[zaptheimpaler]

Personally, i think there was a time where we genuinely needed to solve hard engineering problems - around 2010-2015 when a ton of companies figured out concurrency, distributed systems, scaling, way better web tech, smartphones etc.. in those times companies needed a LOT of good devs, so the network effect Silicon Valley had was valuable. And the VCs saw huge empires to be built and so much money on the table, so high salaries were easy to justify.

Now the market is crowded, scaling is a simple economic problem, the network effect is turning on its head and there isn't any revolutionary software to build on the horizon. Times have changed but the narrative hasn't caught up yet.. its going to suck when it does honestly. Software is just so commoditized and cookie cutter at this point i can't see it being a great career for much longer.

[Hermitian909]

There are still a lot of hard problems to solve, they're just cross-disciplinary.

Software is the infrastructure of the 21st century and if you step out of the tech bubble to things like material science, biotech, etc. you'll see that their infrastructure is garbage despite there being really big returns available.

Developers who can marry modern software to those domains should remain in high demand for decades.

[zaptheimpaler]

Do you have any companies or spaces you would recommend where theres hard problems but low signalling/barriers to entry? I'm autistic AF (no joke) and learn new domains in a frenzy of 3 months of joy and digging but its not easy to prove/signal that.

[dkn775]

The best one is state or local government. You’ll be able to make a lot of change and get tons of experience with a low barrier to entry.

Anything related to public safety (including transportation) probably needs the most tech talent.

[Tehchops]

So much this.

Spend a month with a tech stack of any passing complexity, even ones at $FAANGco...

We're nowhere close to solving all the hard problems.

[packetlost]

There are still hard engineering problems to solve, they just aren't related to scaling out services as much (there's still optimizations and improvements to be made in that space, but not nearly as much). You can't seriously think all the hard engineering problems have been solved, right?

[zaptheimpaler]

Give me some then! I see maybe some cool stuff in the move to ARM processors. I also don't have the resume or fame or background to get offered the chance to solve them if they're out there - in 2015 there were so many and the average level of competence was so low that people gave me a shot anyways.

I've been trying to learn more about the dark corners of the linux kernel and graphics drivers for now. But its not 2015 and I don't have 3 years of experience in embedded/systems/C++ so no ones gonna hire me for that stuff because my resume just says "generic backend dev lol".

[willberman]

Do you mind being specific on how there are no longer hard engineering problems to be solved?

[zaptheimpaler]

Well beginning in 2008ish, we saw websites and applications that served the entire world, literally billions of users. That simply did not exist before then. The internet as a whole was a tiny part of peoples lives. All the stuff that went into solving that was genuinely new ideas in servers, databases, ops, data centre's etc. Eventual consistency went from being a joke to the only game in town. Distributed computing on large data sets went from a Google paper in 2005 on Hadoop to a widely used idea. Smartphones went from zero to iPhone to literally more than half the world has one. Devops became standard. Google went from just managing 1 or 2 datacenters to running AI to optimize the power efficiency of each one.

When you already have architecture that is capable of serving the entire world, when everyone has a smartphone all that's left in that space is efficiency/cost optimization. Whatever shiny new programming language or framework comes out, the bedrock of computing is solid (and the shiny new programming language is really mashing together decades old ideas which is cool if you're new to them but boring if you're not) . Every company is a mess on the inside of course, but they do their core functions well enough. AWS did not exist 10 years ago, now it's big internet drama when it goes down for a few hours twice a YEAR.A detailed postmortem comes out (not standard before), revealing the problem was a configuration change (because everything has long since been automated, so it's driven purely by configuration) .

I know not everyone is interested in those same problems, but I thought they were interesting and what's left now in the guts of software is an adoption phase, people rediscovering lessons that others long since figured out. Perhaps people who work on higher layers of the stack think differently, I'm only interested in the deep tech below, and it's pretty solid at this point.

[willberman]

There's still lots of relevant work to do deeper in the stack. It might just not be at large internet scale companies (I doubt this but lets assume it's true). Most every university has a systems research lab doing interesting things. I think I paged through 5 different professor's websites in CMU's systems department the other month and found 9-10 interesting projects.