[yaok]

In the future, only programmers have money.

>I never learned to skateboard. I can’t dance. I can’t play a musical instrument. I struggle learning foreign languages. I know people who can do those things well.

The reason people need to become programmers is because, while people love to skateboard and dance, that shit don't pay.

Programming gets money. It's the only white collar job that doesn't artificially limit the number of people entering the field--in fact programmers seem to actively support importing foreign workers to compete with them for jobs. That's a new development in history. A group of professionals eager to give a helping hand to low-wage competition.

Expect more dilution of the talent pool.

[michaelochurch]

The economics of programming are complicated and still unexplored. We're the leading front of the clash between labor finitism vs. labor progressivism.

There's infinite demand for problem solving: making existing processes better. The limiting factor there is trust. How do you make people trust your judgement enough that they'll take your suggestions seriously?

Where there is finite (and plummeting) demand is over subordinate labor: pre-defined work that someone has already decided to pay a fixed amount for. All of that stuff is getting off-loaded to machines or off-shored to low-wage countries.

Labor finitism is the idea that there's a finite amount of paid subordinate work to go around and that we're doomed to compete for a waning quantity of it. Labor progressivism is the idea that, when one block of grunt work is automated, it frees up energy to move to something more interesting (and less subordinate, but more profitable).

Fifty years ago, it didn't matter whether labor finitism or progressivism was a better model of the "true" underlying behavior of society, because we were at full employment and technology didn't change as fast as it does now.

Now, it's a genuine and unresolved question: are we doing the right thing when we, in earnest, do the best job we can at making existing processes more effective? Are we building the skills and credibility that will help us graduate to better work, or are we programming ourselves out of jobs and shutting down the middle class? Right now, it's not clear which. I'd say that labor progressivism is winning, but just barely. For labor progressivism to be true, people need credibility and trust and risk allowance (savings) and those were traditionally won by taking subordinate jobs for ~10 years, but those are disappearing because labor finitism is correct over subordinate labor. The result of this is that the terms of subordinate labor are going to hell, and the people most likely to win in the new economy are those who can find a way to leapfrog that increasingly unprofitable slog.

[SatvikBeri]

How do you make people trust your judgement enough that they'll take your suggestions seriously?

While management at most companies is dysfunctional, this problem is 90% our fault.

Try asking a hacker how many dollars they contributed to the bottom line at their last job, and they'll give you a blank stare.

Try asking 10 hackers what their top 1-3 most valuable contributions were at their previous company. Most of them will immediately dive into the details of what they did rather than how it affected the business.

Ask them to quantify those achievements in terms of dollars, or user growth, or any metrics that the business cares about, and maybe 2 will be able to answer.

I'm not talking about asking for immediate answers either. Most hackers can take days and still have a hard time quantifying their contributions.

This gives the impression that the most programmers-even great ones-either are completely unaware of how they affect the business, or don't care.

And if you don't know how something impacts the business, no one will trust your ability to prioritize.

We as a community need to learn to speak the language of dollars, growth, and business objectives if we want to be taken seriously. Otherwise we're just tossing out ideas without articulating how valuable they are.

[Spearchucker]

"How do you make people trust your judgement enough that they'll take your suggestions seriously?"

This is arguably the single biggest issue I've faced in over 20 years as first a programmer and since 2001, an architect.

The result? Trust is easy to get. I'd argue that credibility precedes it, and that's also easy to establish. The caveat is that it requires social skills, and must be done at the outset.

Building relationships that establish trust and credibility requires not focusing on building relationships.

When a new project starts I focus on three things - understanding the current situation, establishing a business objective, and bounding the scope. I do that by getting off my arse, meeting people, finding out what they need to succeed, and listening.

And by not talking, but mostly prompting or re-stating someone's problem in my own words, I build the trust I need from them.

[Edit] It's a bit badly articulated because I'm still formulating the idea, but over the last few months I've tried to put my thoughts down - http://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Entry.aspx?id=8ec91ced-b3a4-4b07...