Ask HN: Did Developers Undermine Their Own Profession?

The real undermine that is happening now is AI replacing Jr Developers and interns.

To increase hiring you introduce conventions to lower the barrier of entry. This means less qualified, skilled, experienced, or competent people can participate with near equivalent performance. The cost is a form of vendor lock-in and generally shitty output that costs more to build and maintain.

In theory this also makes developers easier to replace because they are a cheap common commodity. In reality firing people requires legal safety, so it’s also more expensive than cheap conventions can allow.

This is weird because wages are not declining. Businesses accept the rising wages in exchange for not having to pay for continuing education, licensing recertification, training, or other career maintenance.

We do? I was under the impression that most devs were disappointed in the result of bootcamps. And there are bootcamps that are simply scams. We do like open source, but the number of people working nights and weekends on it is quite small.

You are just seeing the natural progression of knowledge. Standing on the shoulders of giants, etc. Back in the 90s, you could have a 7 figure ARR startup just by doing one basic CRUD app and putting it online. Now, people can do that as a learning exercise within a few days of starting learning how to code, and that was even before AI. The tools are better, libraries exist for most common needs, coding and DevOps practices have evolved, access to documentation and tutorials is incredible, and we are working at higher and higher levels of abstraction.

It is not because we are glorifying mediocrity. On the contrary, we have spent decades striving quite hard to increase everyone's skills and communicate better ways of doing things. And we succeeded. If you can find any, go look at code and practices from the early 2000s and you will see just how much the general quality of work has increased.

As a result of all the support from each other, more people can do the work now. Yes, it decreases salaries, but we've been living in an insane compensation bubble for a long time.

The market didn't suddenly get flooded with juniors because we promoted coding. It was because the demand was astronomical. Companies were desperate for people, so bootcamps emerged to fill the gap. Why would you blame the supply for a problem created by overwhelming demand?

I don't think I know anyone who has such a big ego as to say coding is easy. Sure, hello world is easy but that's not representative of coding overall.

I'm not seeing a flood of under qualified people joining the profession... domestically at least. The group with the highest rates of underperforming people I have encountered have been from contracting companies based in India. Even then, it's not super high in general but more how the company tended to switch from their A team players from initial on-boarding to their B team players for ongoing project work.

The value/pay decline hasn't really happened yet. I think it might really happen in the nenxt few years. We are seeing higher unemployment but we are still seeing high pay for the remaining positions. The companies are being picky about who they hire and still want the "best", or they just outsource.