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Summit posted:I don't think you need to be a genius to be a great programmer but not everyone can do it. It takes a certain personality. It's most easily described as stubbornness. You have to be the type of person to run into a problem and then not be able to sleep until you figure it out 8 hours later. Most people don't find programming interesting enough to do that. It's not a career that you can just go to school and drop into easily. As a result even though the wages are fantastic, the competition for jobs has remained quite low. Also the outsourcing threat never materializes. Communication is key for the success of software projects and language/time zone barriers are killer for anything but the most trivial binaries.
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Jul 27, 2014 06:44
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enraged_camel posted:My sister for example tried to learn programming early in college, but it was only during her senior year that she really got into it. That happened when she joined a community service group and realized they could use a web app to facilitate event sign-ups. So she just crushed through tutorials and eventually built it. Now she can put "proficient in Python" on her resume. She'd also be dealing with stereotype threat so you have to factor that in. Tutoring women in Stem I always go goal oriented because the combination of no concrete goal and societal pressure to be bad at it is a non-starter. Guys have societal pressure to be good at it so they've potentially got a goal built in.
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Jul 27, 2014 06:51
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:This is sort of a side issue, but is there really evidence that software development salaries are going to implode/there is another tech bubble? I cannot really recall in history a time in which it was not considered the wisest career choice to study advanced computer science and the associated disciplines. Being a developer now is like being literate in the Middle Ages. A specialized skill in high demand by every business that does anything. What would threaten it is what destroyed the high prestige of the clerk - widespread literacy. If one of those wysiwyg programming platforms ever actually works and allows "drag and drop" programming by "anyone" with no code behind that would do it. Or the invention of a functional AI that could talk to you, understand what you want, and program it up in a jiff. That would make the discipline pretty pointless for most people as there wouldn't be enough work in AI writing to go around and what work there would be would be above the skill of most devs. Revenge of the comp sci PhDs. I don't think either of these will happen in my lifetime. I'm not saying they'll never happen. Clerks probably thought that widespread literacy was impossible but here we are.
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Jul 27, 2014 16:40
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on the left posted:Why do they let people graduate from sociology programs without solid calc/stats skills and knowledge of at least one statistical package? This is the beginning if the "widespread literacy" solution I mentioned above. When I was freelancing a lot of my work was simple poo poo. That's why I stopped freelancing. It paid well but it was booooring. So I stopped doing things and started teaching my clients how to do it themselves ( cause I wanted to transition out smoothly with good relations/references). You have no idea the joy you can ignite in an executives heart by teaching him how to write SQL queries and get the data he wants from the DB directly. Right now. Not tomorrow after describing what he wants and sending an email and having it get in line with other reporting requests and come back wrong and be sent back/corrected. Now. It's literally empowering. And the reason you need to have a reporting instance so badly written queries don't tank production. But he did so that was cool.
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Jul 27, 2014 16:52
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Xae posted:I would bet we'll see functional AI long before we see a wyswyg that obsoletes most developers. Depends on how specialized they make the wysiwyg. The drag and drop graphical reporting packages work pretty well for building queries. Yes the SQL they generate is horrible and slow. Yes a dev can do better. But the main thing keeping them marginal is their price, not their capabilities. They cost as much as a dev to license and devs do a lot of additional stuff for the money. I'm seeing graphical scripting tools for windows admins cropping up in the really high end corporations as well. In Schlumberger for example I sat next to a guy who scripted things that a unix admin would do in perl with some expensive as gently caress IBM tool that was purely graphical. It made pretty logic flow charts on the screen and actually worked for the narrow subset of simple scripting tasks it was assigned. And the drag and drop Lego mind storms programming interface is literally for children. Edit - that was probably to many words to say I'm not hypothesizing a wysiwyg. I'm assuming many of them each devoted to a narrow subset of related programing tasks. McAlister fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Jul 27, 2014 |
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Jul 27, 2014 17:01
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computer parts posted:There's this: Ok here is the thing. These bubble bursts are hiccups. I graduated right in the middle of the 2001 pop and two years later was pulling 67k in my field with recruiters regularly contacting me to see if I was happy where I was. Calling that a bubble burst is technically correct. But the overall slope on that graph is quite optimistically positive. Real demand for dev work is growing almost as fast as the bubbles. That makes these bubble bursts less a scary thing and more a nice excuse to take a vacation for a few months - provided you weren't an idiot with money when it was coming in of course. Edit - the idiot thing was mostly because my uncle put all his retirement in stock and only bought one stock .. The company he worked for. So when 2008 rolled around and his tech company folded due to inability to get financing he lost his job, his salary, and his entire retirement portfolio in one go. He's the guy I'm calling an idiot. McAlister fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Jul 27, 2014 |
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Jul 27, 2014 17:32
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computer parts posted:Median home prices have nearly doubled in 3 years, if that's not a bubble I don't know what is. Bubble isn't "goes up quickly". Its "goes up faster than real sustainable demand". This usually happens when people start looking at something as an investment rather than as what it is. And yeah, vanity start ups as investments exist. But underneath them is real demand for non-vanity projects that are on hold because vanity projects are creating an artificial shortage. So when the bubble pops the fall isn't that far.
