The Demise of 10x Dev | Prime Reacts
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 23 ก.ย. 2024
- Recorded live on twitch, GET IN
/ theprimeagen
Article Link: blog.testdoubl...
Written by: Justin Searls | / searls
MY MAIN YT CHANNEL: Has well edited engineering videos
/ theprimeagen
Discord
/ discord
Have something for me to read or react to?: / theprimeagenreact
Its amazing how I didn't even know prime a month ago and now he is the guy I watch and listen to the most daily. Blessed to have a veteran like him guiding me.
“Guiding”
It's a change of pace from the other programming youtubers I follow
Exactly my situation lol
And I’m the one guy learning the basics of Java and C++ and in Data Science College, so I barely understand most of what he does, but it still is the content I’m most keen on watching whenever I have time
How many kids today get to start tinkering with their computers and programming through things like Minecraft mods or Roblox games?
There's still plenty of opportunities to get into computers from a young age.
yep
minecraft mods are literally how i got into programming before high school. just graduated university and working in big tech now, definitely would consider myself an 'enthusiast'. the game dev and hacker/ctf pipeline for really young people is more alive than ever
My first experience with programming was Lua in ComputerCraft Minecraft mod, was about eleven or twelve.
Agreed big time.
@@NuclearGalactus lol I learned to code so I could make minecraft mods, on the only computer I had access to which was incapable of running minecraft.....
That was warcraft 3 mods for me. Cs source maps before that.
Why use Git when you can just use USB sticks? 10x DEV
You want me to switch from paper planes to USB sticks?
@@FlaviusAspra Psst, want some of my TCP?
@@thenwhoamiNah but do you have that UDP?
I can't help but feel like there's the potential to develop a very real addiction with all of the seretonin releasing feedback loops we have
todlers with tablets are fucked
Just foundationally think of how much money and players Vanilla WoW used to have. The name of the game is how much of your time can I passively take by creating loops for you.
I made one 60 second TikTok that got 1.3 million views. That is 21,600 ~ manhours, or 2,700 workdays, or 7.4 years assuming no weekends.
Its not hard to beat the public when you largely remove them from playing the game.
10x developer often means you are working 10x more than you need to
10x developer often means 10x less code style and testing guide lines.
In my experience, anyone claiming to be a 10x developer turns out to be an a-hole who make it impossible for anyone to work with him, so he's the only one producing code while the rest of the team recoils in disgust.
Calling yourself a 10x is definitely the sign of a narcissist, but I've got a colleague that I would definitely coin as a 10x. He doesn't just do development hence me leaving out that part, but he's carrying the half company on his back after half the staff left when we were bought out.
@@AdroSlice ah, yes, forgot about this kind. Also very unpleasant and they have no place in this industry. This brand of "10x" developers first invest time and effort in building incomprehencible, unmaintainable pile of code, and then they're the only ones who can do anything with it, securing their employment for years and looking "10x" to the unsuspecting management and junior colleagues.
3x 4x and 5x developers would usually lie.
I usually lie, and just focus on my other personal projects or something.
Programmers create for a living. It’s one of the very few creative jobs that big companies will pay you to perform-that has its own pros and cons. But ultimately we still want to create, and that comes with a certain level of selfishness. We want to create what we want to make, and we want to do it our way. Often love, family, and even basic tasks like eating and sleeping-anything that takes time away from the process begins to feel like a burden. Many of the greatest creators also struggled the most with this side of life. Physicists, musicians, writers, actors-all notorious for creating at the expense of their personal lives.
It's hardly creative at this point in time
@@caiqueportoliraspeak for yourself, my pulls break prod so fast that it's a work of art
@@caiqueportolirathen you could be either doing the wrong or the right job.
@@caiqueportolira this is part of what I meant by corporate employment having its own set of pros and cons. In most creative fields there’s at least some subset of jobs that suck everything you love out of the work and leave employees with only the worst parts. It’s unfortunate, but probably inevitable.
It’s interesting to me that recruiters like it when applicants are “passionate” about coding. If we look at the definition, passion is more synonymous with emotional reactivity than love or enthusiasm. If you want dozens of strangers to produce a cohesive, uniform codebase then I suspect you need rules and standards that discourage passion and individuality.
@@AG-ur1lj That's just the truth of it, in big tech any remotely interesting work is insanely disputed by everyone. For most people big tech will be just money, if want something interesting go to a startup.
as a zoomer who has been programming for a while it's not a generational thing where "us kids" don't care about code quality - rather as someone in college right now I believe that this is a side effect of more accessible programming education. it's pretty easy to get through comp sci 101 and 102, and it's also pretty easy for those who do to think they have learned enough - after all that mentality is what the rest of school teaches us. It's not that there are less enthusiasts, it's that there are more people who can choose comp sci as a career/major. Side effect of comp sci going mainstream, if you will. At least this is my take on it. I'm an EE major in college and a enthusiast programmer but I didn't want to major or work in the comp sci field - I find EE much more interesting. Similarly there are EE students who aren't enthusiastic and generally don't perform as well in class, not sure if correlation is causation here. My point is that the niche enthusiast only industry was rare to begin with, and as comp sci became more accessible the seasoned veterans are just seeing the result of more people in the field.
Yes, I absolutely agree with this.
I think this is accurate. There is also the lack of necessity. Back in the day, if you wanted to play a game you might have to type it in from a magazine! As a kid in the early 1980s it was pretty easy to learn to write your own games, initially in BASIC and then in assembly. Computers were much simpler and there was incentive to learn to program because the internet had not taken off and access to software was limited. A few years later it was over as computers became mainstream and lots of software was available. A kid with a computer would tend to spend time using someone else's software rather than creating it.
