I have personally not listened to it but there's a recent podcast that covers this story and I've heard it's really good, it's called "The Santiago Boys" it's referenced in the article.
> it's probably not a great time to be a very middling pure CRUD web app developer. However, has it ever been, outside of SV and certain very select, fortunate corners of the economy?
Like 80% of jobs outside the USA are either local or outsourced CRUD web applications. Many people live quite well thanks to exchange rates. I wonder what's gonna happen if/when those jobs disappear.
The former. I didn’t realize how few of my projects have even had an intentional architecture. So often they go from feature designs to mockups to tickets to code without any real discussion about how the pieces fit together. There’s certainly never been an attempt to create a common “language” that is shared across the org. On a project half the company might refer to a catalog item as a “product”, and their definition may or may not align with what another team refers to as an “item”. I’m starting to understand that situations like that are why everything gets so complicated.
> If you didn't like working with computers, then you (and another gazillion people who choose it for the $$$) probably made the wrong choice.
The problem is the field is changing, fast. I love writing code... I'm not so sure I love prompting Claude, coordinating agents and reviewing +30k vibe-coded PRs.
Yeah I thought exactly the same, but I guess Jon Skeet is from a different era altogether, we're moving into a world where many programmers perhaps have never even entered StackOverflow. I feel old.
I attempted to read this and it was very interesting and greatly written but I had to drop it. This was worse than a horror book, nothing scarier to me than to think about terminal illnesses.
Awesome! Good articles. I wonder why you didn't use first a more traditional decompiler such as Ghidra or HexRays to generate "almost-C" and then use Agents to give them meaningful name and semantics?
A doctor will get hired immediately after college (with very poor pay though) and become an intern/resident, their diploma is enough to show they know their stuff and are qualified for at least an entry position.
A recently graduated Software Engineer or Computer Scientist won't, and they will get interviewed and have to go through hoops as if their diploma wasn't worth a dime.
reply