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(programming.dev)
Yeah that didn't pan out
I like solving puzzles, and I have a knack for programming specifically
I mean, me too. Glad I never had a talent or penchant for art. I'd be broke.
I just think computers are neat 🤷♂️
Me over here who just liked problem solving and making things.
too many people be like this. well, they're gonna have a rough awakening when the IT job market collapses.
Replace me with an AI and I will laugh my way straight over to the brokerage where I short your stock.
Chevron replaced their whole IT department with Indian outsourcing companies a year ago and they're already falling apart from the inside out.
You should meet the maths majors who aren't really interested in maths but think a maths degree will allow them to become hedge fund managers or similar
"Make people study"? You're mistaken. No one is making anyone study.
Charge people to study? You bet your ass they'll take as many people as are willing to pay their overpriced fees. Finding a job after? Getting decent pay? That's a you problem as far as they're concerned.
Huh? First 9 years of school is absolutely mandatory where I come from, now 12 I think soon.
Then after 12 years of school you still need a degree for most job listings. That's optional but it's free so you're seen as uneducated if you don't get a degree.
First 9 years of school is absolutely mandatory where I come from
Attendance is mandatory. Failure is always an option.
Then after 12 years of school you still need a degree for most job listings.
You can find jobs (even good paying jobs) that don't require a degree, but they tend to be labor intensive, health hazardous, and with awful working hours. There's a job I'm always seeing open in Houston for non-college recruits that involves hosing out shipping containers at the port. The job starts around 6pm and you're in a giant rubber hasmat suit dealing with tanker ships full of toxic chemicals. The bosses want you to work 12 hour shifts, you're in close with heavy machinery on a dock, and you're surrounded by carcinogens that you have to meticulously shield and clean yourself of and hope your PPE is keeping you safe on the clock.
$80k+/year. The bigger companies looking for people with experience will pay north of $150k.
You can also work out on a rig for $150k+. You can drive trucks overseas (Americans working in Iraq could earn $200k+/year back during the occupation). If you do have military experience, there's a ton of money working as a "consultant" in Private Defense. No college necessary. But... you know... there's trade offs.
There's already a glut of tech workers. The IT job market already sucks
I don't imagine AI is going to make it much worse
The glut of US tech workers is due to the excessive number of H1B visas being issued. This year, the number was almost the same, but slightly higher than the total number of US tech graduates. Why hire an expensive American new graduate when you can hire someone from India with 3-5 years of experience at 60% market rate instead?
The glut of US tech workers is due to the excessive number of H1B visas being issued.
That's been part of it. But even with the H1B and the outsourcing, there's a ton of technology to be administered, maintained, and repaired. We're a technology economy. The glut of US tech workers is due to induced demand.
Why hire an expensive American new graduate when you can hire someone from India with 3-5 years of experience at 60% market rate instead?
Because you need to be able to communicate your needs fluently and India is in the wrong time zone. You can outsource some of your work some of the time, but follow this logic to its conclusion and you begin to ask why you're even in business in the states. Why not just invest money in India's private sector if you're so convinced their workers can do a better job at a lower price? Why have an American business at all?
Hum... The US is imploding in general, but there's nothing on the horizon that could collapse the IT job market.
Too many people like this have ruined the field.
If we hadn’t made this all 100% about the money the entire world would be running on the best possible software.
An example I’ll give is ghostty, where 1 guy who got rich enough to cash out gets to spend his time making insanely good software, using a somewhat risky pre 1.0 language that would never get approved by corporate/investors, just because he wants to and enjoys it. And he openly chastises people telling him to enshittify or turn it into a business, because he doesn’t need to.
The entire Web 2.0 was built on the exact same thing with pylons, Django, rails, flask, etc. being born out of people who just wanted to code.
If I had 5-10x more wealth so that I never had to worry about money, this is what I’d be doing too.
Actually, what I’d be doing is attending university classes every day and writing software and doing analysis on the side.
Sir, I need money for food.
Yeah I know. That’s why I work too.
I still think this field has been wrecked with greed and enshittification.
I think that should be directed towards the top, not people working for a living.
I don't know you, but I'll give you an example of someone I do know
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Didn't give a crap about computers throughout highschool. Didn't really know what he wanted to do in general
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Picks computer science last minute because it supposedly makes a lot of money
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Cruised through shitty community college doing the bare minimum, no side projects or any sign he's even interested
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At graduation time, he barely knows how to code. Has a github profile with some homework assignments he was forced to do
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Is part of the job market now, competing against you and me.