Agree. I wonder what the impact to good programmer distribution is now that its mainstream. Like, would those that excel have gone into programming anyways?
My two favorite reasons for 'why do we do this to ourselves?' that you appeared to miss were 'autism' and 'inertia'. Autism would be mine.
Same, brother.
same
🙋🏼♂️
Lol yeah I'm finding its a major thing. A lot of these "programming enthusiast" traits just sound like autistic traits to me. Granted, we fixate on all sorts of stuff, but when we fixate on programming, it seems to look kinda like what this guy is describing.
I came here to say this. This article hits me real deep. I didn’t realize this was due to my autism+adhd until this year’s diagnosis.
Maybe go to doctor?
I resonated deeply with your dishwashing comment and the need to succeed. I was in the same position personally; my wife being two months pregnant, still in college for computer engineering, completing a coding Bootcamp at the same and transitioning to the agony of job search and the algorithm grind.
Children does change you, and consider myself lucky to have managed a well paying software engineering job when she was 9 months old.
Love your content, very insightful
I can see how a sizeable viewer base can't relate to the family and partner part so they just ignore that part of every stream/video they watch primeagen lol
working from home has me motivated to be a 0x engineer. Of late I just can't be f'd doing anything lol
It’s called Burnout
@@Optimistas777 there are also jsut a lot of people who suck at *from home. The only way they manage not to take a nap on the floor at work everyday is because they know someone will come by and kick them. So they pass the time doing work. At home? Nobody comes and kicks them.
@@homelessrobot For me, I loose motivation when someone just keep surveilling me. At one work place, they just didn't bother me unless I was unable to show some kind of progress or results in a given time period. At another place, they have this active surveillance, where they would check whether you are doing your work often. This stressed me out a lot since I always had to maintain some sort of 'linear' progress so that I have something to show them every time they check. It's ridiculous because many of the problem solving is not a linear process.
And I have a self-motivation. And while I use external source of motivation from time to time, I think you'll never be good at something unless you find an environment where you can push yourself.
TL;DR: the author has ADHD and thinks he isn't "special", he's just a millennial programmer, thus "back in my day"ing his way to believing that Gen Z has no enthusiasm
The first half of this article is ADHD + bad educational experiences + beginnings of burnout.
I had the "luck" of being labelled as "gifted" early on in life, which provided the needed motivation to love learning.
Listening to this article made me realise that I'm finally on the other side of burnout; I'm getting out of it. I hear what he's saying and recognise that a past version of me resonated 90-something% with it. Burnout fucks you up, but it pushes even more growth.
The second half kinda went off the rails though. I think he fell into the classic fallacy of over-generalisation and making conclusions based on perception. As a member of the "new generation of programmers", the people I talk to who are actually invested and good at programming are the ones who are passionate about it. In fact, I'd wager that getting better at coding brings that passion out in a lot of people. I've anecdotally observed people that started with 0 coding knowledge and end up enjoying the brain workout. I've also seen people get something akin to math anxiety where there brains just halt whenever they hear anything technical.
I think I wanna make new dev friends outside my bubble, i want to learn more from people who are passionate about code.
I had the "luck" of being labelled as "gifted" early on in life, which made me think I don't have to put in the effort, it will come by itself because I am special.
Couldn't help but point out the difference that I experienced. Thinking about it more I love learning too though I really do hate studying because cramming information under pressure into your head requires _effort_ .
@@Taaz2 I think I somehow developed a pretty good information sucking brain. I leaned in heavily to the patterns and random connections that my brain sees at first and noticed that they're quite reproducible, so now to remember something I have little "keys" that index into the hashtable of my brain. Simply, I got pretty good at hearing something in class, instantly overthinking it, and processing it for the next 24 hours or more until it completely stuck in there.
However, I relate in that it made it really hard for me to put effort in towards homework, projects, etc. I cram at the very last second, and after burning out, the anxiety of being in the last second ceased to have such utmost importance anymore. The result is that I've been missing deadlines often, but as I've gotten better (and with the help of medication), I've been able to redirect my passion to help me get those things done
@@kyay10the neural connections get really smarty after so many hours of programming.
Years ago I didn't have neither the patience nor the knowledge to look at a piece of documentation and know what the heck it is about, even when I could search word by word.
Now I have that patience and raw knowledge, so I can really process really complex stuff in so little time.
We're not 100% gifted at the end, we end up being so good at programming because we like programming, that's the luck we had.
People who doesn't really like it at all, won't be as good as someone who truly is genuine at it.
A programmer is not intelligent because they were already, they are intelligent because that's what programming does to you, so many algorithms, so many concepts, every single fucking day learning something new, watching videos and smashing your brain with knowledge until you literally feel numbness, makes your brain a smooth learner, I like how my neurological connections are arranged right now, summing up my asperger to it, makes every single social interaction cool.
demise of the 10x developer, and rise of the 'GIGA-CHAD-DEVELOPER'
I'm a father too, and I couldn't agree more. My sons completely changed me.
I've been working as a developer for over 2 decades and I've contributed to many open source projects. One thing I've noticed is a lot of programmers are people who are socially awkward with poor social skills. In Apache there are tons of people with a natural inclination for programming, but don't have basic social skills. That often results in flame wars on the mailing lists with egos blowing up. Writing code fast is a terrible measure of "is this person a good developer?"
