I've spent around 34 years writing code so far. My last project was an online order system for a lunch restaurant. To get an idea what kind of problems they're dealing with, I started by working two weeks in the restaurant.
To my surprise I found that I actually enjoy delivering food more than writing code. As long as the customers get the food they ordered delivered in time, everyone is happy. And once I'm done, I'm done. No more lying awake at night going back and forth over some design decision and worrying about consequences from choices already made.
It's not as mentally stimulating, and I earn way less money, but I'm finding it harder and harder to find the motivation to go back to writing code.
Yes, but I think what those DIY solutions do is to lower the initial barrier to achieve some kind of automation at the cost of accumulating technical debt at a much faster pace.
It's not entirely clear to me what the long term impact on demand for software development is.
In some cases, cobbled together ad hoc solutions can last and actually work well for a long time. They avoid the cost of overdesigned systems built for a future that never arrives using fashionable technologies of the day.
In other cases it looks like the externalities of this designless process are far greater than the direct benefits as adding features either slows to a crawl or massively increases the chance of human error.
Judging by the pre-virus job market, there is no sign of any decline in demand for in-house software developers.
What worries me far more than that is the tendency toward funnelling everything through a handful of oligopolist gatekeepers that are in a position to extract a huge share of the value developers create.
Sounds like a bank, a government agency, or any business over a certain size.
I tell people you only call it politics when you are losing. More accurately, it's a layer of literal stupidity above the competent to shield the money side of the company from the leverage that operations people would have if they had any information about how the money side worked.
Instead of a hierarchy, rethink a company as a hub and spoke model with concentric rings. The main differences are the implication in a hierarchy that there is "gravity," keeping people down and that they need energy and leverage to climb "up," which further implies there is a place to "fall," and that there is only one way "up," instead of many possible paths to the centre from all directions. There is no gravity, only gates and barriers, and even these are just information. Politics is how a middle manager runs interference and creates distractions to make sure you can't see over, around, or through them, and that the people behind them closer to the money can't see you. Tech is usually outside the main perimeter, mediated by contracting companies or middle managers whose job is to compartmentalize the value people create, and be sure it is replaceable.
Viewed this way, of course this demented political farce is how Apple works, because it's how everything seems to work when you have internalized the precise and specific mental model someone uses to take advantage of you.
Sorry if you can't unsee it now, but hopefully it will be funny and we can get good, competent people who value tangible skills into positions of power.
