Posted on 07/25/2024 8:37:43 PM PDT by Cronos
We need to stop treating technology and those who know how it works like a commodity. Because when you do that, you're quietly creating an elaborate and expensive mess down the road.
..asking tech to code itself seems like a great idea. On paper. But it's only when you ask AI to code something that's going to generate the revenue needed to pay for itself and the company's future growth that you'll realize that AI doesn't know how to shrug.
.. Techies, especially software developers, are terrible at marketing. Especially when marketing themselves.
So when the boom cycles in the tech industry reach a peak, like they did in 2021 and 2022, people who don't know better start asking questions like: 1. Is there any substantial difference between a programmer with 10+ years' experience and someone just out of an online code school? 2. Does off-shoring really come with all those management issues? 3. Can't we just use ChatGPT to code our entire next release with all this year's roadmap features packed into it?
In fact, I just said "people who don't know better" do this, but the shitty thing is that they do know better.
If you think the interest rates are scary on plain old regular money right now, wait until you see what the payback terms are for tech debt.
I'm all for low-costs and scrappy engineering solutions, but I'm also confident we haven't escaped the velocity in technology where elegance doesn't matter.
(Excerpt) Read more at inc.com ...
The business geniuses, who make up the executive suite, only care about off loading their shares at the high price. Leaving a legacy business has gone out of fashion.
And regarding H1B, I'm curious to see how it plays out since both Trump and Harris are on record supporting and eyeing an increase in H1B. Will Vance help turn Trump back to opposing them and committing to end H1B despite the money from tech billionaires?
Bottom line is tech salaries got out of whack from during the early 2020’s.
FAANG was paying entry-level grads 200K to start.
I knew that was not going to be sustainable.
As a software dev, I can definitely say AI isn’t quite ready to replace individual people by a long shot. In the past year we have employed AI tools to help speed along the code development process. At times it works, but only for the most boilerplate stuff that I could just as easily copy from one place and paste into another.
For more bespoke problems, it makes a solid try, but more often than not there’s at least a small number of errors, and sometimes it misses the mark totally.
AI needs to cook for a little while yet before it’s ready to replace humans. Unless of course you want to build an upside-down pyramid and expect it to stand upright.
It depends on the value the person brings AND scarcity
Management at my company needs to read this.
No scarcity when you flood the job market with H1B.
I am all in for a union.
salaries are a fixed cost which can be dwarfed by quality products in a successful company.
while reducing those costs may reduce the losses... it also increases the chance of failure.
we’ll need to out compete them with brazen pro-American tech ingenuity.
we need companies that hire ONLY Americans and aren’t afraid to say it.
Long story below. Consider this your warning.
In the fall of 1992 I designed, from the ground up, an online transaction processing system to do medicaid medicare and private insurance eligibility verifications. All of these came into the datacenter through a dial-up system. (2 channel banks into 2 USRobotics boxes with 24 modems in each). I designed this system so that any component could be swapped out for something bigger, faster, and the system would just carry on. I had multiple paths of redundancy, backup battery power, everything. Planned down to the tiles on the floor in the datacenter. In exchange for this design work and sacrifice they promoted a different guy to VP who did basically NONE of the work. So, I left the company. About 4 years or so ago I met a guy who had just left the company as a developer. I asked him about how things were there, and he told me that in the last couple of years(!) they had FINALLY managed to replace the old system. He described the problems that they were suffering from. All because not only had *I* left, but everyone that I had worked with had left, and no one understood the design. So assumptions were made that were wrong, short-cuts were taken that caused single points of failure, and all sorts of other stupidity. “Where’s this going?” you ask. The company would become Change Healthcare. You know, that company that got hacked a few months ago and took down all the billing systems? Yeah, that was my company. I was employee #16. The system was never designed to be connected to the internet, and it sounds like the shortcuts that the former dev told me about in the main OLTP system were extended to the online servers as well. :-\
The moral of the story, don’t run off the people who not only understand the system, but can also DO the work and get results.
Well said
Also, I wrote all the skeleton code. The “Data housed in a local database” server. The “Connect to datacenter over frame-relay” server. The “3270 terminal emulator” server. The “5250 terminal emulator” server. All worked out so that all the devs had to do was “string copies” as one of my then co-workers put it.
When Microsoft outages caused by a CrowdStrike software glitch that paralyzes airlines and other businesses, the importance of well-paid software techs becomes reality.
I saw this snowball start rolling downhill 20 years ago seeing the most-experienced programmers aging out without the younger ones fully understand what they inherited. This was the main plot point in the movie "Space Cowboys" and has arisen in real life where minders of Cold War tech are often clueless as to what they're dealing with.
I got the hell out of I.T. when I realized we're not only thrown under the bus but expected to be happy living there.
I think that, overall, our society is not good at transferring knowledge from one generation to the next.
I think you have your facts mistaken. President Trump tried to reform the H-1B program to prioritize jobs for Americans by enforcing the rules for proving the business need and increasing the pay of H-1B workers to make them less attractive relative to American workers.
You might be thinking of Trump's position on H-2B workers, who are seasonal (non-agricultural) hospitality workers. Trump hires a lot of foreign workers for his hotels.
-PJ
Was there ever a time when there was a union to represent the skilled draftsman’s trade in the automotive industry?
As much as I despise unions, I have to agree.
If not a union, some kind of guild.
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