People like these should talk to a therapist and work on the other parts of themselves. In fact, everyone should see a therapist on a regular basis. I tell this to young developers that I mentor.
that blog sounds a lot like flame wars I've seen on apache mailing list. this obsession over 10x is stupid ego wanking. I've worked with people who considered themselves 10x. Guess what they weren't actually 10x. The real 10x programmer don't give a shit about that stuff.
>everyone should see a therapist on a regular basis
nice try therapist
@dulles.gehlen This mostly tracks with my experience, but I hesitate to use the psychopath label for it due to empathy with the thought processes in these flame wars. I feel like my autistic fixation on efficient systems is rooted in a desire to help people take care of each other more effectively and easily. If I see bad systems developing, I'm gonna howl about it like the semi-domesticated primate that I am because that's my tribe they're fucking with. If anything, that's kinda the opposite of psychopathy isn't it?
Absolutely not. They're not autistic nor anything else. It's just subculture where you can't behave otherwise. It starts at universities. Uni strips you from any social skill, promotes hard work etc. They don't know the other way to live.
From my experience Soft skill kills hard skill. Every time I'm social and fun to hang out with, my coding skills are non existent. No way I could write even simple recursion. When I'm in hard skill mode and my code is on very good level, I'm unbareable to others.
@adriankal I don't agree. Yes, universities do tend to teach people to be assholes, but if you think it's not possible to be good at both code and social skills and your opinion is popular, I think we found the problem. We have been fed stereotypes that we unconsciously conform to. Code skills can actually enhance your social skills. Recognize that every time you speak (or write), you are sending a signal to a black box (another person) and you need to error handle the responses you receive. The SDK most of us are running in the states is called English. Work from there. It's not impossible.
Therapy? Pointless. I just snooze away, 8hrs of deep sleep hit me harder than a lesbian relationship, the issues simply jiggle right out. You need to learn how to accept life, shit happens, people change, and the toilet clogs, big whoop, move forward and cleanup your shit because nobody else will(for free)
The end of this video is - unironically - the most motivational piece of advice I’ve listened to. This is what people should be striving for.
I also am a developer that predates the 90's, 1982 to be exact and we basically had nothing. You needed to build your software yourself if you wanted something. In a time that no one knew what a computer is.
When you have build software from the ground up, created your own version OS32 in assembler, created your first text to speech in 1982's with a special text to speech chip. You know your things around and how to rebuild civilization after a nuke attack by takin,g spare CPUs from a washing machine.
Nowadays developing is 80% bureaucracy, pushing tickets and using someone's else's nuget library. to export a "" text string.
It is a complete different kind of developers. From time to time I try to share my knowledge, but if it is not somehow connected to a book then they get lost in understanding what I try to explain. For them I sound like a crazy old guy 🙂
And I have no problem with that, I keep my brain sharp during my off-office time.
I don't think that modern day developer will ever be able to create exciting things, because their brain never got trained in finding solutions on their own, they always need some help of an external library or else their days are doomed. I think modern day developers will be get surpassed pretty fast by even younger generation. I don't think they will last for decades. Just throw away developers for companies.
"I don't think that modern day developer will ever be able to create exciting things" I respect your experience, but, bluntly, this is an insane thing to say. Sure, programming is more accessible now, and there are plenty of mediocre corporate jobs for mediocre people. But that doesn't mean there are not brilliant minds making brilliant things right now. Every single generation thinks "kids these days are stupid and lazy", and every single generation is wrong. It is an inevitable cycle.
@@lunafoxfire When you go into the Windows kernel code and drivers, then you will discover that you run code that probably originates from Windows NT barely modified.
When you look at all other modern new projects, most of them will vanish over the next decade. Modern knowledge is very volatile. Angular, JavaScript, react,... all will evaporate and you have knowledge that becomes worthless over time. You can't cumulate the knowledge.
Modern developer are not developers but integrators.
Most of them can't create a wheel when they need one that does not exist yet.
I don't want to demotivate young people, I want to trigger them to realize that there is a deeper level than pushing tickets and get inspiration from what happens under the hood. Get them out of their comfort zone.
Take an ESP32 and create a web site on it for example.
@@olafbaeyens8955 Well sure if you are just looking at web development searching for enduring knowledge, you will become depressed. Angular, React, jQuery, etc are all ephemeral products of their time to solve a very specific problem. Also of course Windows is not going to drastically rewrite their kernel code because a) it works, and b) windows cares HIGHLY about backwards compatibility. If you think no one is creating anything useful, what about graphics research, ai research, security research, quantum computing research? What about this generation which has created Rust, Zig, Mojo, Carbon, etc?
I think you are seeing more mediocre developers simply because there are more developers. The real advancements are happening in places outside of web development. I feel like you are just jaded by the commercialization of programming. But to say that nothing exciting will be created by modern developers is crazy, especially if you are just looking at web dev. What exciting things did web devs create 20 years ago? The same thing that they are creating now, really. Just at smaller scale.
@@olafbaeyens8955 "Angular, JavaScript, react,... all will evaporate and you have knowledge that becomes worthless over time. You can't cumulate the knowledge. "
Remember expanded memory, extended memory, segment:offset addressing, etc? All that knowledge became worthless too.
@@olafbaeyens8955 Hi, I have been working in this industry for less than a decade and I wholeheartedly agree with your take. I have been at some 6 jobs and counting. It is rough, honestly, for people like us. The jobs out there accommodate for the integrator, because the integrator does not find job security in their skills, they find job security in their age at a given company. Eventually the integrator rises the ranks and becomes the boss. This has already happened at most companies and new companies come with their own grown-to-boss integrators. In short, there is no escape for hackers, the integrators have taken the offices.
