::looks at his green card....:: Hmm, couldn't do a whole lot on election day...

Oh, I should have gone out and campaign for my favored candidate to convince other people to vote for them. Make sure those damn republicans don't win in Massachusetts next time!!!!

As a whole, software engineers are arrogant little snowflakes who think they're better than everyone around them or those who came before them.

So they just keep repeating mistakes over and over and over, rejecting advice straight up. So you can explain to someone doing something how you've seen it a million times before and it doesn't work...they'll still insist they know better. And when it blows up in their face, they'll say it was inevitable. (Obviously not always their fault: a lot of advices they get IS bullshit and they can't filter the good from the bad).

We're essentially agreeing. I may just have made my point poorly.

Today, "junior inexperienced people" make it just fine. So they're all around you. If there's no "second dotcom crash", they'll still be in the industry when they start growing gray hair.

The people back then that got the axe...at least some portion of them would be seniors and tech leads now if that didn't happen.

And stagnating wage growth made a lot of people jump ship.

Even then, I know many people who were pretty good at the time who just didn't manage to stick around. Some cities just couldn't absorb even all of the "good" ones, and not everyone can move...

There's a heck of a lot more people in software today than there was back then. On top of that, most people who would have gray hair today got weeded out by the dotcom crash.

So you're already in a spot where the younglings will vastly outnumber the older software engineers purely from the funnel.

Next, yes, a lot of them end up in management. A good half of the people I went to college with (who did not give up during the dotcom crash) are CTOs, directors, VPs. Often of tiny startups mind you, but still. Note that this isn't many people!

Then you have people who just give up: while a lot of people these days would have you think EVERYONE should become a software engineers, its hard work. Easy jobs are left to cheap interns or new bootcamp grads. The rest is tough and a lot of people just give up.

Finally, it's a field where you have to continually renew yourself. That means the longer you're in the field, the worse off you are compared to a new grad if you stopped learning. You might have been a SOAP/WSDL expert back when you were 22 because it was all the rage, but that knowledge has limited usefulness today. If you don't keep learning, you're out.

When you add up all of these things, there really aren't that many older engineers. With the funnel increasing drastically over the last few years, expect gray hair to get more commons though. The massive amounts of twenty somethings software engineers will grow older. And while the other attrition criterias will weed some out, there will still be a LOT more of them than there currently are of us.

Unless there's a second dotcom crash, of course.

For one, WSDL/SOAP web services back then weren't used the same way. They were generally used to split apps in "tiers" (eg: business logic, frontend, data layer). Sometimes someone would extract a few more for scalability or whatever.

That's why "the cloud" (things like AWS) is an enabler here. You didn't have that back then.

We're not talking splitting the app in 3-4 pieces. I'm talking splitting an app maintained by 100 devs in 2500 services. Effortlessly (thats the key and the only reason its viable).

Tools like Mesos/kubernetes and continual deployment setups make this viable.

At work, if I want to make a new service, it's not much more difficult than adding a function: Run the generator, open the service, add some code, push, hit a button or type something in slack. Done.

We're talking 2 minutes (and on that, 1 minute is the time it takes for IntelliJ to open. You can cut that down using vim, lol). We deploy services and apps to production an average of 12 times per day per developer. Because it's "free" to do.

Microservices are completely non-viable if you can't do that. If you don't have the infrastructure to do it. You need to get the benefits without paying a significant cost.

Doing it like we did it 20 years ago (yes, I was a out of college then too) would have been batshit insane. And splitting stuff in just a few pieces isn't the same.

To make an analogy, it's like comparing svn branches to git branches. I wouldn't make 15 branches a day in svn.

Microservices are an architectural style meant to solve the maintenance/deploy/tech debt issues by physically separating an implementations in a lot of pieces. It's not a solution to a business problem. It's a solution to a tech problem you create when solving arbitrary business problems. It's basically solving the same problem you solve with functions/classes/modules/folders/whatever, except with physical decoupling so you can swap -everything-, one piece at a time, not just the code.

So to your example: think of how you'd split that in classes in OOP (or however your paradigm of choice split things). Now make those physically distinct microservices. Now 2 years from now when you realize there was a technology problem in fetching prior months because whatever version of Python/Ruby/Rust/Java/whatever has a security issue in a function that's used only for that part, you can move it to an arbitrary other technology (or version of the same technology) in 2 hours instead of migrating your whole app.

You mean convert all your API's into JSON calls and spin up gajillion web services

Can use anything, doesn't have to be JSON. Any network protocol will do.

And you don't have to use micro services. You certainly can run a monolith. But with "the cloud" you now gain the ability to spin up as many servers as you want and spin them down too. So it enables micro services as an option.

