Ask HN: Is there a bubble in software work? What's the 5/10 year forecast?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21784715

18 10 7 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm reading The Click Moment, where the author writes, "Ten years ago, if you wanted to guarantee yourself a life of financial security, one of the surest paths was to become a lawyer." So law programs and students blew up, and the result was companies like LegalZoom offering routine legal work for $25, and it's no longer deemed a "hot" field. I'm wondering what you guys think about this. With AWS releasing CodeGuru, (which aims to reduce hours spent debugging and testing) I suspect a similar thing could happen. I'm in ${BIG_TECH_CITY} where there are bootcamp ads plastered on buses and in my YouTube ads. I just doubt there will be work for new bootcamp grads, say, 5 or 10 years from now.

jki2752• 7 years ago

Computer Science is still hard, and the vast majority of those who think they want to write software simply aren't effective at it.

There will always be work for people who are good at writing software.

As to your last comment? Maybe but I doubt it. I think that things will morph a bit to the point where there will be better "bootcamps", maybe not called that exactly, that offer more of the real CS education that's necessary for a good software engineer. But we'll see.

codedrome2• 7 years ago

Writing software isn't really "bootcampable" if there is such a word. You need a significant amount of time to gradually absorb knowledge and skills.

jki2752• 7 years ago

I covered that in my comment.

GoldenMonkey• 7 years ago

Law is not really comparable.

Software continues to eat the world. There are so many new sectors and the demand for software is insatiable. Mobile apps, drones, robots, ai, self driving, medical devices, blockchain... so much more... there are so many fields and applications for software still...

And new sectors... an example: If I were starting in college today. I would major in cs and genetic engineering. Programming living cells...

For context: Andreessen, why software is eating the world. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190348090457651...

cmorgan8506• 7 years ago

Agriculture is just kicking off now too. You're right, it's consuming the world.

noir_lord• 7 years ago

Not to mention the maintenance and replacement of software in fields where it's already extremely dominant.

The valley may explode/implode but the rest of the world has had a pretty solid demand for developers since I was a teenager in the 90's, it's just less dramatic and less well paid with fewer hours.

muzani• 7 years ago

The bootcamp student no longer needs to learn garbage collection, how memory works, hash maps va arrays vs linked lists and all that.

They really just learn to tell the app what to do. They tell it to open a camera, save the photo, what format to save it in, submit it it which server, how to store it, when to resize, a balance between quality and size, how to inform another user when the photo has been submitted, how to politely inform the user that it's not going to abuse camera permissions, how to gather user data while staying within legal restrictions, and so on.

A good developer with the best tools might do this in half an hour. A newbie developer could take half a week. The good developer can easily demand more money.

Sure there are things that will simplified to a $25 action. When I started programming, we were building our own push notification services and chat servers. A lot of this is now $25 or less, but a developer can still get paid $1000 to assemble it - the code is there but you still need to pay someone to read documentation.

And maybe through some miracle, AI can do all this work in the future. Then you still need people to manage AI, to communicate with clients/customers, understand what they want, and tell the AI to build it. AI will likely be as smart as some cheap foreign labor who can barely speak English, so someone needs to slowly explain to them what they mean, possibly in their own language... which is a lot like programming.

So let's fast forward 1000 years, where we can reach 90% project estimation accuracy and all this assembly is just blue collar work. We'll get something very similar to the construction industry now, which still hires engineers with a degree, to build complex megaprojects like getting a skyscraper done in a couple years. Maybe a CS certification and the word "engineer" might actually mean something then.

codingslave• 7 years ago

I think the upper echelon of computer programmers will be paid more than ever. I think the lower levels will see compensation decreases. So if you want to make tons of money, get really really good at computer science and algorithms, ignore the frameworks

codedrome2• 7 years ago

5 to 10 years is a lifetime in this business. That's like asking what cars or aircraft will look like in 50 or 100 years.

Spooky23• 7 years ago

The premise is flawed. Law has been a problematic field for a long time now — anyone looking at being attorney as a stable path a decade ago was delusional.

Technology is eating the world, but it’s not a high security field at the same time. Whatever you do today is legacy is 5-10 years, and you can be easily rendered redundant if you’re not in the right place/skillset.

Ask HN: Is there a bubble in software work? What's the 5/10 year forecast?

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