So what happens? The integrators, in order to secure their positions, create a lot of rules that helps them stay in the throne. Rules like sanctioned code patterns in order to keep the code homogenous, even if the code patterns mean that development of new features is slowed by 10x due to all the boilerplate. Or even better, rules like compulsory meetings, the kind of meetings where the boss integrators can preach without writing code, the integrators feel so smart that they believe their own preaching is more valuable than code itself, the code is the lowly task taken to execution by the dumb monkeys.
If one of the dumb monkeys is making the integrator look bad then the solution is simple, the integrator simply has to schedule a lot of meetings as often as possible until the dumb monkey falls in line, thus the integrator succeeds. The monkey's performance falls from so many meetings and demotivational conversations, at the same time the boss integrator looks like a genius who could predict the poor performance and tried to rescue the monkey with correctional meetings.
Eventually either the monkey appeases the integrator or leaves, by its own desire or forcefully, it doesn't matter.
There are still enthusiast programmers today, it just isn't all of them.
I wonder if the actually true conclusion is that the enthusiast portion of the CS industry has gotten proportionally smaller due to the for the money group getting much much bigger.
14:50
I feel exactly the same way. There are LARGE amount of projects I attempted to start in college, and once I went off script or attempted to do something on my own, I would get a lot of bugs and errors that would result in more bugs after fixing them. Discouraging me from trying to learn something while also feeding into my Imposter Syndrome along with other issues I had at the time.
What? Arch users can get dates all the time: `$ date`
The awkward kid that preffered to be in doors and at a computer. YES!!!
Older guy complaining about kids these days. What else is new.
I love this video when we can think more about our career, what it's really to be a software engineer, and see there're people with different perspectives... It's like stocolmo syndrome, you live every day, the same things that became reality in your life but ins't and someone need to say!!
I mean this sincerely: you are a "philosopher programmer", and it is refreshing and at times enlightening. Thank you, Prime.
11:25 I am the opposite. I am a terrible speaker and beginning with a certain number of people (depends on their eloquence but on average I would say 5 to 6 people) there are only two ways I will say something: You ask me something or somebody says something (normally something which I think is stupid) which prompts me to just straight up interrupt somebody else like they wouldn't be saying something.
I'm pretty sure that's what the article is saying (although I could be mistaken). It's saying that people are breaking "the mold" of the past. I'm currently going to school for CS (in my 30s) and the CS nerd culture that I grew up with in the US is different now. I just assume it's because the US is becoming more diverse. It just means we have to participate a bit more in forming the culture rather than having it handed to us. It's how a culture evolves. Some people don't like that. Personally I don't like those people. Don't be a consumer of your culture, be a creator.
I have no idea what you are talking about. That is a level of abstraction that my autism can't comprehend.
Hot take from experience: the lowest quality code I have ever had the displeasure of having to work with was written overseas by overpaid contractors. It was React in Typescript, and it was a complete nightmare. None of the things they did in that code made any sense.
is this a hot take or something 99% of people would agree with lol
@@ChillAutos when I started writing the comment, I was going to single out a particular country, but thought better of it as I got toward the middle.
@@k98killer Yeh i mean everyone knows which country you mean. The honest truth is though the businesses that hire these devs are the ones asking for it. They want cheap labor and then pretend like they have a great product. Nope you got tect debt baby.
@@ChillAutos to clarify, I meant Colombia
@@k98killer LOL, don't worry, shit code can come from anywhere!
what about -1(00)x devs who use gpt4 to write all their code and design and architect their systems 🤣
You forgot to add two zeros ;)
Oh shoot yeah
I think a good comparison to look at to gain some perspective is the much more mature field of Mechanical Engineering. In the early industrial revolution, pretty much all mech-eng was was a bunch of mad scientist types coming up with crazy contraptions and doing so with obsessive zeal. Then, as machines became ubiquitous and lucrative, up to the present day, mech-eng became dominated by smart people doing a regular 9-5 job. But, there are probably about as many if not many more of these mad scientist types in mech-eng, but you'll find them either still making crazy contraptions in their garage or specialty mechanics shop, or working in R&D or aerospace. I have worked in the auto industry, R&D, and aerospace, and the "types" of people you meet are so obviously distinct, but everyone is happy where they are (and if not, they know where to go). I do think that this guy's frustrations (or whatever) are at least real in one way, which is that soft-eng is undergoing growing pains right now where people aren't happily sorted out. For one, the industry hasn't really figured out what the equivalent of R&D is, i.e., the cutting edge where "enthusiasts" can blossom, nor has it given up the delusion that every new app or feature has to be treated like it's the next frontier. And also, the industry is, for a lack of any better alternative, putting many of these "enthusiasts" into management position. Both of these will cause impedance mismatches and frustrations all around. On the one extreme, 10X'ers hate being stuck in a bloated company department in a team dominated by people who don't share their passion for the craft. On the other extreme, you have 1X'ers stuck in "greenfield" projects that forces them to work more than they want to and are probably going to fail and be shut down, sending them back onto the job market, when all they want is a good job where they can put in an honest day's work. The software industry is too much of a mess still for people to find their happy place. It will take a while to sort this out (hopefully not 250 years).
Brother I love you and your content, you had given me so much guidance and inspiration as a youngster in the field, thank you
I’m in my 20’s and this was a wake up call for me. I have some self imposed insane deadlines for my projects. Me overworking myself was def a contributing factor to my divorce.
again, i got a wife and a son we all use Arch, it is not a problem, the only problem i got is i can't stop telling people i use Arch
i use Arch btw.