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Jul 27, 2014 18:56
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Lacrosse posted:I think I could enjoy learning how to program. I taught myself HTML when I was 11 and I dabbled Second Life scripting while unemployed to see if I could make a buck to help out with the bills. I used to really like building websites, so I bet I could enjoy being a programmer. 28? Phooey. I got my aunt started coding in her mid forties. At one client I taught the secretary pool of women in their 60's enough coding to do all the report writing they were paying me $100 an hour to do. You absolutely can start now. Most of the mystique of the industry is people trying to make it look way harder than it is for the usual reasons. The trick is finding a way to get paid to learn it if you don't have enough time/money to take night classes or independent study it. The easiest way to do that is get a job in qa and then start automating tests .,. Write programs to run the tests for you. In doing that you'll learn the company product very well and have a leg up on outsiders when a dev position opens.
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Jul 27, 2014 19:21
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The best paid dev I know never went to college. My hubby and many other devs I know went to college for something else and ended up in programming. Going to college put me behind my development peer group that didn't go to college and I only recently caught up to their earnings. So What the hell are college stats doing in a thread about programming? Wealth stats matter. My first exposure to computers was an apple II e that my dad was playing with and having access to computers plus leisure time from an early age ... Would have been very beneficial if Id done more than play kings quest etc. As the guy I mentioned in the first paragraph did - giving him a ten year head start on me. But he's plateaued and I'm catching up.
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Jul 27, 2014 20:59
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asdf32 posted:I'm saying there is a unique depth to the demand for programmers because almost literally any company could benefit by having more of them. y. This is what I was going for with the literacy comparison. The unique depth. Being able to read/write was a skill that could get you a solid upper middle class or better lifestyle anywhere for a long time because its so incredibly applicable to everything.
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Jul 29, 2014 20:47
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Wow another spot of free time. Anywho, the reason I wouldn't write off widespread basic (computer programming) literacy at some point in the future isn't the idiot who wants a report of "odd" orders and can't define "odd" - which can be done btw if you build a heuristics engine to figure out "odd" but that's so much work just having humans do it is more cost effective. It's the gal who learns to write excel macros and makes a dizzying spreadsheet of macro upon macro that becomes the beating heart of her department with massive amounts of business logic baked in. She doesn't know how to program. She's had no formal training. Her toolset is the programmatic equivalent of a spork. What she did is so much harder than writing a program in a real programing language with a real IDE to do the same thing. And she will, every time, blush, downplay it, and insist that Java is to hard to learn, she was just doing some simple scripting is all. /Sigh
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Jul 29, 2014 22:22
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BrandorKP posted:Is there something special about software engineering that a person overseas who can be paid significantly less can't be taught how to do it? It's not that they can't be taught. It's that good, constant, communication is vital to the success of a nontrivial software project. I've made a lot of money taking the code an offshore cheap contractor made and fixing it so it does what the client wants. The total expense of the project usually ended up higher than it would be if they'd just hired local talent to do it in the first place. Say I have a question, "do you want it to do X or Y here"? A frequent response is, "what difference does it make?". Which leads to a discussion of the impacts and eventually a decision. If I'm a native English speaker in the cube across the hall from you this discussion is verbal and takes 5 minutes. If I'm a $14 an hour contractor in India to whom English is a second language this discussion happens via email and takes several days, maybe a week, due to time shift and language barrier. The man-hour costs of everyone involved in it will dwarf the man-hour costs of my 5 minute conversation despite wages on the programmer side of the conversation being much less ( but still not bad! $14 an hour is well over min wage in the us). If the discussion were about something physical the employer could simply send a picture or a blueprint of what they want. These are worth thousands of words and communicate very effectively. You can send a picture/mock up of a UI so off shoring UI implementation works fairly well which is why so many of those shops specialize in