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Comment by crinkly | Hacker News Reader

Depends what you do. The sudden large accumulation of layers and corporate SaaS crap in the industry since about 2001 you're right on. But those of us a bit further down the stack or before that, it's pretty useful still.

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Absolutely, but we are a dying breed in the same way that nobody really knows how to build nuclear power plants anymore.

Most CS grads will end up in a position that has more in common with being an electrician or plumber than an electrical engineer, difference is that we can't really automate installing wires and pipes to same degree we have automated service integration and making api calls.

Not a dying breed. There is just a relatively static demand. Proportionally it looks worse because the rest of the industry has grown massively.

Really the problem is there are too many CS grads. There should be a software engineering degree.

Personally I am a fan of bootcamp grads for simple stuff like FE.

They lack academic knowledge but understand the problem domain and tools, and are generally more teachable with lower salary expectations.

I would like to see more "trade schools" and its one of my pet peeves when devs call themselves engineers despite not being a licensed or regulated in any meaningful way.

Those bootcamps create assembly line capable people, and nothing else. If your work is so static and unchanging that you can use such people, great, for those people doing that kind of limited scope work they are being used and discarded with little to no economic ladder to better their situation. It's exploitation of others, which is commonplace today, but I'd try to do better. It's still a poor way to treat others.

You just described people who go to bootcamps or trade schools as "assembly line capable, and nothing else".

By your definition running a welding company is also exploitive?

I don't see welding companies with a series of 8 hour interviews where the welder is grilled on all manner of welding edge cases they'll never see in the job, then further evaluated for 'cultural fit', and then expected to work 12-14 hour days - including weekends - when the job listed no such hourly requirements.

Welding, machining, carpentry, plumbing, hvac etc are all highly technical trades with a lot more certification and regulatory oversight than the overwhelming majority of software development careers.

Eh, do you actually know anything about welding, especially in safety critical applications? Thats not even counting crazy stuff like welding in the nuclear industry.

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