> Programming now for 30 years and it's a breeze to pick up new frameworks and ideas.
All things being relative, frameworks are lower on the tier list in terms of contributing to the (albeit nebulous) problem. The failure of programmer productivity can be boiled down to being a people problem, though there's individual facets of that problem that need addressing specifically.
> I do see a lot of struggling developers who are only in it for the paycheck
No offense, but how do you know this? It seems like you're assuming other peoples' thoughts and intentions.
And how much does it actually matter? There's nothing wrong with having a job for the purpose of getting paid. It's not possible for everyone to be a 10x developer, and developers who don't live/eat/breathe code bring their own form of value to their job that isn't necessarily there for rockstar programmers.
> who learnt their Java only skills 20 years ago who wonder why it doesn't get any easier...
The struggle to adapt is indeed a valid point that you bring up. If someone can't adapt, they're going to introduce friction into the process.
There's another side to the coin as well.
Programmers today are expected to adapt way more frequently every passing year. We may be reaching a breaking point where programmers can't justify in their minds the onslaught of changing expectations before them.
Although AI is a beast of its own, I think it's the most prescient example of this. When I was a kid, I dreamed of working on artificial intelligence. Today, on top of the frequent changes in the web development world, if I were to invest my time into AI, well, it would be a black hole upon the rest of my life. When doing the cost-benefit analysis, it's extremely hard to justify investing time in anything because, deep down, we all know that an AI tool will not be relevant in a few short years. Hell, some things become irrelevant within months.
But life is short, and we only have one of them. Not everything is about code. The idea of software was to make our lives better, not for our lives to make the code better.
Maybe all of this tech is coming at too great a cost to our souls.
> No offense, but how do you know this? It seems like you're assuming other peoples' thoughts and intentions.
No assumptions, it's because my team are asked regularly by the 20+ year experienced developers to fix their problems so much so that it causes problems for my sprints, mostly because it's unplanned work.
> And how much does it actually matter?
Because other people have to carry their work instead of doing their own work.
> Programmers today are expected to adapt way more frequently every passing year.
This is how it's always been, but it doesn't take much effort to learn the Java syntax invented in the last 10 years, or a new Java API that looks useful. Keeping up to date in your own field, programmer or not, is just good practice.
It shouldn't be necessary to point out use of a broken/deprecated Date API, or annotations that have been in Spring for 15 years that does the same job as roll your own bodge a dev cobbled together, without tests, over an entire sprint (to get to PR late for a deadline) and now has hacks across a code base everyone has to work with.
> The idea of software was to make our lives better, not for our lives to make the code better.
I agree, but some of us chose to wrestle with the devil so users don't :)
All things being relative, frameworks are lower on the tier list in terms of contributing to the (albeit nebulous) problem. The failure of programmer productivity can be boiled down to being a people problem, though there's individual facets of that problem that need addressing specifically.
> I do see a lot of struggling developers who are only in it for the paycheck
No offense, but how do you know this? It seems like you're assuming other peoples' thoughts and intentions.
And how much does it actually matter? There's nothing wrong with having a job for the purpose of getting paid. It's not possible for everyone to be a 10x developer, and developers who don't live/eat/breathe code bring their own form of value to their job that isn't necessarily there for rockstar programmers.
> who learnt their Java only skills 20 years ago who wonder why it doesn't get any easier...
The struggle to adapt is indeed a valid point that you bring up. If someone can't adapt, they're going to introduce friction into the process.
There's another side to the coin as well.
Programmers today are expected to adapt way more frequently every passing year. We may be reaching a breaking point where programmers can't justify in their minds the onslaught of changing expectations before them.
Although AI is a beast of its own, I think it's the most prescient example of this. When I was a kid, I dreamed of working on artificial intelligence. Today, on top of the frequent changes in the web development world, if I were to invest my time into AI, well, it would be a black hole upon the rest of my life. When doing the cost-benefit analysis, it's extremely hard to justify investing time in anything because, deep down, we all know that an AI tool will not be relevant in a few short years. Hell, some things become irrelevant within months.
But life is short, and we only have one of them. Not everything is about code. The idea of software was to make our lives better, not for our lives to make the code better.
Maybe all of this tech is coming at too great a cost to our souls.