web pages. Furthermore, the up-front documentation costs are higher when you offshore. You can get away with a fairly basic set of requirements and flesh it out as you go along verbally with a physically present programmer - or at least a native speaker in the same time zone who you can skype with frequently. But Pong Yang down in Beijing ( actual person I worked with ) can't just pick up the phone and call you whenever. Its 7:00 pm here when she comes in to work. So when shipping her work the description of what you need needs to be extensively documented to reduce the need for her to talk to you. Now all a computer program is is precise descriptions of what the computer should do - written in a computer language. Computer languages are simple. They'll have all of a few dozen words each. The translation of what you want from English to Computer is rarely the hard part. Having a business analyst ( also highly compensated position) define/document the problem clearly enough to get Pong Yang going incurs a large extra expense up front that you don't have if you hire me. You'll get better results quicker for less money hiring local programmers most of the time. Even though the wage for local programmers is higher. They've been trying to offshore us for a decade now and they get burned when they do. /Shrug
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Jul 31, 2014 15:31
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Smudgie Buggler posted:Then you're just dense. Not all unions are effective and do great things for their workers, but there is no worker whom collective bargaining and effective organisation would not benefit. This seems a bold assertion. And since its a universal assertion its one that can be disproven with a single counter-example. The singular of data being anecdote. A few months ago I was coming home from a trip and my van to the airport was full of stewardesses who were bitching animatedly about changes in policy resulting in to long hours, not enough staff, freezing wages, etc etc. They were so short handed that on occasion flight were delayed for lack of staff ( customers would be told it was weather or something else ). After listening for some time I broke in suggesting they look at unionizing. They all responded saying they have a union and it SUCKS. The union rep signed the agreements that let the new management do this! He's incompetent! Or in the pocket of the owners! Well hold on, unions are democratic organizations, how did that corporate shill get into a position where he could do that? At which point it got kind of quiet and then one of them said, "well, it was our fault I guess. I wasn't paying attention and didn't vote". Some more questioning revealed that the closest competitors had been given lots of work to do while the shill was given lots of free time to seek votes and other support. Then we turned to talking about how to oust the shill and get things re-negotiated. By being in a union the bosses were able to effectively screw over all the flight attendants at once by corrupting one person. A strategy my dad employed more than once btw ... So I've actually got several of these anecdotes because a large part of his job was breaking the back of labor and I grew up watching him do it. To get effective use out of a union you must not merely contribute money from your paycheck but also time and effort following this kind of politics to ensure you are getting capable and incorruptible people going to bat for you. To be worth it the gain from unionizing must exceed the time/drama sink. The less negotiating power you personally have, the greater the gain from unionizing. Furthermore, gains are relative/marginal. What is it ... $70k? There was a study showing happiness increases with income until you hit a certain amount of income ... Phone posting as always but I swear it was around 70k that the strong relation dropped off. I was making 67k after 2 years at my very first coding job. [i]More money is not going to bring me more happiness[i] (also why I support raising my own taxes for things like universal health care etc ). Following deeply personal political drama that directly touches the lives of everyone I care about is stressful and would decrease my happiness. I don't want to be the stewardess in the van who admitted she was partially at fault for not voting - or worse, the one who voted the wrong way.
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Aug 1, 2014 02:04
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ZShakespeare posted:I wouldn't be surprised if we started to see companies opening entire shops for start to finish products overseas to exploit cheap labour in the future though. Schlumberger was trying that when I was there but the folks who are the sources of our requirements would have to move to the 2nd and third world code mines to make it work. And they really don't wanna. Being sent to Beijing was the business stakeholder equivalent of being exiled to Siberia. My boss had to physically be there for two weeks every 6 months and he bitched about it endlessly.
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Aug 1, 2014 02:18
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BrandorKP posted:
Which is tremendously easier when you are describing physical things that can be held and touched.