"Undiagnosed and in need of touching grass and being told that they are fine the way they are as long as they let others live their lives", the Blog.
Its wild that he asks the correct question right out of the gate: "Why do I keep doing this to myself?", goes into great detail on how his behaviors make him a good programmer but also miserable, and then concludes that Zoomers doing things differently than him is a great tragedy that will destroy software forever.
And that doesnt even touch upon the fact that his 10x-brain somehow cant figure out proportions. The enthusiasts are still there and they are still doing enthusiast things, but they make up a smaller fraction of all developers than before because the industry has grown massively and needed to become more accessible for people to develop cheap and fast solutions that can be discarded and replaced just as quickly. I dont know where you have been this whole time Mr Searls, but welcome to the world of software mass production. Its been... going for a while now... not sure how you missed it...
I struggle a lot with finding something 'greater than myself' to keep me going. Unfortunately, I can't have kids. I've been searching for something else to fill that void, but it feels pretty hopeless sometimes.
I just do hobbies until my hands fall off
Programming got me to explore options I knew might be wrong, but I was curious about their outcomes.
I think the article has a point; not that there are less enthusiast programmers, I think there are probably a lot more enthusiast programmers now, but that a smaller _portion_ of programmers is enthusiast. And like... that makes perfect sense. The people who started earlier are naturally the early adopters who care a lot. People starting now might be people who also care a lot and just haven't started till now because they didn't realize or didn't have the opportunity (or, as a subset of that, just... weren't born/mature yet), but there's naturally going to be a lot more people picking it up because it's an incredibly cushy job.
After thousands of failed projects, smiling at my daughter, being content in just trying out new stuff even if it does not lead anywhere slowly, and trying to make my work a better place for all my collegues, bad or good in coding, I wholeheartedly agree to every single word of the outro. Bless you, mate.
You may not believe this, but I too was once a dishwasher. I did it for 8 years while trying to be a rapper. You can still find the results on my channel. I just realized at a certain point about two years ago that the hip hop world didn't want to hear about all the scientific stuff happening in my head, but programmers probably do. So I made a foundational pivot in my habits and lifestyle and became what this guy is describing. Before, I had been applying a similar approach to music and not getting very far. Even though I made some excellent friends in the process, it always kinda felt like more was needed from me than just the thing I was passionate about. Alas, passion is all-consuming for people in my sector of the autistic spectrum, but once I finally got diagnosed as an adult and realized it wasn't something I'm able to change about myself, I decided the move was to just make the effort to shift my passions into something that provided more monetary value. That said, I'm now two years in, sitting on a full stack framework that I wrote myself and $0 in my bank account while I clack away in a corner of my dad's house. I can network applications, but please god somebody help me network with some clients.
Your name checks out
My $0.02, take it or leave it, but I would try to take advantage of the benefit the tech industry has over the the hip hop industry and look for stable employment. I was interested by the music industry before getting into tech and it just seems so all or nothing, whereas in tech it’s still very stratified but there’s a lot more folks who have their needs met and some spare to enjoy themselves a little as well.
@0oShwavyo0 Very much with you on that. The last couple years have been one giant reskilling grind. Feels like I've come really far in the learning curve, but it doesn't seem to be translating into paying work yet. A lot of the problem is that I feel compelled to work on skilling up much more than I feel compelled to apply for jobs due to imposter syndrome. Just gotta put myself out there more, but a large part of me also kind of just wants to roll a company and be my own boss with it since software is a product I can produce with close to zero overhead.
@@andythedishwasher1117 for what it’s worth, you can always leave a job once you have one, and sometimes having one can make landing the next one easier, so the first opportunity doesn’t have to be perfect. I can’t offer any advice on freelancing or entrepreneurship, but I wish you luck!
@0oShwavyo0 Same here. Used to be a musician and just like dishwasher rapper above I brought all that energy into programming to find stable work.
pacman -S kids
His hypothesis on newer programmers coming into it for the money is absolutely spot on. How could you miss this Prime? Another symptom of this is how YC went from being filled with hackers and enthusiasts, to being basically an Ivy League alternative for that particular demographic which prioritizes Ivy Leagues and Big 4 consultancies. Programming is now an A tier job, like it or not
Hm, you are correct. I hate to admit it but it's true. How do I know? Because I have been through a flurry of jobs and they are all corporate ladder office politics crappers. That's not the sign of a job for hackers, it is a sign of a job for insecure over achievers, the kinds that join the most prestigious schools because they do not know what to do with their lives.
I am a hacker, I don't give a shit about the code, but Mr. Fancypants takes it personally when I tell him how we could make his job and my job easier by improving the code he wrote. Oh, he hates it!
@@josevargas686part of being a good engineer is learning how to work in teams, and learning how to persuade people. In a team it’s as important as coding ability.
I think one point that the people writing the article might have missed might be how much the tech industry has grown over the year. Even if the ratio to programmer coming into tech for loving programming and those who are only there for other reason might be lower than it used to be, correct for the growth of industry it might be that the number of enthusiastic programming might just have increased. The feeling of a generation gap might just be the affect of thing moving out of it's initial niche for niches often attract the ones that are most dedicated towards it.
The lack of a "because I can" at 3.10 in this chat is giving my quantum soul an existential crisis!
I've also done this; I spent 2 years working on open-source projects in my free time while holding down a job, that was 8 years ago. I'm still doing it today with other projects, and I have no regrets :)
One difference is that I love learning; it's the primary (if not only) motivation behind all my personal projects. When a project no longer offers anything new to learn, I typically lose interest.
