Ask HN: Did Developers Undermine Their Own Profession?
We sold it all to “fun” and “accessibility”.
Unlike doctors, lawyers, or skilled tradespeople, we glorify bootcamps that promise anyone can become a developer in weeks. We worship open source, working nights and weekends “to help the community,” while the market treats it as baseline.
The result? A flood of underqualified competitors, stagnant or declining wages, and a profession that has become disposable. We brag about how easy coding is, all while normalizing mediocrity and eroding the value of our own craft.
We didn’t just create software, as a matter of fact we cheapened ourselves. And now, the industry we built depends on our own overwork, generosity, and naivety.
> we glorify bootcamps that promise anyone can become a developer in weeks. We worship open source, working nights and weekends “to help the community,”
We do? I was under the impression that most devs were disappointed in the result of bootcamps. And there are bootcamps that are simply scams. We do like open source, but the number of people working nights and weekends on it is quite small.
You are just seeing the natural progression of knowledge. Standing on the shoulders of giants, etc. Back in the 90s, you could have a 7 figure ARR startup just by doing one basic CRUD app and putting it online. Now, people can do that as a learning exercise within a few days of starting learning how to code, and that was even before AI. The tools are better, libraries exist for most common needs, coding and DevOps practices have evolved, access to documentation and tutorials is incredible, and we are working at higher and higher levels of abstraction.
It is not because we are glorifying mediocrity. On the contrary, we have spent decades striving quite hard to increase everyone's skills and communicate better ways of doing things. And we succeeded. If you can find any, go look at code and practices from the early 2000s and you will see just how much the general quality of work has increased.
As a result of all the support from each other, more people can do the work now. Yes, it decreases salaries, but we've been living in an insane compensation bubble for a long time.
I don't think bootcamps are glorified, but rather looked down on.
I don't think I know anyone who has such a big ego as to say coding is easy. Sure, hello world is easy but that's not representative of coding overall.
I'm not seeing a flood of under qualified people joining the profession... domestically at least. The group with the highest rates of underperforming people I have encountered have been from contracting companies based in India. Even then, it's not super high in general but more how the company tended to switch from their A team players from initial on-boarding to their B team players for ongoing project work.
The value/pay decline hasn't really happened yet. I think it might really happen in the nenxt few years. We are seeing higher unemployment but we are still seeing high pay for the remaining positions. The companies are being picky about who they hire and still want the "best", or they just outsource.
You make a lot of assumptions here. Like: I've never bragged about how easy coding is. I've never glorified bootcamps. I've never treated open source work as baseline.
The real undermine that is happening now is AI replacing Jr Developers and interns.
Who fueled AI, though? If not those millions of lines of free, well-documented, commented code just sitting on GitHub, contributed for “fun” to show off work. Almost no other profession would do that, especially not in their free time.
Lawyers, doctors, plumbers would never give away years of their expertise for free. Developers did. The rest will be history.
It's a sure bet that someone has scanned West's Legal Forms to fine tune an LLM. Maybe add some JSON specific to West's field names. Et voila.
I don't buy into the gloom-and-doom. AI will change stuff, sure. Just like ARPANET and Internet changed stuff. Just like telephones changed stuff. etc.
> If not those millions of lines of free, well-documented, commented code
Feel free to stop using Linux then, and all the server that rely on it to send you this HN page. Stop using HN now if you're serious about what you said.
> Almost no other profession would do that, especially not in their free time.
Dude, StackOverflow exists. Reddit, Quora, Facebook, all exist. You don't need to make up base lies to justify your crackpot tirade against open source developers.
We deal with other professions on a daily basis. A lawyer or a financial advisor drops a single tip or piece of advice, even casually, and someone could be writing them a check for hundreds or thousands. A painter sells a single brushstroke or sketch and it’s still cash. They guard every scrap of knowledge because it’s literally money in their pocket.
That's part of my point here. Where's lawyers' StackOverflow? Where's financial advisors' Quora?
https://law.stackexchange.com/
https://quant.stackexchange.com/
> The result? A flood of underqualified competitors, stagnant or declining wages, and a profession that has become disposable.
The market didn't suddenly get flooded with juniors because we promoted coding. It was because the demand was astronomical. Companies were desperate for people, so bootcamps emerged to fill the gap. Why would you blame the supply for a problem created by overwhelming demand?
The goal is hiring/firing everything else be damned. It’s weirder than it sounds.
To increase hiring you introduce conventions to lower the barrier of entry. This means less qualified, skilled, experienced, or competent people can participate with near equivalent performance. The cost is a form of vendor lock-in and generally shitty output that costs more to build and maintain.
In theory this also makes developers easier to replace because they are a cheap common commodity. In reality firing people requires legal safety, so it’s also more expensive than cheap conventions can allow.
This is weird because wages are not declining. Businesses accept the rising wages in exchange for not having to pay for continuing education, licensing recertification, training, or other career maintenance.
I think it’s precisely because of the free sharing that we’ve been able to build such a huge market. The fact that so many engineers enjoy relatively higher salaries and strong demand compared to other professions is thanks to open-source contributions and knowledge sharing being offered for free.
When there's gold but the easy gold is gone, some people rush to sell shovels - it’s easier than digging yourself. Soon, there are more shovels than places to dig, and some buyers don’t even know how to use one.
What can I do? Linux, git, C, gcc, vim, and a long list of top quality software have been developed just as you described. I feel ashamed of charging $9.99 for my shitty app, so I won’t.
That's a very liberal use of "we".