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Aug 1, 2014 02:22
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Trabisnikof posted:I think math would be better if it had more randomized blind trials in forming proofs. Not me. Just want to clarify. My argument was that the demand is so deep that it would take a significant portion of the populace becoming programmatically literate to slake it. Keep in mind, however, that a portion of that demand is for trivial poo poo like fart apps and games that aren't building any kind of future for mankind. I'm not saying people should or are foolish for not doing it ... Just that that is what it would take. Like how the demand for literacy wasn't met even when 10% of the population could read. One in ten people simply wasn't enough to meet demand. I don't think the demand for software dev skills is as deep as literacy, but if you aren't thinking in terms of how many people out of a hundred could start coding without saturating the market you are lowballing it.
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Aug 1, 2014 02:55
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Side note: Google, Facebook, and game companies do not represent the software dev market. These companies that exhibit the bad behavior folks are trying to scare me with have something that my employers do not have. Prestige. People want to work for them. People view being able to say "I work for Facebook" at parties as a desirable thing. People will settle for lower wages and terrible conditions to work for a video game shop or render farm because they want to be able to point to their names on the credits. The market for that specific sub-section of my industry is indeed experiencing a labor surplus and if I worked in that sector I'd definitely want a union shop. But you can't point to conditions at Blizzard and extrapolate to conditions anywhere else. Edit : EmployERs, and yahoo doesn't really belong there. McAlister fucked around with this message at 05:04 on Aug 1, 2014 |
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Aug 1, 2014 03:08
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Trabisnikof posted:What do you think makes software programming different from the myriad professional and technical fields that are unionized? Specific example please to compare and contrast? Name a unionized field you think is comparable to non-video game non-google software dev.
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Aug 2, 2014 14:50
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:Well, a lot of this likely has to do with these tech workers living in the bay area and not understanding that the left leaning people surrounding them everywhere tend to support things beyond the social issues the left takes up. "I can't be right wing like those horrible people all of my neighbors always badmouth because I don't hate gays and left wing people stand up for gays. Also legalize pot; let's do that." Live in Colorado and absolutely support unions for whoever wants them. For forms of employment where the employee has very little negotiating power I support requiring them by law so that employers can't bully/stokholm folks into not having them. But in professions that don't need them I don't see any point in forcing them. Or did I misunderstand and the premise is having software devs join not any specific union but rather an over-arching group such that if group x was in trouble we'd strike with them in solidarity? If that's what you want just say so. That's a decent idea.
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Aug 2, 2014 14:58
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Peven Stan posted:so are you ever going to acknowledge how a union can ensure you're fairly paid for OT or how it can help older software engineers avoid being laid off in favor of young people right out of college dirk You know ... I can't tell if this is satire or not. I looked at it and I realized that to tell if you were joking I'd have to go over your post history. We are a salary position. Overtime is rare outside of the video game hell pits ( which I already agreed that game dev should be unionized for its workers own protection ... They want to work in that specific company so much they become exploitable in a way normally only possible when people are worried about necessities ). When overtime happens we get bonuses for it. And for all the hand waving about skill turnover all the older programmers I know are turning folks away at the door and working part time well into their retirements because they want to and the money in maintaining legacy fortran/COBOL systems is insane. Like $200-$250 an hour insane since as part time contractors they do work hourly. They are very happy people. Oh, someone asked what we could do if the price per dev-day went down. Well a poo poo-ton of government agencies have these legacy fortran and COBOL programs such as MUMPS at the VA which could be killed in a fire and replaced with something modern. So that's one thing.
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Aug 2, 2014 15:14
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archangelwar posted:
All the folks trying to convince me ( or anyone ) to form a union of 4 people at my workplace do so by trying to appeal to self interest. And you use the same pitch trying to appeal to walmart workers. Join a union! Get better pay! Get better working condition! How is that not an appeal to self interest? As I noted above, that's a poor strategy because I'm more easily moved by the interests of others than for myself. And trying to rile me up over wanting more when I already have more than enough isn't getting you any traction.
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Aug 2, 2014 15:24
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archangelwar posted:Workers is not a singular noun. And that's not an articulated argument. Edit: I can't really participate in a direct exchange cause I get called away and only phone post at odd times so I'll skip to the coup de Grace instead of trying to lead you there with questions. When the lowest compensated worker in a group is in an above-average/ nice situation then you can appeal to neither self interest not group interest to argue for unions. Devs are generally leftist and happy so self interest arguments don't work and our most junior members are also well paid and happy so group interest appeals targeted at dev as a group also don't work. To find an a appeal that works you need to broaden the group from "developers" to a larger pool of workers that includes folks who need help/protection by unionizing with them. For example, when I worked at the park service our building had a union rep for government workers and since I was a government worker I was in the union. The rep covered everyone in the building regardless of job so it was dev and janitor and IT and intern and lawyer and secretary alike. I have zero problem being in that kind of union as it does contain members who need it. Club Dev, however, simply doesn't -outside of game/prestige shops of course. McAlister fucked around with this message at 15:46 on Aug 2, 2014 |
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Aug 2, 2014 15:30
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Dirk: Where do you work that older talent isn't guarded jealously with the bosses having anxiety attacks worrying about how to replace their institutional knowledge when they retire?