Mike, whenever you say ‘There are so many young enthusiast developers out there!’ or ‘There are so many young developers who care about code quality’, i can’t help but be reassured that you really must live in a bubble. I’m 23, doing it professionally for almost 4 years now. Got to work with lots of engineers +/- (usually due to my age +) 10 years from my age. Working at my 4th company, in my 9th team: the vast majority is here for money, they don’t read books but fucking articles, they spend 0 time outside working hours on programming. They like to use this damn phrase ‘clean code’ when referring to what code ought to be, yet having little to no clue how to really write it in clear, readable, maintainable, extensible and scalable way. They learn git commands without bothering to learn it properly. They’re scared of rebasing. They rarely learn from code review comments nor from their own experience! The author of the article definitely has valid points with which you didn’t agree. I don’t know where you see this handful of prominent young fellas, but hear me out: the issues with my generation of developers the author writes about are more real than you think
Eh, you are right. I think you and I can understand Primse's perspective though as Prime works in a bubble. His second job was at Netflix and he got the job by talking about RxJS through a phone call, and now he is an internet sensationality such that curious and enthusiast developers gravitate towards him. He doesn't even do "standups" at his job.
You and I, instead, live in the real world, the one where companies are constantly trying to oversell their shitty product, where the oldest devs at a company have the most decision power not due to skill, but due to office politics and loyalty.
We are in the trenches, the elo hell of programming, even though the jobs we find are well above average.
@@josevargas686 you’ve nailed it perfectly
@@josevargas686 i feel you so much bro. Every line resonates with me tremendously
thats not DHH scream thats how his F1 sounds like
I was definitely socially awkward and anxious but not upper class. I got my first computer when a business threw theirs out in a dumpster. I pulled it out, took it home on the public bus and enjoyed playing Ski Free. Eventually discovered BBSes and found a copy of a book teaching QBasic in the discount bin of a bookstore. The rest is history.
that dolphin vocabulary at 0:46 is right on point prime. I must say you don't just look like the two time. you know his ways too
i know things
"I develop in Ruby". Is anything after that worth listening to?
10x insinuates that the person is way better at programming, but we're all good at some aspects and bad at others. It's about perspective and timeliness because an onlooker could be amazed by some of your work and disgusted by some of the other stuff you've made, depending on the circumstances.
I agree so much with having kids changes your priorities and forces you to adapt a more healthy work/family-division.
As someone who doesnt have kids and doesnt want them, I can also say that theres nothing wrong with making a statement like this. This is because it is something called an "opinion" and it doesnt hurt anyone as long as you dont discriminate against people who dont have them.
The problem with such takes is that it is based on the assumption that that person wants to have children in the first place. People saying like having children is like trying out a new hobby…
@@robindeboer7568 With my statement or the text read by Prime?
I don’t want to force anyone to have kids either. Its a huge commitment although it comes with lots of great things as well. My point was that it shakes you up if you currently live too much for your work.
@@scythazz I don’t want to force anyone to have kids either. Its a huge commitment with many disadvantages, but it comes with lots of great things as well. My point was that it shakes you up if you currently live too much for your work and forces you spend more time with your new family.
there's no arch wiki page on how to get a date so it's impossible
This video landed at the right moment for me.
Currently completing a Full Stack Diploma after falling into development from the side door.
My final project is a React/Django app and I am not exaggerating that the "walkthrough" project for React consists of 25 minutes of video, in some cases literal copying and pasting of code.
This includes using things like useMemo, useContext, axios Interceptors and other things that I know are not suitable for a beginner. I understand roughly what they do.
Everyone on the course as far as I can tell has been advised to follow along the walkthrough for their own final submission but feels like a carbon copy of the tutorial and feel like ive learned very little.
What is a "full stack diploma"?
Hi Prime, haven’t you mentioned how your uncle paid for you to go to college, twice? That counts as “affluent”.
19:58 just looking at how your chat reacted earlier most are motivated by money primarily.
In fact I am currently teaching a friend and its pretty obvious that their main motivation is money and its almost enough to want to duck out of this industry and to find another. It is bordering on heart breaking.
Aside from the mess they are haemorrhaging into our code, the increased religiosity, the higher noise floor of nonsense on line targeted to these people I would disagree. There is a lot wrong with that. So much in fact that it's hard to even enumerate.
So yeah I can see where you are coming from but I can also see where he is.
The ratio of people who are invested in this and would be interested in it even if they weren't getting paid is narrowing.
Let me ask you a genuine question: How many people do you know professionally that would be programming if there were no money in it? I did/do. You probably did/do. Half? Less than half? I think thats the issue hes outlining.
There was a time where it was closer to 100% ... the sort of person with that motivation and acumen is a very different person to someone who is just doing it for the pay check.
@@sacredgeometry who cares tho , we get paid + its fun for us so its great
That's a "problem" in countless industries. If we had the mythical UBI around, it would probably show how many people have no interest in pursuing anything productive. Not everyone has values that would drive them to achieve things that are beneficial to others and so on, if money weren't part of the game.
@@musashi542 Case in point.
@@XDarkGreyX I would assume most people simply wouldn't work at all.
But it leaves two people particularly affected by this in the meantime:
1. The people who have to deal with their industry being flooded by people who have no real investment or desire to be in it other than doing the bear minimum to get paid.
2. The people who may or may not pull their weight but should be doing something else so are being inherently disenfranchised by it.
I have met countless people in this industry and as I said the number of those two types of people is a lot higher than when I started even almost 20 years ago.
Just my luck to start enthusiast programming at the end of the era of enthusiast programming 😵
At :52 your screams are like the sounds I make when I'm doing any normal programming.
