[speedplane]

> I was in a similar position not too long ago. I had nothing but a liberal arts degree, a miserable first career and a yawning resume gap. I just stumbled into coding and I was completely addicted. ... its a life changing opportunity in a field where you get to make things for a living and there's always something new to learn. Thank you thank you thank you cloud providers

Programming in the 2010s and 2020s is kind of like union labor work back in the 1950 and 1960s: not instantaneous riches, but meaningful work that leads to a decent middle to upper class life.

Unfortunately, this won't last forever. Other countries are catching up to the U.S. quickly. Eventually, development will move to cheaper labor countries like so many other industries. What is frustrating though is that if the U.S. actually focused on developing its talent, we could maintain the lead for another decade or two longer than if we just sit on our hands. With that extra lead time, we could come up with the next major industry (AI-training? quantum computer programming?), but as it stands now, many other countries will be equally poised to jump on the next opportunity and we'll squander our lead forever.

[sah2ed]

> Unfortunately, this won't last forever. Other countries are catching up to the U.S. quickly. Eventually, development will move to cheaper labor countries like so many other industries.

People have been saying this for like 2 decades now when the magic buzz word then “offshoring” [0]. Offshoring and its cousins still happen as a cost-cutting measure, except not at the scale most people would imagine based on the enormous hype it received from “thought leaders”.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat#Ten_flattene...

[speedplane]

> People have been saying this for at like 2 decades now when the magic buzz word was “offshoring” [0]. Offshoring and its cousins still happen as a cost-cutting measure, except not at the scale most people would imagine.

I think it is happening at the scale people imagined. The amount of foreign trade and offshoring that the U.S. is doing with developing countries is multiple orders of magnitude higher than it was in the early 1990s.

[tracker1]

That's been the case for nearly two decades though. Outsourcing happens, it can go okay to very badly. Running teams overseas, the communication channels become more important and more limiting at the same time. Trying to run meetings in two hemispheres is not an easy chore and takes a toll. I did it for 8 months and jumped back into development.

I've also seen cases where it clearly wasn't worth it. It just depends on the project, communication and company culture. There's something to be said for walking down a hallway to actually talk to someone.

Of course the disparity north to south is less so, as meetings can be aligned better... such as with say California, Washington, Arizona and Brazil. The fact is, value is value... if you're constantly learning and experimenting, you're ahead of the curve and can deliver value where others don't.

[epiphanitus]

>> Unfortunately, this won't last forever. Other countries are catching up to the U.S. quickly. Eventually, development will move to cheaper labor countries like so many other industries. What is frustrating though is that if the U.S. actually focused on developing its talent, we could maintain the lead for another decade or two longer than if we just sit on our hands. With that extra lead time, we could come up with the next major industry (AI-training? quantum computer programming?), but as it stands now, many other countries will be equally poised to jump on the next opportunity and we'll squander our lead forever.

Agreed. I have several (very smart) coworkers in other countries. And our political system is an atrocious thing to watch these days. Whatever happened to compromise?

I don't think anybody really knows for sure what the future holds. The thing is with cloud computing and with the spread of technology into the developing world they will likely be needing engineers too.

Of course that may not happen if the software world is so carved up that all of the business goes to a handful of companies that are employing a fixed number of people and concentrating the gains.

And if Elon Musk has a breakthrough with neuralink, then maybe we'll all be out of a job. Why write code when you can think print('hello world')?

On the other hand, big players can get disrupted, technology can change, and its not like every human being has the capacity/stomach for the abstract problem solving we do day to day.

[indigochill]

I've seen programming outsourced before (and I moved out of the US to Europe to get my start in software). However, what people without software experience are likely to miss is that programming is not really the problem in commercial software. Communicating the thing-to-be-made in a way that both management and the programmers are on the same page and keeping that communication open through development so that the right thing gets made is the real challenge (heck, doing this among managers is challenging enough).

Outsourcing can, in some cases, raise additional obstacles to this goal through differences in language and/or culture, and every mistake here adds additional cost to the project. This isn't insurmountable, but usually I don't see this even considered when the question of outsourcing comes up.

That, and the group we outsourced to happened to be in a part of the world that was in the middle of a literal civil war, so staff sometimes couldn't work because staying alive was more important. Being aware of the near-future geopolitical situation of your people is important anywhere, and just kind of happens by osmosis when you're working domestically.

I very much look forward to Neuralink, but as you point out on the following line, this will also not turn non-programmers into programmers because the main hurdle is not knowing the syntax, but formulating thought into a structure that's useful for computers, and it seems most non-programmers do not have the mindset for it. Programmers are people who turn ideas into formal logic. Although some things can be automated there, I personally think the future's still bright for developers with people skills, wherever they may be.

[moneywoes]

What can I do to stay in demand in this field?

[dzamo_norton]

Just continue to ask yourself that question each year