| I'm not gong to finish being a professional software engineer any time soon, but I can certainly see the end from here. Like, it's no longer inconceivable. The basic problem is that developers want to grow and solve new and interesting problems--and at the very least, this billing of them as 'programmers' pretty much implies a mentality of factory assembly that doesn't fit. It's the core structure companies and businesses that burn out/burn through developers, and until that changes, you'll keep losing talent. It's not enough to pay us decently, though many don't do that. It's not enough to give us a direct stake in the revenues of a project, though almost nobody does. It's not enough to give us interesting problems to solve, though few even have those problems. You've got to do all of those things. We're collectively sick of solving problems that have been solved before, and also of self-inflicted problems that anybody with half a brain should've seen coming but biz wouldn't listen to tech. We're sick of working with people that aren't clever and don't want to learn. We're sick of making me-too apps because that's what gets funded. We're sick of having to play catch-up on constantly evolving tech, made so by firms who are playing the VC moneyball game and who derive their profits from marketing and pushing tech that honestly is no great improvement on what's gone before and which may simply implode when the money dries up. We're sick of dealing with and babying customers who literally do not understand the value we create for them, and for having a profession with social cachet only slightly above child molestor. We're sick of being managed by people who by definition don't understand their business well enough to teach an idiot savant how to run it automatically (which is exactly our job description). That's why we don't want to program anymore. EDIT: Interesting on the downvotes...fat fingering things on mobile, or what? |