And that option has interesting benefits. It does increase complexity (drastically), but for that cost you get a decent bit. The ability to change the stack under arbitrary pieces of code. The ability to deploy pieces of your system separately from the other. Faster builds and deploys. Hard cut boundaries between concerns that can't be crossed even if your devs wanted to.

Now, if that's worth it...depends on your problem space.

Salaried employees. Unless managers are taking notes and keeping track of them at all time (which would make the average software engineer straight up quit), all they can see is output, and they wouldn't keep track unless it was cause for significant concern, just not give promotions (that part is probably documented)

I'm really looking forward to everyone having a unique title for every possible permutation of engineering role: "Sorry, you're a Messaging Platform Software Engineer III. That doesn't pay as much as the Document Platform Software Engineer II"

And this is where things get interesting, since aside for burger flippers, that's how the world works.

I can already see it: "We're offering you $X" "Well, I guess I'm gonna go work elsewhere" "Wait!!! We can talk about this...actually nevermind, we can't >."

This will be interesting. Oracle has a LOT of lawyer power...

But the numbers almost certainly show a disparity, and the usual counter arguments come into play (are they paid less because they do less hours, choose different roles even though they say its for equal roles, did they negotiate less?), but proving anything on either side on those fronts is really hard.

I am pretty sure that none of Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Elon Musk could get a 900

850 is the max for the scale people generally refer to when talking about credit scores. Googling around, some banks seem to use internally a different score scale, but let's set that aside for a sec.

People can, and in fact do get perfect score. If you understand exactly how it works, its' not that difficult. It has very little to do with how much money you make, and is a pretty artificial metric.

When you get a report and it says things like "too many accounts with balances open", it doesn't mean "you have too many accounts with balances open". It just means you don't have -precisely- the amount of accounts the algorithm uses for a perfect score, so you lost a non-zero amount of points for it, and since you said you have a mortgage, it's probably what it's referring to.

To get a perfect score, you need a bunch of accounts open, that were opened several years ago (none recently), that are used but have 0 balance at the moment they were audited. Your available credit across those account has to be very high, and you need multiple accounts from different credit providers. There are a few other factors, but if you do it just right its pretty simple, given enough time, to manipulate your credit to get a perfect score.

In fact, some people make a game out of it. The only gotcha is you have to use those accounts sometimes but they have to be at 0 or nearly 0 the moment they're reported, and you never know when that will be (since it can change). So often you'll hover between 845 and 850 (or whatever other scale you're looking at, though those may have slightly different criterias)

If you quit every 6 months, yeah. Every 1.5 to 2 years? No one cares (depends on the industry, obviously, but in tech and related? Nope). Even the occasional "Well, that didn't work out" 2 month sting or the couple of "Meh, I wanted better" 10-12 months won't have anyone bat their eyes at you.

As long as we find ways for "the people who sell them their food" to live there SOMEHOW, this will just keep happening. As long as you have those lottery equivalent affordable housings. As long as you let people live in illegal apartments. As long as you subsidize it.

Make it impossible, and sooner or later the food prices will go up (and food prices fluctuate very quickly). People will either pay the marked up price (which will allow people selling the food to live there), or will no longer want to live there, reducing demand.

I'm not a big believer in the "free market fixes everything!", but here we clearly have a situation where a situation is made artificially possible.

but short sighted voters wanted to maintain their property values

I'm not sure downplaying that will solve any problems. It's people's homes. They presumably picked their homes because of various criterias that fit their life styles. They liked the location, the neighborhood. They potentially spent years looking.

And then you come in and tell them they have to give it up, essentially for only the benefit of others (at least directly. Indirectly it could benefit them, but that's harder to measure).

This isn't like asking someone to make a small donation to a local charity, or even raising taxes. You're asking people to allow things to happen that could drastically reduce their quality of life every hour of every day, including when they're trying to sleep. That's not something to be taken as lightly and dismissed as "LOL NIMBY WILL BE NIMBY",

Sure, from a society's point of view, it's for the best. But you can't blame people for pushing back.

While its stupid to think everyone who pirates a game would have bought it, its pretty much equally as stupid to think no one would have.

I'm surrounded by engineers that make 130-200k and who torrent everything day in day out. Sure, they most likely would not buy EVERYTHING They torrent, but that silly episode of Game of Thrones they just HAD to watch? You could charge 500 bucks for it and they would have bought it.

Yeah I wouldn't rent them. That's easy but not really worth it. We're looking at buying and paying for the install. Some of our neighboring buildings are doing the same thing, so I'm using their numbers to do the math, and my building has better exposure and more roof space, so it will work quite nicely~