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Aug 2, 2014 15:50
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archangelwar posted:But it is ... Yay, I'm actually still here for an interactive discussion for once. And what you just did is an articulated argument. What you did before was a zinger. In just copy pasting my edit from above so if you already read it skip it. "mcalister posted:
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Aug 2, 2014 15:57
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CCrew posted:Are you in a union? I'd still love to get input on my union questions from last page. For instance, should all employees unionize including CEOs and management? And how does the Major League Baseball players union benefit workers everywhere? They've never gone on strike in solidarity with anyone else that I know of and their lowest paid members are paid extravagantly by any measure.
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Aug 2, 2014 16:06
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Dirk Pitt posted:I have worked at two companies that have done multiple rounds of layoffs. The low hanging fruit is always first. Then in both instances, older devs in their 50s and 60s were kicked to the curb. Yes their knowledge is vast and they are very fast and good employees, but they have $175000 a year salaries, and that's a lot of money when you have 20-30 somethings raking in $75k to $100k doing similar work. I was in one company that did that then hired him back a little less than a year later at an even higher salary when they realized they hosed up ( 21 devs) and one company that did that and couldn't get him to come back when they realized their error (around 50 devs in his group). They pay through the nose to get consulting hours from him now and he is semi retired. What was the general field? Pure dev or dev + industry knowledge? The two above were dev + medical industry knowledge and dev + oilfield services industry knowledge.
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Aug 2, 2014 16:22
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Peven Stan posted:well then, may i interest you in other features such as: I'd rather get universal healthcare and take the leverage of providing healthcare away from employers.
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Aug 2, 2014 18:01
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computer parts posted:People will want the moon no matter what you teach them. That's why there are currently job requests that have "20 years of VMWare experience" as a required feature. A lot of "impossible postings" are because the person who wrote the job req has a specific person in mind that they want to hire but HR has hiring processes that do not include, "hire your buddy". So they make a req that's impossible and when questioned as to why candidate X didn't get the job they can point to an item on the req that candidate X didn't meet. People almost never ask why candidate X got the job so long as candidate X does well so the target person also not meeting the req is almost never questioned. This happens most frequently for government positions as they have really stringent hiring over site and require you to interview multiple people before hiring. I had a few written to be impossible for anyone but me when I was in college because I was a great summer intern and they wanted me specifically back the following summers but the rules didn't allow them to just re-hire last summers intern this summer. And the internship was not a high paying job ... So this isn't a high end nudge/nudge/wink/wink big money thing. It's just, "drat it, I don't want to waste 3 weeks of the summer getting a new network admin intern up to speed when the girl from last year already knows where everything is and will be effective from day one".
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Aug 3, 2014 17:52
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computer parts posted:Just so you know "20 years of VMWare experience" is literally impossible. The company didn't exist 20 years ago. Which is why I assumed that example was histrionic hyperbole and didn't take it literally. Longer than the tech existed postings tend to be 5 years experience for a 3-4 year old language. The desired applicant will be an early adopter and have something they've agreed to treat as equivalent for the additional years. Or possibly literally be someone who helped invent the language/toolset in some (possibly very minor) way and as such can claim a head start on everyone else. computer parts posted:There is also a long standing and well noted phenomenon of HR people wanting a lot of conditions in an applicant that don't actually come into consideration in an interview for the position. And those conditions won't be technical because HR goons don't know what any of the tech stuff being asked for means so the just copy that stuff boilerplate and play word-match with resumes. They do know, however, what a college is and may insist on various levels of education or certification that may not be needed.
