festus

@festus@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sounds like a plan⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Here’s my pet theory as to why CS did so well for so long and why that probably won’t remain true moving forward.

  Programming / tech is a relatively new field that, as a proportion of how much time it takes as part of people’s waking hours (as a rough indicator of how much of the economy it can penetrate), has gone from essentially 0% to 99% in only a few decades. We went from only large corporations having one or two mainframes, to office computers, to home computers, to smartphones, etc. Add in social media, streaming, etc. and people have gone from spending virtually no time on programmable devices to all their time on programmable devices.

  As tech continued to have this (apparently) exponential growth, there was a chronic shortage of programmers, leading to massive salaries. As salaries exploded, programming developed a reputation for being a relatively easy, well-paying job, provided you were somewhat intelligent. As a result, hordes of students studied CS to help keep up with the growing demand, although always lagging. For seniors the lag for new hires to reach their level is quite a bit longer, so seniors have remained in high demand.

  Now as we catch up to the present though, it’s hard to see spaces where new jobs for programmers can be created without cannibalizing existing ones. VR? You’d take work away from game developers. Metaverse? From traditional social media sites. In short we’ve put computers on watches, sleep trackers, fridges, TVs, cars, light switches, etc. There’s no more room for the industry as a whole to grow. AI might be the exception for this - if it actually succeeds it could keep tech growing by eating into the jobs of other industries, but then I expect it would end up eating many tech jobs too, so for the purpose of my argument it’ll either hurt the programming job market or have minimal effect.

  So - we reach the present. Lured in by the high salaries of previous years, and the high salaries seniors currently have, we have an overabundance of juniors on the job market. If tech had continued its previous rate of growth, things would have been fine - but it can’t. As a result, there just aren’t enough jobs for all the current juniors and there likely won’t ever be - the industry can’t grow to accommodate them. Many of them will need to switch to other careers and for less students to study CS for balance to arrive. There’s still a shortage of seniors at the moment, but as the current juniors who are employed gain experience and move up the job ladder, this will change. Current seniors can’t count on older tech workers retiring quite yet, due to how young-skewed tech is (because of the job growth pattern we previously had), so they should expect growing job competition as juniors develop and for salaries to stagnate (already seeing this at my employer).

  This isn’t all bad news though - consumers will benefit. With a shortage of new industries to move into, the glut of workers who remain will best find work opportunities by selling products that outperform and/or are cheaper compared to the existing products. In other words, expect more alternatives to MS Office, social media, Photoshop, etc. People will be able to create work for themselves by undercutting the current incumbents - we should expect to see an explosion in competitors for existing products. In some ways we’re seeing this already - more and more great indie games that outperform the AAA giants, open source software that provide better experiences against the proprietary options (Lemmy vs Reddit, Mastadon vs Twitter, Forgejo/Gitea vs Github, etc.)

  I fully expect to see deviations to this - new hype cycles that temporarily create demand, boom / bust cycles depending on the present economic circumstances, an eventual (short-term) shortage of workers once today’s tech workers do start to retire, but long-term I expect ‘programmer’ to become just another generic white-collar job with similar pay.

  TL;DR - unless you’re already a senior in tech, you might want to look at professions that are actually in demand as the glory days for software developers won’t come back.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is this the end of Bootloader Unlocking in the EU?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  No. Thankfully (at the moment) vendors are allowing us to install other OSes, but if a vendor really wanted to lock you down to Windows all they’d need to do is hide one option in the bios. I’m uncomfortable with the idea that there’s no technical reason preventing the PC industry from getting as locked down as Android phones did over time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is this the end of Bootloader Unlocking in the EU?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Only if the motherboard vendor allows you to. Imagine buying a Dell or Asus laptop and being forced to only run Windows.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Friendly reminder that Tailscale is VC-funded and driving towards IPO⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Your approach won’t work if you’re behind carrier grade NAT or you can’t open ports. My landlord provides my internet so I use tailscale (with headscale on my long distance vps) to connect everything and it works great. It uses LAN when I’m home, and NAT punches when I’m elsewhere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨VCs are starting to partner with private equity to buy up call centers, accounting firms and other "mature companies" to replace their operations with AI⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You will be if you call customet support and get an AI that can’t help.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is Docker?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Entirely depends on who’s publishing the image. Many projects publish their own images, in which case you’re running their code regardless.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not even necessarily the ISPs that are doing it. In many cases they don’t like this because their users start getting blocked on websites; it’s bad actors piggy-packing on legitimate users connections without those users’ knowledge.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There are residential IP providers that provide services to scrapers, etc. that involves them having thousands of IPs available from the same IP ranges as real users. They route traffic through these IPs via malware, hacked routers, “free” VPN clients, etc. If you block the IP range for one of these addresses you’ll also block real users.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Security of running Headscale on a VPS⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes but there are ways to protect against that. For instance you can configure Tailscale clients to only trust nodes that have been signed by trusted nodes, or something like that.