[time0ut]

Optimistically, I hope it filters out the people who were only interested in it for the money.

When I was in school, decades ago now, very few people went into CS compared to other majors. Everyone I knew going into it did it because they loved it. I would have done it regardless of the career opportunities because I want to build stuff.

Interviewing candidates over the years since then, my experience has been there are still very few of those passionate nerds and a lot of people who did it for other reasons, like the money or similar. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. I don’t fault people for it.

Maybe if we get very lucky, it will go back to a relatively few passionate people building stuff because it is cool?

[denkmoon]

Having an industry’s labour supplied only by those inherently passionate about it is a great way to crush wages and working conditions. Look at what companies like Blizzard get away with because their employees just want to make video games at their favourite dev studio. While they’re a pain in the ass sometimes, I welcome the devs who are only here for the cash.

[alex43578]

This is totally leaving out the supply and demand aspect. People like the idea of making games more than working on the plumbing of some accounts payable software, so Blizzard can pay less and treat worse than NicheBoringFinanceCo.

[Archonical]

The parent comment is describing supply and demand. If Blizzard attracts a larger supply of workers who will accept lower pay and worse conditions because they intrinsically want the job, Blizzard gains leverage. That is exactly why studios like Blizzard can get away with more than “NicheBoringFinanceCo.”

[alex43578]

If an “industry’s labour [is] supplied only by those inherently passionate about it” the post says it would “crush wages and working conditions”.

That runs completely counter to the basics of supply and demand in a perfect competition market. It would be market with far fewer (labor) suppliers, who could therefore command a higher wage, not lower.

[dwohnitmok]

You are only looking at supply. Neither supply nor demand by themselves adequately describe prices (even in supply-demand 101 theory; in practice of course it gets significantly more complicated than just supply and demand). There are fields with few suppliers where supply is extremely cheap and fields with few suppliers where supply is extremely expensive.

Is the number of suppliers low because demand is also low or is the number of suppliers low because demand is high but supply is constrained?

A field that previously had a supply of labor in it "for the money" who all leave is indicative of the former scenario not the latter.

That does not lead to higher wages. That leads to low wages.

(There are a variety of reasons why this story is too simple and why I remain uncertain about developer salaries in the short term)

There is a broader question of whether having people who are in it for the money leave independently "causes" wages to go down (e.g. if you were to replace all such people with people "purely in it for the passion"). My suspicion is yes. Mainly because wage markets are somewhat inefficient, there are always mild cartel-like/cooperative effects in any market, people in it for passion tend to undersell labor and the people in it for the money are much less likely to undersell their labor and this spills over beneficially to the former.

Note that this broader question is simply unanswerable assuming perfect competition, i.e. a supply-demand 101 perspective (which is why it doesn't make sense to posit "perfect competition" for this question).

It posits durable behavioral differences among suppliers that are not determined purely by supply and demand which do not update reliably in the face of pricing. This is equivalent to market friction and hence fundamentally contradicts an assumption of perfect competition.

[sumeno]

The only way the people who are only in it for the money leave the industry is if the money gets worse. If the money stays the same why would they leave

[icehawk]

Except that there are a LOT of people that want to work in video games (which is the supply) which then depresses the price (wages)

All of my developer friends in the gaming industry have had far worse working conditions then what I've had.

[terminalshort]

To use your example of someone working on the plumbing of an accounts payable system, who is passionate about that? The supply is near zero. That, like most jobs, is going to need to be done entirely by people who are just doing it for the money, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Your example runs counter to the laws of supply and demand too. You understand that wages will rise when supply is restricted, but you don't want to accept that supply will respond to the price signal in the form of more people entering that job market.

[bryanrasmussen]

> That, like most jobs, is going to need to be done entirely by people who are just doing it for the money

why then do they all have those interview rounds where you have to talk about what really attracted you to work at this boring company and how you would love to do that kind of work? They evidently haven't gotten the memo.

[AnthonyMouse]

Let's consider how this could play out:

If you need a lot of low quality code in a hurry, AI can definitely do that for you now. The path to making money by writing mediocre code for people who don't really care that much is going to look like managing a network of bots that constantly spit out a huge volume of code that kind of mostly works and if it sometimes doesn't then whatever. The people in it for the money can probably make a decent amount in the "high volume low quality" space.

Then there's the code that needs to actually work, or have some thought put into it. Consider the process of writing IETF RFCs. Can you get an LLM to spit out English text that conforms to their formatting? Absolutely you can. Is the RFC it emits going to be something you'll want to have the whole world trying to implement as a standard? Not likely. So the people doing that are going to be doing it something closer to the old way.

[davidw]

I am kind of considering the idea of changing my LinkedIn profile to one of me with a 'wild rag', checkered shirt, and broad brimmed straw hat and calling myself a robot wrangler and see if I get any takers.