I don't know if he's employed as a software engineer right now, but I've worked with people who obviously fit the same profile. People who expect real work to be as simple as submitting a homework assignment last minute using shit you copy pasted from SO (or I guess ChatGPT now), and then fucking off to enjoy life while your coworkers are burdened by your incompetence.
This is a field where actually giving a shit is a requirement.
Devs who are devs for no other reason than money and who don’t give a shit about the quality of their work are a problem.
ghostty is recently a nonprofit, I didn’t know the creator’s backstory! https://linuxiac.com/ghostty-terminal-emulator-transitions-to-non-profit-status/
I thought it was interesting. Then I dropped out because programming was more fulfilling and I didn't need to become a CS major to be a programmer.
Tech workers have historically been respected and well-paid, without unions. The power of tech workers did not come from solidarity, but from scarcity, Doctorow said. The minute bosses ordered tech workers to enshittify the product they were loyally working on, perhaps missing various important social and family events to ship it on time, those workers could say no—perhaps in a much more coarse way. Tech workers could simply walk across the street ""and have a new job by the end of the day"" if the boss persisted.
So labor held off enshittification after competition, regulation, and interoperability were all systematically undermined and did so for quite some time—until the mass tech layoffs. There have been half a million tech workers laid off since 2023, more are announced regularly, sometimes in conjunction with raises for executive salaries and bonuses. Now, workers cannot turn their bosses down because there are ten others out there just waiting to take their job.
Good luck finding a job at all and especially if you're in it only for the money
Lol we tricked an entire generation into oversaturating the STEM market so Lockheed Martin could get cheaper labor :3
There 4 billion recent STEM students in China taking the future away from the west.
The amount of STEM students isn't the problem it's how we are using them
It's both. The tech giants and the defense sector pushed for "everyone should learn to code" because it increases the labor pool, but they gladly take H1B visas at the same time. Their intention is the same for both, more laborers makes for cheaper labor
Yea I know.
Its not a business failing though it is a government failing. Whsts the point of having a government if they don't fix shit like this? That's what they are for.
I wish I could say the same. I didn't get into programming for the money, I got into it because it was the only thing I was any good at and generally wouldn't discriminate against me because of my disability.
Because I thought computers would be less unpleasant to deal with than people.
Turns out they can be just as stupid, and I didn't even get out of having to work with people either.
My intro to computer science professors said the problem with computer (sans the now rare hardware bug not worked around by the OS and lower layers) is that a computer will do exactly what you tell it to... And that's where most bugs come from. I've found computers can do very silly things over the years due to operator error 🤕
Most of the time you can kick a computer in anger without consequences and that's enough for me. Can't do it with my colleagues without at minimum having to talk with HR. And sometimes it even solves the issue (maybe helps with humans too, but can't legally try it)
For most software engineering jobs it's actually more people work than computer work.
In the grand scheme of society, it’s kinda bonkers how there was such a short window to go to learn something like Web Development and get a job before it started being replaced. Basically a job that existed for ~30 years and won’t be around much longer.
(Yes I know AI is dumb, but it doesn’t matter if C-Suite execs think it can do it, they’ll replace jobs with AI)
Even without AI, Web Development was destined to be a short lived industry.
Sure, it will be around in some form, but a lot of that space has been taken over by mobile app development. Another portion of the market has been taken over by social media (your business doesn't need a website anymore; it needs an Instagram/twitter/etc). And yet another portion has been taken over by products like Wix that allow non-experts to make good enough websites themselves (even without AI).
Really, thinking of "web dev" as a profession is a category error. You are a graphical designer and programmer that was working in the web industry. There are plenty of other industries that hire your profession.
You aren’t wrong, but I think web apps would have been more prevalent because you could develop for a single platform (browser) and it would work on most any device that has a browser.
If companies, like Apple didn’t block Progressive Web Apps in order to force App Store usage, I’d disagree, but we just don’t live in that world.
I, too, chose the career where you get paid to google your own problems all day.
To do? Because there's a chance I can do that without meds. To study? Because that's kinda needed.
Yes and no, I don't want to deal with people too much. But I'm in help desk so it's only half true
Whoooooops!
this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2025
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