

Programmers becoming "starving artists" - codexon
http://www.linux.com/archive/feed/33035

======
DenisM
If programmers are in short supply become one and make tons of money. If they
are over-supplied become an entrepreneur, hire lots of cheap programmers and
change the world.

Think positively.

~~~
w3matter
Only thing is cheap programmers generally -- not exclusively -- but generally
suck.

~~~
DenisM
If cheap programmers suck, good programmers should be expensive.

In this situation be a good programmer - it's not hard, just requires
diligence and methodical learning of new stuff.

------
Daishiman
Among the many erroneous assumptions this makes is that the demand for
software is not elastic or limited by the cost of development. In reality what
would happen is that if code becomes cheaper companies will get more than they
could before to automate increasingly larger aspects of their infrastructure,
improve the quality of their current software, and make custom software more
accesible to small businesses.

As the very same article says, custom software is more than 90% of all
software out there. The cost of licenses for proprietary enterprise software
like Oracle, AIX, SAP, etc. is dwarfed by the costs of consulting and
customization to make those fit into existing infrastructures.

Programmers aren't going anywhere. If anything more people will need training,
more computers will need fixing, and more experts will need to be called to
fix the newbie's mistakes. Just because there are more programmers in general
doesn't mean that the number of competent programmers will increase.

~~~
cschwarm
> ... custom software is more than 90% of all software out there.

I've read this in several variations for years. But I've never seen a
reference.

Is this just a myth or can anyone point to real research which provides
evidence for the claim?

~~~
Daishiman
Without getting into statistically relevant data, of the hundreds of
programmers I've met in my lifetime, at most a dozen worked on proprietary
packaged software (game devs, more precisely). The rest did web sites,
consultancy, customizations, everything that meant going to a customer and
creating or changing something that was there to better fit a set of
requirements.

------
nutmeg
I work with open source technology in my job all the time, and I don't think
there's any danger of someone freely implementing the custom systems we need
to support our clients' needs. Just because everyone knows how a wrench works
doesn't mean my mechanic is fixing my car for free.

~~~
fragmede
Bits are trivially copyable; alternators not so much.

~~~
Hume
The point is that the arrangement of bits might not be appropriate to copy;
people have been writing poetry for millennia but when you need to write copy
of a webpage or lay out a spreadsheet you have to write out new 'bits', you
can't just tear out a page of Hamlet and hope that it does the job.

------
j_baker
"Now computer literacy is widespread enough, and basic programming tools have
gotten easy enough to use, that the ability "to write a program" is no longer
in short supply, and with the Internet at our fingertips we all have the
combined output of the whole world's supply of programming talent available to
us, not just programmers in our own city, state or country."

Methinks that the author doesn't understand the difference between data and
information:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data#Meaning_of_data.2C_informa...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data#Meaning_of_data.2C_information_and_knowledge)

~~~
jimmyjim
> "Now computer literacy is widespread enough, and basic programming tools
> have gotten easy enough to use, that the ability "to write a program" is no
> longer in short supply, and with the Internet at our fingertips we all have
> the combined output of the whole world's supply of programming talent
> available to us, not just programmers in our own city, state or country."

On the contrary. I wish it were. Notice Apple's efforts to streamline the UI
on all of its devices so that any idiot could use them without a problem. The
computer literacy goes only so far as operating a GUI application, not
anywhere toward the more important underlying theories of computer
programming.

------
DannoHung
Computer Programming is going to be the last or nearly the last actual job
that humans will have.

I'm not worried.

~~~
Estragon
Yeah, the analogy breaks down at the point where a computer program solves
someone's concrete problem. The most a musical piece will do is make you feel
something. People are always going to pay for solutions to concrete problems,
because everybody's problem is slightly different, and needs a slightly
different solution.

------
nopinsight
As long as computer programming courses in school are as inadequate as they
currently are in most of the world, many people with aptitude will not be
exposed to it in a compelling fashion and thus most will not choose it as a
career. If that is the case, demand for _professionally developed_ software
will likely outstrip supply for the foreseeable future.

------
folktales
Clearly the scope of this article is limited to developing software for
personal computers, which really aren't all that common (in a certain sense).
See:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprocessor#Market_statistic...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprocessor#Market_statistics)

BTW, this article is from 2003.

------
andrewljohnson
One fundamentally wrong thing he says is that programmers don't want
competition.

This just isn't true. Competition is often good for the companies, not just
the customers. Competition makes you innovative, and competition is often a
great way to do R&D without spending money.

------
gexla
People whom are not creative and can't adapt to change will get left behind as
change happens. The rest will be fine. You only have to be able to run faster
than X% of the competition, and most of those people you are outrunning hate
what they are doing anyways.