[KellyCriterion]

>plumbing of some accounts payable software,

As many of us in the early IT generation, I came because of I wanted to build games and program cool stuff.

Today, while I admit Games are supercomplex stunning apps, I hate it and I love to do boring finance app development :-))

If you would have told me in my 20ies that I will end up in banking & finance IT, I would have laughed at you - today I really like it and I do not play a single game anymore.

[deterministic]

There are plenty of non-games software companies that are treating devs purely.

However almost all of the companies I have worked for in my 30+ years career treated devs well.

So if you are in a shitty situation, I highly recommend finding another job instead of just placing yourself over a barrel.

[sb057]

See also: public school teachers. You either need to be insanely passionate or incredibly stupid to take ~$55k/year for long hours as an educator that is also a babysitter. And insanely passionate teachers are in short supply.

[boringg]

I bet a lot of teachers look at what devs do and think that its also insane to sit in front of computer all day, in a no boundary job, working on something you really don't care about and is potentially really bad for civilization only to make money off and lose your sense of self.

[notesinthefield]

My spouse has expressed this nearly verbatim after transitioning out of a 16 year career in middle and grade school education to medical curriculum development. It was hell on her mental health but at least there was a clear motivation and purpose for being there.

[raw_anon_1111]

There are a lot of other benefits of being a teacher especially if it’s a secondary income in a two income family. Namely you are on the same schedule as your kids. My mom is a retired high school teacher.

[alex43578]

Long hours? Teachers work the same hours or less than other adults per “New Measures of Teachers’ Work Hours and Implications for Wage Comparisons” by West.

“Teachers work an average of 34.5 hours per week on an annual basis (38.0 hours per week during the school year and 21.5 hours per week during the summer months).”

That’s leaving out the benefits of incredibly strong union protections, it being a state job with matched benefits, absurd job security even in the face of terrible performance, etc.

[tdeck]

There's no way these numbers can be correct. My school was 8 am to 3 PM, that's 35 hours a week right there for full time teachers. But teachers spend many more hours outside the class preparing lessons, grading work, and following up on things. If you even spend a week teaching something you quickly realize how much extra prep work goes into it.

[alex43578]

From the study: "Teachers work more than they are required to work by contract, but less than self reported hours of work. I find that teachers are more likely to overestimate their hours of work in the CPS than workers in other occupations, and conclude that this is likely because of an uneven work year".

Even by your own example, you're only at 35 hours a week, and that's before you subtract out the weeks of summer vacation, winter vacation, spring break, etc; where the workload is certainly far less than 40 hours a week.

[mylifeandtimes]

Wait-- I think you are confusing "teachers" with "police officers".

[nullstyle]

“ benefits of incredibly strong union protections”

Lol, try saying that to an alaskan teachers face and watch yourself get slapped for the absurdity of the claim.

[alex43578]

The Alaskan teacher's union is ranked 15th overall in the US [1]. I'm betting they're just fine, and that any issues are more general "Alaska-problems" than anything specific to teaching, unions, etc.

https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/how-strong-ar...

[nullstyle]

Lol; perceived influence is one of the 5 domains being analyzed. That has nothing to do with the protections offered to AEA members in AK.

Nonsense research showing how crappy academic research has become

[EricDeb]

average salary of a high school teacher in seattle is 90k plus you get summers off.. doesnt seem too bad..

[ddorian43]

Where are the gamedevs in it for the money?

[cabalamat]

Working on boring accounts software.

[sunir]

I think you have the law of supply and demand backwards.

[Thanemate]

>Optimistically, I hope it filters out the people who were only interested in it for the money.

I hope not, because we don't need software developers to be "starving artist 2.0".

And on that note: I vividly remember people staying away from the video game development industry because it was deemed "passion industry", and that had a really negative connotation of long working hours for asymmetrical return, and more.

I don't look forward for every other software engineering branch to become like that.

[hyperadvanced]

Seems… improbable. There will certainly be less of us, but the fact remains that nobody wants to debug this shite vibecoded apps companies are pushing, and some simply are not able because of skill atrophy and perverse incentives to use AI at the cost of stability.

[Hasslequest]

Brother, we need to eat. You don't need to go to college to learn about some topic, you can pirate textbooks. You need to go to college to get a piece of paper saying you did. If you were passionate about computer programming, you can do it in your free time while you flip burgers or do whatever you need to survive

[viccis]

>You need to go to college to get a piece of paper saying you did. If you were passionate about computer programming, you can do it in your free time while you flip burgers or do whatever you need to survive

This is a naive view of the average (or even above average) person's approach to learning, as well as an overly cynical read on the intellectually motivating atmosphere that comes from earnestly engaging in an academic environment.

