ten or so years later everyone has moved their infrastructure to the cloud (RIP in-house sysadmins and network engineers), and developers are now mostly ticket punchers as you said. Lord knows how AI streamlined processes will affect the Dev sector.
I don’t think that’s a healthy way of framing things. Software development was always, from the very start, just another profession. What changed in the last decade or so was a) supply and demand in the job market, b) the quality of the pool of workers searching for jobs. Companies still look for developers, and most still pay handsomely well, but the hiring bar is currently met only by those who are far more experienced and/or paid attention to their career growth. You still see companies hiring people straight out of bootcamps, but they come out of the bootcamp pipeline with proper portfolios and they hit the ground running without requiring that much training or onboarding.
In contrast, the blogger states that “After more than a decade of sitting behind a single company’s desk, my CV looks bleak.” A decade is a very long time to stay idle by without updating their skills, isn’t it?
I saw this phenomenon throughout the past decade in the hiring loops I was involved. In the demand peak I already saw a few developers with over a decade of experience interviewing for senior positions that started their interviews already defeated and broken, complaining that in their last roles they just went with the flow and never bothered to do anything relevant with their career. They claimed they could fit the role and do whatever needed to be done, but the truth of the matter is that that’s true for each and every single developer called for a technical review. We needed to have some assurance that we were hiring the best candidate for the job, and these developers with a long experience of “sitting behind a single company’s desk” gave us nothing to work with. So why would we hire them over those who could show off something?
You are right in all regards. It was always a profession. My aunt who was a programmer in the 1980s sure as hell treated it as work.
But there is a slice of a few years, less than a decade, of people that entered the job market during the great Internet gold rush, that are (for lack of a more polite term) simply entitled as shit. I know, I used to be one. It took me a long time to acknowledge that.
This article reads like someone working through that.