@baldur IT is fashion driven. We're more fashion-driven than the Fashion industry. The field has been expanding exponentially since it was founded, and so the ratio of experienced programmers to newbies has always been very low. And so the hard-won wisdom of the elders is washed out in the glamour and hype.
Management would make coders fungible, but the best coders can change languages/frameworks/etc. quickly so there's a counter-pressure.
Just curious, do you have any opinion on "You Deserve a Tech Union" compared to "The Tech Worker's Guide to Unions"? I've been wanting to get one, but not sure which.
@baldur fascinating. Also, and this is a tangent, but if React is past its shelf life in 2024, what is better these days? Because all of the front-end job posts are still heavy on React.
@baldur Thank you for writing this. I lost my most recent job to exactly this kind of commoditization of labor. “New York developers are too expensive; send this to XXX or we’ll terminate the contract”. And because it's all in React, they’ll get away with it.
Fuck it. I'm done. I've made enough money in 31 years as a developer to walk away. I got high enough in the food chain that I wouldn’t be in the union (managers never are), but I totally agree that it's the solution.
Off topic, but that's an interesting typeface they're using there. It has a non-slanted italic font!
I won't say it's good, per se. The difference between the roman and italic fonts is subtle enough to be difficult to distinguish, and some characters, like U+0074 LATIN SMALL LETTER T, have the exact same glyph in both fonts.
@argv_minus_one So, the typeface is TypeTogether’s Literata. It was originally commissioned by Google for its epub reading app (at least originally, I don’t know if that’s still the case). It’s definitely interesting though I’m not sure it actually works for its intended use case (ebook reading).
@baldur Some lines hit really close to home. After years of "we need to hire more people to do this right" and equally many years of "we can't afford that, CTO won't give us the budget", reading something like "They will let their own businesses suffer by shipping substandard software because they believe they can recoup those losses at your expense." is really painful to bear.
@baldur One thing I'm not certain about is what makes one piece of technology "okay", say, a C++ compiler, but others problematic, like a web component framework? Both do essentially the same, encapsulate knowledge and hide the dirty details from the developer.
It's easier to hire C++ programmers than assembler programmers - yet I don't think many developers would say we should go back to hand written assembly.
@baldur In the early days, C compilers would produce objectively worse code than assembly written by an expert.
That has changed drastically over time, is this the big difference?
I'm not a web person, so maybe I'm asking dumb questions, but is the issue that things like React don't actually go through the same evolution of becoming better than their hand-written predecessors?
@rnlf It's always going to vary. That's part of what makes it complicated. Standardisation is good as are improved dev tools but at the same time tools like Electron and React Native have a greater commodifying effect than, say, Rust.
The issue is that some tools promise to abstract away expertise more than others. React frameworks tend to abstract away the various different specialities involved in web dev whereas Rust or C++ don't do the same to their fields, at least not to the same degree
@baldur That makes sense. C took away the need for people specialized in Assembly, and often the same people would be quite knowledgeable about different hardware platforms. So C only really abstracted away a single specialization.
@baldur Among many of the things that have me nodding in the post was the link to v0.dev is that the page did nothing at all except ask me to enter some text, and it pegged my CPU at 100%. Could not ask for a better demonstration.
@baldur Oh Baldur, this is just so, so sharp. Gonna be thinking about this the rest of the day. Thank you.
(And I hope you know how downright humbled I feel, after seeing you closed with such an expansive endorsement of my little book. Thank you so much, Baldur — that really means a lot 💜)
@baldur really insightful piece! It’s been pretty obvious that recent layoffs and some of the AI hype has been about labor discipline but I hadn’t thought of how frameworks and technology choices also serve this purpose.
Perhaps also related is how tools like LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor push a certain individualist framing of job market that claims to be about empowering workers but curiously bereft of any labor organizing. Know of any research or analysis on this topic?
@baldur it's 40 minutes, so I won't be offended if you lose interest. But he focuses, for example, on the way Google's Go language tries to make engineers interchangeable while many other languages do not.
@blabaere Possibly. Haven't looked into it enough to be sure but that feels plausible, at least for the old "write once, run everywhere" era of Java hype
@baldur I know you're mostly joking, but when I postpone a passionate post and I still want to make it the next day, that validates that it's not a knee-jerk reaction motivated by thirst for likes and boosts or in-the-moment anger.
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