brogrammers + tech becoming cool

jester77

Here is an excellent rant/blog on the current state of startups, pretty spot on imo.

Sparks

Saw "brogrammers", thought "oh feck no".

Saw "they'll hit their first technical debate and get laughed out of it" and thought "you've never worked in the industry, have you? You'll be maintaining their code, mentoring them and training them up for your job (because they'll accept lower pay) for the next decade, is a more likely outcome".

Saw people wondering why people are taking up IT work, and wondered what else someone is going to do when they leave school after the leaving cert for the construction industry, and who now has a wife, kids, mortgage and a skillset in building houses - which isn't exactly a skillset in demand today.

Trojan

I've been having this discussion with my ex- programming lecturer on and off the past few years.

The speed at which a working application can now be put together is orders of magnitude faster than when I graduated 10, 12 years ago - in the days of VB5 & 6, Microsoft Foundation Classes, etc. This is both a good and a bad thing.

For those who have a background in the bowels of machine code, assemblers and C, these tools make life a lot easier - once you make the leap of learning the framework in depth. Another bonus or advantage for the old school background is understanding the history of the development of these frameworks and APIs - if you had to work with the low level code it's a huge advantage in understanding possible weaknesses, and you know why the creators chose to do things in certain ways.

My biggest concern is whether the knowledge of the framework is transferable, as it's not an insignificant investment of time in learning something that is proprietary, and if the particular framework goes out of use, you need to start again.

For those without a background in the low levels, these tools allow them to build stuff that they couldn't otherwise - at any speed. Some will choose to educate themselves in supporting languages. Some won't - and they're the ones who will need support and mentoring and training.

If the APIs and frameworks themselves are unreliable or of poor quality, more people using them should bring more eyeballs, more inspection and testing, and thus increasing quality.

JQuery is a good example - certain issues weren't fixed for 5 years, but show-stopper bugs were fixed quickly, as more and more people started using it. And the bugs that remain are known, so developers work around them. I agree that nothing mission critical should be running on these systems until they have stood some sort of test of time (and if you're running something mission critical in Javascript, you are either a defensive coding expert or a failure).

But the end result should be more software - ranging across the spectrum of quality, and more business opportunities leading to job creation. Rather than viewing this as a lowering of the average software quality, I'd like to think that it will increase the overall amount of high quality software out there, even if there happens to be a lot of low quality there too.

Sparks

You know, I wouldn't mind that being the case Trojan, if those who knew the low-level stuff got paid more than those who need to have the frameworks to do anything...

...thing is, it ain't so Sad truth is that not many coders dig down towards the kernel to try to learn the low-level stuff anymore; low-level stuff seems to have a PR image that looks a lot like Alan Cox, while all the high-level stuff is lauded as being the cool new thing all the kids are doing before their startup is bought by Facebook for eleventy billion dollars. So three guesses what people gravitate towards. And three guesses what gets valued more by people who don't code (ie. the same people who decide on salary levels).

Trojan

That's certainly a pain in the proverbial in the short term, but over the longer term shouldn't market forces correct itself as more and more low-level coders upskill to get the better salaries, thus increasing demand?

(It's the same issue in the web design arena by the way - with "website in a box" type facilities available and first time developers undercutting existing companies with shoddy quality but rock bottom pricing. Sounds like the Market for Lemons.)

jmcc

Creamy Goodness wrote: »

i only really thought this was a childish immature american thing just like college frats.

please don't tell me it's making its way over here

I think it was covered in the Irish Times "technology" section so that will mean that the virus should be confined to a small cafe in the arse-end of Dublin close to the Irish Times office where a bunch of latte-quaffers think they are in OiTee. In other words, utterly irrelevant. Tech has a very unforgiving way of routing around such damage because there's a requirement to keep learning new things and how to use new tools/software. Sometimes I wonder if techies are born rather than being produced by third level courses. There has to be that basic spark that drives the need to know and understand and those who don't have it end up in sales or management. (If what I think is happening, based on some domain drop patterns, is happening, then there's a mini-DotBomb on the way that's going to cull a lot of these brogrammers.)

Regards...jmcc

Sparks

Trojan wrote: »

That's certainly a pain in the proverbial in the short term, but over the longer term shouldn't market forces correct itself as more and more low-level coders upskill to get the better salaries, thus increasing demand?

Not so much; see Ulster Bank for details!