I think the greeks got it right 1000s of years ago. "Everything in moderation including moderation"
Content like this why I subscribed. Great work Prime!
22:40 Programmers in the dev community make up a minority in the industry. Even outside of Silicon Valley, I've found the author's points about pursuing this profession for the money to be true. The pandemic was a microcosm of this, when most Americans felt the least financially secure. That is only second to now with out increased interest rates and sky-rocketed housing expenses.
31:50 The 10x developer is the one who finds a reason to not do the work at all. Too many developers are afraid to questions designs or plans.
I think tutorials for programming should mainly focus on showing you the ideal structure of a program's implementation and then provide an API reference from there. If there are some unique patterns the creator envisioned for implementing a specific feature, that gets tossed in the 'examples' folder of the repo (something I need to get better about providing for my own tools, come to think of it). The rest is supposed to be a learning process because A) Whoever made that tool shouldn't be expected to explain to me how programming in general works and B) if you aren't taking the opportunity to learn from your tools by testing the limits of their capabilities, you don't understand YOUR capabilities when using them.
I'm 15 and coding in my whole time for fun, who else?
Keep going and you”ll have financial independence by the time you are 20
Who else got into programming by opening developer tools inside an excel spreadsheet and writing subroutines to automate spreadsheet tasks?
Totaally agree about kids. Absolutely puts things into perspective makes you work harder, more efficient, within a time frame to be available in the rest of your time
thank you for making me pause the video and finish my work
For me computer had the potential to make life easier. And then I got hooked. Just how you would define "passion" aka suffering for a thing
wanted to make a game, couldn't understand c++ classes, was introduced to web development by other people, profit.
I go to bed late, dream: I KNOW HOW TO DO IT !!!!
Wake up, run to the computer..... Spend 5 hours only to realise either, 'I've already tried this' or 'the dream made no sense in the first place',
My sleep deprived brain is getting used to blocking out the trauma
I will try to sleep again... and again I will dream of solving the problem... :_(
Why do I do this to myself?
because I am unable to kill the dream.
for a second the chat mutatet to the money crab meme
The author describing their routine might as well have wrote "I am pre-diabetic". Usually these types are not good at taking care of themselves or their living space
i know some programmers that dont even know how to format their computer, one of them cant even make his microphone work correctly.. doesnt know how to install zsh and only know how to use vscode and code in javascript.. if they use typescript is all typed as "any".. they still are "programmers" but are not at all "enthusiasts"
'simultaneously accessible and scrutable' means you can touch AND understand their juicy innards.
It's like Dostoyevsky's man with a toothache. He loves to talk about his toothache. That's why we do it to ourselves - so we can talk about our toothache.
the guy whose doomed to push the boulder for eternity is sisyphus..
I feel like I get where this guy is coming from to some degree. But I'd bet that the number of enthusiast programmers hasn't shifted one way or another. With the explosion of money in the space, the number of non-enthusiast programmers has skyrocketed, so if you look at the ratio of enthusiast to non, it'll look like a stark decline.
unsurprising for someone with that mentality. programmers are just the worst kind of people sometimes and its their own damn fault
Overgrown and over opinionated children
My impression is that real 10x developers write 10% of the code 1x developers write and achieve the same thing faster with better performance and UX. The methods used to achieve that have nothing to do with the title.
Yes and no. The idea of the "just throw more time at it" from the "enthusiast programmer" just does not scale to that level of productivity, at best you can get like 50% more, but in practise it is usually less due to tirring themselves out. What they do get is more potential time to practise, which in principle could lead to a faster increase in skill, but that comes with a tons of asterixes on stuff like "does this count as deliberate practise" and just how good of learner the person is. If you are a good learner, you can probably get a lot of value out of making sure a lot of your main activity counts as deliberate practise in the first place, and if the other one is mainly only learning when doing their spare project, you are probably going to get a lot more hours of deliberate practise in compared to them.
Oh, and there is also something on the time aspect that real 10x (or other many x) developers tend to end up doing, though in reality it tends to be a combination of what you wrote and these things. Those things are generally stuff like reducing the other related work needed for the same amount of lines of code. This could be as simple as just being familiar enough with a problem that you can save a lot of time researching/looking things up for it, but it can also be such things as just making it less error prone such that they need to spend less time debugging the code, making the code easier to understand to the point it reduces the amount of work it takes to work with that piece of code, and well just making it at a quality level where you would need fewer and/or smaller refactorings to it to where you want it in the future. Finally there is stuff like making sure that you are doing work under good conditions (well rested and not lossing tons of productivity to meetings and interuptions from open office enviroments) and exploiting flow states (which studies show are about 10 times as productive a state, but for a lot of people can be hard to get into).
@sorcdk2880 While I appreciate the time you took to write this, I have two observations. One is that this comment was not very readable, meaning that, as natural language, it's not very performant. The other is that this is a very long comment. In other words, it seems to indicate that you've either missed the point of the original comment or disagree with it fundamentally.
@@andythedishwasher1117 If it was not so insulting, I would have found your comment a nice joke. At least the used hasty generalization falacy is obvious enough that one can spot it as a joke. It is hellishly late here, so please excuse the lower quality writing.
@@sorcdk2880 lol sorry if it came off salty. As an autistic person, I know it can sometimes be hard to boil down complex thought processes for others to digest. In all honesty, I was just feeling a bit too lazy to dig into the meat of your counterpoint, so I made a joke instead because it felt ironic given the context.
Much love. Again, thanks for taking the time to read and reply.