------
blahedo
It may be that this comes to pass eventually, but soon? Not a chance. The
majority of kids don't even have any access to a programming course until
_college_. The students I see in my intro courses often don't even have a very
solid understanding of what a (mathematical) function is, much less have the
precision-of-thought skills one needs to successfully program. It's one of the
main things we have to teach in CS1. And these are the kids that actually
_want_ to learn to program.

So, not soon, no.

~~~
teeja
Historically, the kids who'll become really good programmers don't have to be
exposed to it before college. They'll already have started programming before
they're in high school. If they're really drawn to it, noone will be able to
keep them away from it that long.

In my experience it's not a question of exposure, it's a question of the pay
being offered. Most programmers that kids know probably don't make very much
money. That could be changed if there was more exposure for those who greatly
enjoy and profit from the craft.

~~~
blahedo
I thought about that; the issue is not that one _must_ have a college course
to get started on programming, or that a course in secondary or primary school
is the only pre-college exposure people could have. It's that of all students
in college, a very small percentage of them have _any_ exposure to
programming. And I think we can safely assume that the percentage would be an
order of magnitude lower among students that never make it to college (which
still describes a majority of people---attending college for even a day puts
you in a minority).

By contrast, even the most NCLB-starved schools tend to have _some_ art and
music programs, even if they're cut way back, and virtually everyone has some
(perhaps inadequate) PE classes and access to pickup games of basketball or
stickball or whatever. There's really no imminent chance of the number of
people who have done "some" programming coming within two orders of magnitude
of the number of people who have done "some" art or played "some" sports.

------
resplin
Starving artist is not a good analogy. Software is a trade that provides
economic benefit to the recipient, rather than purely entertainment.

Better analogies would be to an architect, general contractor, plumber, or
mechanic. Anyone can do these jobs with proper training. They don't live off
repeated sales of single pieces of intellectual property. And they all make
reliable livings (though few of them become millionaires).

~~~
JohnnyBrown
I think the tradesman analogy is good, but the future programming career may
have elements of the starving artist in it as well. Working for free to build
a portfolio is a feature typical of creative trades that would be foreign to
an architect or plumber.

~~~
demallien
Well, I don't know about plumbers, but architects know all about working for
free to build a portfolio... For example, if an architect wants to do
something a bit more challenging than yet another McMansion, they are going to
have to enter competitions where only the winner gets paid. They do it anyhow,
because placing well in a competition also helps to build your reputation as a
designer.

------
tybris
Nonsense. Programmers aren't artists, they're engineers. The difference is
progress. Whereas art hasn't come a long way since Rembrandt and Mozart,
engineering has. Open Source is just the stuff that's easy and has already
been done. Progress won't happen if everyone has to develop it over and over
again or spend millions on licenses for trivial products.

(Note: Article is from 2003, bottom of IT crisis)

~~~
ovi256

      Whereas art hasn't come a long way since Rembrandt and Mozart, engineering has.
    
    

Hahahahaha... Sorry, but that is just false. It's the same oversimplification
an (ignorant) artist would make : "Technology surely has not come a long way
since books and horse buggies - we can just read books without books and ride
horse buggies without horses."

I'm sure it was just a lapse of attention on your part, though.

------
kiba
Programmers regularly create jobs for themselves everytime they write code
because the code they write create bugs.

If they write practically 100% bug-free code, it is probably because the
program is small or they did it so slow and methodical. Which mean, a whole
bunch of other stuff not getting coded.

Trust me, there's enough programming jobs for everyone for the forseeable
future.

------
10ren
If the demand for programmers keeps growing, no one needs to starve.

For most of its life, computer adoption has been growing exponentially - each
time they got cheaper, more businesses could afford them. This meant a
constantly growing demand for programmers, and therefore higher wages.
Eventually, every business that wants a computer will have one, and then
demand will stabilize to grow at the rate of population growth - bye-bye
supernormal profits for programmers. I saw a fascinating presentation that
claimed that this happened at around the year 2000.

Of course, now computer adoption is greater than 1 per capita, with it being
common to have at least two of a desktop, a laptop, an iPhone and a gaming
console - and greater demand for software. Also, some consolidation of
software would have seemed likely (and that happened within the categories of
e.g. word-processors and OSes) - yet, the number of categories themselves
seems to have grown, with a webapp for every occasion, and even add-ons to
websites like facebook etc.

So maybe the exponential growth in demand will continue.

I like to think that software embodies knowledge, and like knowledge, is
therefore be limitless - it's just that that hasn't been the driver of
industry so far

------
fragmede
SaaS. Where is the 'starving artist' edition of Google?

------
w3matter
I already see it when trying to hire programmers and designers.

Because a programmer knows a mish-mash of PHP, Java and a little Javascript,
they think that they are immediately qualified to write a scaleable web app.

Designers are even worse. Just because they know photoshop or dreamweaver,
they think they are a designer.

I find that my programming candidates from the open-source world, though, tend
to be better then those using the latest and greatest editor with some kind of
intellisense on Windows.

------
freebsd_dude
depressing =(

