Remember some of the hot-button issues in tech over the last decade? People angry over the use of the word "passion". The merits of "craftsmanship". Whether the "10x developer" is a myth.
Something connects all of these debates, and nobody's really talking about it. That's why I wrote this essay: https://blog.testdouble.com/posts/2023-07-12-the-looming-demise-of-the-10x-developer/
@jneno @joshpuetz @searls I guess the big concern with using LLMs for learning is their ability to hallucinate; or to just straight up lie.
On top of that; defective code might prompt for more, subtly defective code.
(For me, my bigger issue for learning new stuff is the requirements involved in just setting up an environment for development/deployment/"Production" locally-I've usually worked within teams where the environment setup has been made...and is way more complicated than IDE launch.)
@searls fantastic article. Itās a great insight. I recognized this years ago, as cultural conflict within teams and organizations, but I didnāt connect it to all the social issues.
A key realization for me: a lot of great products are made by ānew generationā teams. Maybe the code isnāt as great. Maybe the development doesnāt go as quickly. But product success often (usually!) doesnāt depend on those things being optimized. Great product management decisions (usually) matter more.
@searls great article and hits close to home. Your descriptions of asynchronous thinking, project obsession and self-imposed crunches match my own experience as a self-motivated dev.
Have you read about the idea of harmonious passion vs obsessive passion? The first is passion which supports other areas of your life. The later passion takes over whatever time it can. Itās an ongoing struggle for passion to stay harmonious.
@searls Justin, this is SO LONG. ;)
Which I point out only to say that it's even more impressive that I was compelled to read all of it. I really enjoyed this; it's a lot to chew over. Thanks for wrestling with all of it!
@searls You say, āSoftware, as an industry, has structurally organized itself around the assumption programmers will continue to resemble members of the outgoing generation.ā
I agree with this... but is there maybe a mismatch between how the industry is structured and how those in leadership idealize its structure? Do they think they want clock punching āresourcesā but inadvertently depend on the enthusiasm for much of their success? What happens if/as this āshiftā occurs?
@randyslavey @searls That was pretty common in the old generation as well, including a *marked* reluctance by backend people to ever learn frontend or JS.
It tends to get better with age as you realise you won't get to keep a single specialty exclusively forever.
(Or you work at, like, Lockheed or something and stay in that silo. Old folks do that, too, including enthusiast-flavoured old folks.)
@searls i mean, I was already nodding along until
"The new generation is more likely to expect structure and support from human resources and management, whereas the previous generation is more likely to find active management (e.g. career pathing, coaching, goal-setting) actually saps their autonomy and intrinsic motivation. "
So that's what it is. I never considered this in the context of a generational gap, and also encountered it mostly elsewhere:
@searls I mostly saw this between different professions (especially nursing, because I know people in that profession, not to call it out). And it makes sense if a new generation treats programming as just a job it becomes more like other jobs.
It also feels there might be lessons there. Surely Florence Nightingale was a 10Ć nurse. And we can't be the first industry encountering this transition (though I find it hard to think of other examples)
@searls šš interesting read. Many parts I said of course, other parts posed more questions that I wonder what my answers might be.
I really like your pushing at sociological aspects, situation and generally broader motivations of Dev work. Iāve always found it odd that we often want to swim outside of that like some pure science with natural laws - truly absurd.
In short I am so here for a take like this and would love to read more. Itās a line of thought truly worth pondering more.
@searls "Nor do I know whether anyone will coin a term to dismiss my generation"
Mostly we're Gen-X. Nobody's gonna even remember we exist.
@searls Interestingly, because the generational shift you point out lines up very roughly with Gen-X vs Millennials, *one* difference is going to be just how many *more* of them there are than us.
Gen-X, which happens to be the enthusiast programmer generation, was tiny compared to the Boomers *or* the Millennials.
@searls your article really resonated with me, as someone also from this era/background.
You nailed the traits of the enthusiast programmer, but Iāve found that as Iāve become more commercially-aware, itās become more of a (healthy) personal/internal tug-of-war: the traits taken to the extreme or without pragmatism lead to unnecessary/unobtainable perfectionism, NIH, under-delegation and burn-out.
@searls both sides can learn a lot from one another but the challenge is education and hiring need to represent that.
Would love to hear your experiences/thoughts as to whether youāve seen the same throughout your career.
"This rubbed me the wrong way at first. Then again, everything does.ā
I'm not sure I have ever identified with a single paragraph as much as I do this one.
@searls I see that now, having actually read the thing - like I said, I skimmed it at first :)
Iāll need to dig it out, but a few years ago I read a very interesting essay on the formation, evolution and eventual extinction of subcultures - as they grow, they attract less-aligned people until theyāre overrun with ānormiesā.
Whatever āclubā āweā (I got my first PC at age 7, self-taught BASIC) belong to is not likely to happen again, on that I agree. Iāll give this more thought.
a generation of programmers who didnāt care about code quality the same way we did.
when was this era of code quality?
certainly not in my career.
code quality only comes up when someone else is reading it.
@searls šš Very well-written and much food for thought.
Might I throw out another category: person who's only occasionally an enthusiast programmer and otherwise a lot of the time feeling either like an impostor or simply burned out and wanting literally any other career than programming. Asking for a friendā¦
@searls in fact, I think there are more millennials treating programming like a hobby/passion than I can ever recall encountering in my career. Open source and the web gave many more opportunities than were taken away imo
But perhaps the disadvantage of being an old programmer is forgetting the old days
@searls
> itās not altogether unreasonable to speculate that enthusiast programmers may, in aggregate, outperform professional programmers who hang up their keyboard at the end of each shift.
This is one of the uncomfortable truths. You donāt have to be an enthusiast programmer to work in this industry (š letās stress that!) but you are often competing (hiring, performance reviews, promotions) with those who areāand youāll lose
@searls I find myself in a weird in-between place. Born in 86, programmed in qbasic growing up in the 90s (in Russian lower-middle-class). An early millenial.
Things I hate: imposed structure, being managed too much.
Things I love: debating, discussing, and generally practicing communication around programming.
I can't find old gen friends to talk to, because they aren't comfortable communicating for fun. I can't find new gen people because they don't think programming is a fun topic. š¬
@searls itās been a long time since someone articulated the unarticulated for me like this. Feels like a therapy breakthrough!
Having tried to write about some of this stuff before (but not nearly as profoundly), I know how much care has to go into articulating these thoughts without judgment or condescension.
Thank you (and your rumination)
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