@@andythedishwasher1117 The comment is not so much a counterpoint as it is about adding nuances and expanding it to cover more cases. That kind of arguments naturally takes up a lot more words.
Funnily enough, I am the EXACT opposite of the text highlighted at 13:44. I am a great learner - I just absorb information. I love learning new things. But when I have to *apply* these things, that's where I struggle and go through the whole 'having to force myself'.
Thank you for the last words. They are so wholesome!
I love the advice you gave at the end of this video ❤
I think this guy just didn't realise he has ADHD or ASD, because that's the biggest factor that makes you like an "enthusiast".
Programming is just getting more diluted with neurotypical industry as the industry still is growing and maturing.
1000% this guy has ADHD or similar. It's sad to see people who don't know they are torment themselves trying to make themselves "normal".
Like, he thinks he's a bad learner but more likely his brain will only engage with things he truly enjoys or is passionate about.
I nearly failed high school not because I'm a bad learner but because I need medication and the right environment.
I thought ADHD would make them fail in ever delivering anything, getting bored half way through. Programmers need far more focused and attentive attitude.
I think Prime missed the point a bit here. It's not there are no zoomer enthusiasts or that suddenly people lost the drive to write clean, good code. It's just that 10-15-30 years ago there was many more hardcore enthusiast types in IT jobs and the culture was much more insular.
There is more people who treat programming as just a job - they want to get through their tasks, push that PR and then not have to think about it after work. This does lead to conflicts with old-hat guys who may be perplexed that someone rolls their eyes at them talking about new language features introduced in a new release of whatver language.
The conflict isn't just about overtime or passion vs. just doing your job. It's also about moving the profession from the realm of highly specialized computer wizardry for uber nerds to something more of a good blue-collar job. The wizardry stuff gets reserved for things like AI. If you're maintaining some frontend profject for a company or writing automated tests for same project, you're like closer to a blue-collar qualified worker than the "use magic spells to talk to computer" hacker stereotype.
People just need friends and exposure to different settings. As a leader (or company owner), the key is to get everyone involved with interacting liaison meetings. Or take a trip to a theme park or do mandatory extracurricular events. It might help struggling individuals to get out of a rut. It might help them find a reason to keep on doing life (or help them find a purpose).
Sadly, most work places don't understand that people have feelings and that they're not a machine. The more a company ignores that fact, the higher the attrition rate.
But why does David hasselhoff care about ruby
I wonder if part of the issue here is that Prime's perspective is shaped by his working at a FANG company (btw)
I was the same as you. When we had our daughter, I started doing 40 hours, and not a minute more unless it is an emergency.
Outside of all the self-loathing and transference. There are lots of industries that are what my dad calls lifestyle industries. Look at Blizzard, all the conflict in that business are between the enthusiasts and lifestylers that started the company and made it rich with their passion based innovation and creativity, and the chair stuffers. When you start getting a critical mass of chair stuffers and paycheck collectors, they expect business stuff and to do business things and all of the formal structures that go with that.
Great Video! Thanks for uploading Prime
Searls: there are no more 10x developers
PrimeAgen: Ok Boomer
I dunno, it didn't seem to me like the blogger was looking to hate on anyone. He simply had a hypothesis (that a growing portion of devs see development as merely a job) that he used to explain a phenomenon (certain conflicts and controversies).
"only one L away from Sears" ... that's oddly poetic lolol
The guy is literally me.
You could say most highly creative/scientific people through history suffered from this problem. Think of Van Gogh or Einstein. It's not inherent to programmers. Therefore, it will continue to exist regardless of any developments on the computing landscape. It can only shifts towards a different set of puzzles.
He had pc, now kids have raspberry pi and arduino. Much more open and cheaper way to learn CS. Entire article is written from the perspective of a grumpy grandpa who doesn't tolerate any change. "Kids are doomed because of social media! Let's ban them before it's too late!" vibe.
How come Gen X got the coolest name? I can't think of a way to use it in a derogatory fashion as in 'OK Boomer' or 'OK Zoomer'. Are we just calling Gen X the Doomers now? Because they made Doom? Or is that us millennials who also somehow escaped a derogatory title despite the many articles about how we destroyed America? I have so many questions and complaints regarding our generational syntax.
30:53 goated take.
Literally best programming take I've ever heard.
I live in a "bespoke solutions" environment. Absolutely miserable.
Wait, are they really saying that "boomer" programmers cared about code quality?
Legacy code is usually the most atrocious pieces of code you can get your hands into, exactly because of the lack of standardization and professionalism.
This person is just programming version of "old man screams at clouds".
It’s diet for me. I started eating zero grains and I literally feel like a new person. I can work all day and not be tired. ADD symptoms went away entirely. Eyesight is better. Tons of energy. Sleep like a rock. It’s like the Limitless pill.
For anyone else going to get hung up on phrasing: "started eating zero grains" -> stopped eating grains. Move on ;)
Around 20 minutes there's the point made, that programming changed from an enthusiast job to a career job that people do for money. I think that is not true. I know plenty of people from work who did not start as computer enthusiasts, but electrical/automation engineers who ended up programming software because that's how the job changed over the years. That was way before the learn2code/bootcamp stuff even started.
"Arch dev getting a date is mathematically impossible" ;D ... I use arch BTW!
Ok so this is an actual intergenerational barrier: When I hear 'GCP was created in 1974', I'm hearing 'Google Cloud Platform was created in 1974'.
TCP
@CamembertDave Ah I see. Subtitle mixup.
9:18 cheers for the hot take. I’ve been delaying having kids for many years because this is me too…
wow. the last thirty seconds spoke to me
Cool, I also worked in Sears in 2018