Provided one can go through the silliness of fitting golf balls into planes, or going through the algorithms and data structures books from 30 years ago.
It kind of depends on where in the globe one is, many countries see programmers as a white collar job that happens to be better paid than a plain secretary, a mere transition phase into management, that is the success story for most families, the programmer turned boss.
So those of us that fight against becoming managers, it was for love of programming and the related technical details, as it usually comes with a payment and career ceiling.
And being unemployed beyond 50 years old in many countries that see being a programmer as yet another office job, means too old for employment, and too young for retirement.
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So those of us that fight against becoming managers, it was for love of programming and the related technical details, as it usually comes with a payment and career ceiling.
I think quite a lot of these programmers don't fight against becoming a manager, but it's rather that they don't have traits (character traits, demeanour, low on dark triad traits (it is known that the selection process and work reality for managers actively selects for these), ...) that are necessary to get "selected" to become a manager.
Maybe they choose not to exude those traits by choice (when a leader slot opens up), and can use them when they are circumstantially relevant. I have gone full founder, and I’m not happy with who I was. It’s an IC’s life for me.
The only thing is, we’re all managers now. We’ve been given a fleet of robots to support a set of outcomes. We have to set expectations, monitor outputs, coach, intervene, step back, onboard new team members, train regularly, make sure they have the tools they need, etc and so on. Are those “soft skills” or just engineering? I’m curious if and how people are lacking in these areas when it’s just text.
In many career paths, after senior developer there are only management roles.
Doesn't matter what traits they have, the only way up, to get that raise, additional benefits, or not being thrown into some improvement program is to accept becoming a manager in one of its various forms, or go elsewhere where hopefully there is a more sane career path.
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Doesn't matter what traits they have, the only way up, to get that raise, additional benefits, or not being thrown into some improvement program is to accept becoming a manager in one of its various forms
You did not get my point: it is not about non-acceptance of becoming a manager, but rather about having traits that commonly imply that "those in power" won't select you for becoming a manager.
You are the one not getting it, there are companies where those in power only offer two pills, the red one allows to remain a company employee, the blue one means out willing or not.
People aren't selected, they are dragged into their Peter principle role.
My introduction to databases was via dBASE III Plus, shortly followed by Clipper Summer '87, and Clipper 5.x (already OOP and some C++ like constructs).
The change to VB/Access and SQL later on took some mind shifting as the concepts on how to design a database are quite different.
Additionally it is quite remarkable the productivity that xBase offered, for a constrained environment like MS-DOS, in an automatic memory managed language, with AOT compilation (when using Clipper, FoxPro and co).
I had a very similar path starting with dBASE III Plus.
As you say the productivity it (xBASE/FoxPro/Clipper) offered was remarkable. One of the tools that I really wish I had was a FoxPro/Clipper compiler that took a subset of the language (general purpose stuff and screen functionality) and compiled it to either C or Go with ncurses. Who knows, I might have AI help me build one.
Brazil had a vibrant and omnipresent Clipper developer ecosystem until VB and Access ate their lunch. This also made a lot of businesses adopt windows.
I was able pull together a Halo 3 LAN party last year, although the "consoles" were Linux PCs and the game was the MCC edition (60fps instead 30). Split-screen was resurrected via mods. I bought some Microsoft gamepad receiver to bring Xbox 360 original controllers under Linux. Some people insisted they get to play on the original gamepad (otherwise it was a mixed bag of PlayStation and newer Xbox/PC controllers).
I also realized that Halo 3 itself would have been old enough to drink with us!
I don't know if the Altair 8800 would count as my first home computer, as I was too young to really understand what it was and mostly just liked to play with the paper tape feed on the Teletype attached to it. By the time we got the PET 2001, I was old enough to actually use it as intended.
From where I am standing it is mostly Angular or Next.js, both have separation of HTML and CSS by default, naturally they cannot block someone to come in and put tailwind on the project.
I have seen CMS systems and asset management products, whose translation and designer teams are now mostly gone, thanks to AI taking care of their work.
How many translation jobs, or asset creation jobs are still available?
I also have witness backend teams being reduced, thanks to SaaS and iPaaS cloud products that remove the need of backend development, now one only needs to plug a couple of products, do some AI based integrations in Boomi, Workato, n8n,... create a frontend with Vercel's v0 and be done with it.
I am in no ilusion that it will come for me as well, and better slide into some other alternative skill set, at least I am closer to retirement, than hunting for my first job.
Kind of, have you actually fully read the article?
Buried there down to the bottom of the Fortune article,
> Just a week after his comments, however, IBM announced it would cut thousands of workers by the end of the year as it shifts focus to high-growth software and AI areas. A company spokesperson told Fortune at the time that the round of layoffs would impact a relatively low single-digit percentage of the company’s global workforce, and when combined with new hiring, would leave IBM’s U.S. headcount roughly flat.
Are the gradient visualizations not doing it for you?
Of course it kind of breaks down as the gradient can no longer be visualized as an arrow in 2D or 3D space and not all concepts transfer as easily to higher dimensions, as one would hope, but some do.
It is quite different, because one thing is to look to a math expression like SDF and understand the 3D shape that comes out of it, the math behind a demoscene plasma field, or a ray traced shape.
Other is making heads of tails of what a neural network with backpropagation means.
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