[Hasslequest]

It's not naive. I've been to college. To call it intellectually demovating is an understatement

[viccis]

Unless you were unfortunate enough to go during peak covid years, then that was just a skill issue. If it was truly beneath you, you could have been writing and publishing papers.

[drivebyhooting]

I only went into SWE for the money.

I initially pursued my real passion which was math and physics and got a cold water bucket to the face only after grad school.

[KellyCriterion]

So you didnt tap your toe into a real dev environment before that second? :-)

[array_key_first]

> Maybe if we get very lucky, it will go back to a relatively few passionate people building stuff because it is cool?

I think we basically lost this when software/computer/internet entered the mainstream. Now, like everything else, it has to be bland, unoffensive, and a commodity.

[raw_anon_1111]

I really wish this entire romanticism of the good old days when people only got into computer science because they breathed ate and dreamed about computers would die.

It was never reality - I graduated in 1996 and have worked at 10 jobs everything from lifestyle companies, to startups, to boring old enterprise to BigTech and now consulting companies. To a tee everyone has treated it like a job and not some religious calling. There is absolutely nothing wrong with coming to work at 8 leaving at 6 and not thinking about computers until the next day.

You don’t need to be doing side projects and open source contributions to do your job as a software developer anymore than a surgeon needs to be performing operations at home.

No I wouldn’t have chosen a major because I enjoyed it if it didn’t make any money. I didn’t then and I still haven’t found a method to get over my addiction to food and shelter.

[jazzpush2]

That's just your experience, though. It reflects mine, before I went to elite companies, where it is quite normal for people to live-and-breath software, at almost all hours.

[raw_anon_1111]

And by definition most developers don’t work at “elite” companies. I hope you don’t call your average FAANG and adjacent “elite”.

And if you think that is normal, it’s honestly kind of sad.

[jazzpush2]

I've worked at FAANG, yes, as well as one of the top two frontier AI labs, quant, and now, in a similar role doing very technical research.

Do you not think it's considered "elite" to e.g. work at such companies in highly technical roles in the same way that a PhD at Stanford is considered "elite"? As a holder of the latter, I do. If not, what would you consider an "elite" team?

Maybe you think the statement was pretentious, but your response: "I hope you don’t call your average FAANG and adjacent “elite” - that's sad" is, truly, the most pretentious thing I've ever read on this site. So I'll ask: what do you consider elite?

[raw_anon_1111]

Yes I’ve worked at FAANG and the average mid level or even senior developer is not that impressive. Anyone with time on their hands and a decent proficiency can grind enough leetCode to get in.

Not that I did personally, I came in in the internal cloud consulting division (yes a full time blue badge, RSU earning employee).

You know then while all developers have to work at scale. Most of the work is built on pre-existing scalable components.

There are 1 million developers+ possibly if you count all of the FAANG + adjacent developers. I’ve nope a few of them during interviews after I left because I knew they couldn’t handle not being coddled by BigTech and wouldn’t know what to do with ambiguous requirements , an empty AWS account (even if they worked at AWS) and empty git repo.

But back to the point, they very much treated their job as a just a way to earn money and RSUs. They would have been a fool to treat a company as toxic as Amazon as anything else.

Yes I knew what I was getting into going in. I was a 46 and it was my 8th job out of college. I made my money, made connections, put it on my resume and moved on

[jazzpush2]

I'll ask again: what do you consider elite employment in tech?

[bumblehean]

>before I went to elite companies, where it is quite normal for people to live-and-breath software, at almost all hours.

Honest question: Do they actually _want_ to live-and-breathe software, or do they work in a highly competitive and highly compensated environment where doing that is implicitly required?

[jazzpush2]

Defintely a mix, though I agree with you that the majority fall under, "they work in a highly competitive and highly compensated environment where doing that is implicitly required."

[ryandrake]

This is never normal, and should not be normalized.

[underlipton]

I'm not saying that this is an incorrect read, but I think it's important to consider that young people might be responding to the general desperation of a tight labor market across the last generation. It used to be that you could get a degree - any degree - and that would be enough to get you in the conversation for a position somewhere. Today, a degree isn't any sort of guarantee of any sort of job - in your field, entry level, dead-end retail, anything. Tuition skyrocketed and only a few fields kept pace. So, you get the degree in the field that's a "winner." Of course, this just increases competition, robs other fields of needed competency, etc. Prisoner's dilemma?

[weatherlite]

> Maybe if we get very lucky, it will go back to a relatively few passionate people building stuff because it is cool?

This is a really narrow way to look at it and define it lucky. What you describe will absolutely be a shitstorm for everyone - passionate workers and non passionate alike. Management doesn't care about your passion, it cares about the bottom line. Lots of folks will get fired - passionate people as well, or see their salaries cut and their job security evaporate. There's no winners in the scenario you described other than the employers.

[archagon]

I think it will actually filter out people who weren't doing it for the money.