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Aug 3, 2014 22:13
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enraged_camel posted:Step 1: go into a thread that insults an entire profession I have to admit, I'm wondering what the ratio of engineers to software people in this thread is. I went to an engineering college and my husband has his degree in civil engineering so I've never called myself an engineer since I've never passed the EIT which I thought was necessary for the title. But I had no idea how emotional other engineers get over it. Let's try some engineering sperg bait. "I'm working on my patio now so I'm going to head out back and pour some concrete. Bye!"
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Aug 4, 2014 00:07
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Sooo ... I'm comfortable admitting that the people who made fart.app are software devs. Do engineers admit that they make whoopee cushions, fabricate sex toys, and make ez bake ovens or do we pretend that these things spring forth fully formed from the head of Zeus? If so, is it fair to stereotype one of the two fields based on its best work and the other on its most trivial? Also, Therac 25 happened - for the folks out there who think software is all safe and friendly and harmless. http://courses.cs.vt.edu/professionalism/Therac_25/Therac_1.html McAlister fucked around with this message at 02:28 on Aug 4, 2014 |
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Aug 4, 2014 02:26
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shrike82 posted:There're probably more software developers involved in low level embedded/kernel/realtime programming than there are engineers building bridges anyway. /Sigh And if the GOP keeps throttling our infrastructure budgets at all levels of government ... /Sigh
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Aug 4, 2014 03:12
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uncurable mlady posted:Therac 25, which (if it isn't already) should be drilled into the skull of every CS freshman is a great example of why we should hold software devs to the same standards we hold engineers. I've gotten a lot of informal training on these topics on the job as I've worked in industries where we were working on systems that impact health and safety. So corporate training. Didn't hear about Therac in school and only got ethics type stuff as a byproduct of being in an engineering college as they were required of everyone. /Shrug Also, keep in mind, a lot of devs skip the school route entirely so even if there were more classes they would have missed them. So corporate training does have the virtue if catching everyone though there are clearly some interest conflicts there.
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Aug 4, 2014 03:18
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Safe and Secure! posted:Accreditation and a "PE for software engineers" is not going to result in "better software engineering". My school switched their CS major to software engineering. The result was extra courses on: That's horrifying.
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Aug 4, 2014 03:19
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Lyesh posted:Why is that horrifying? I'd way rather programmers have some sort of toy experience with software design than having the same with computation theory (which isn't terribly useful in the general field beyond stuff like knowing big O notation and friends) or architecture. I disagree as to the utility. Its less important nowadays I'll totally grant you since most frameworks have basic data structures baked in so you don't have to roll your own lists anymore or do things like decide to make them doubly linked or not etc. But I find that kind of knowledge to be highly correlated with coworkers who kick rear end. Whether they got it in school or are self taught the ones that have a basic understanding of low level concepts just do better at writing performant code, attacking problems from the direction that requires the least work, understanding threading (esp when not to do it), and not blaming the compiler/database when something weird happens. Also, you kind of need that stuff to write cool poo poo like heuristics engines so you can do things like tell if any data is "weird" or which emails are "spam" or hunt for fraud in health insurance claim databases ( which is going amazingly by the way. The money the ACA allocated to hire a bunch of programmers to write a heuristics engine to look for "weird" Medicare claims is paying off tenfold. =D ). quote:It also blows my mind how many people in this thread oppose programers' unions for reasons like workers not being interchangeable when both movies and sports are heavily unionized and also have measurable productivity differences for employees that the software field could never even dream of. There is a difference between "actively opposing" and "can't be bothered". Both movies and sports got unionized in the first place due to issues of workplace safety as I recall. If programmers were being asked to do our own stunts or play through injuries we'd have a reason to expend the time/effort to unionize. McAlister fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Aug 4, 2014 |
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Aug 4, 2014 15:38
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Would people be interested in a cited effort post about an industry that used to pay what programmers get paid now, then abruptly got commoditized and wages/profits went promptly down the crapper at astounding speeds? I'll do it after work if so. Cause understanding why that industry was vulnerable will help explain why dev isn't vulnerable.
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Aug 4, 2014 16:12
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down with slavery posted:Why don't you just tell us what the industry is instead of playing countdown to the reveal Mainly busy and don't want to take the time to make it nice and sourced if all people are more interested in title-chat. Since you are the only interested person and want to self research I'll just do the summary. Its dry cleaning. An economist wrote a paper about the most lucrative fields to get in in the 80s or 90s and dry cleaning was on the list. This got it attention because capitalists hadn't really noticed just how lucrative mom&pop dry cleaning shops were. But the study outed dry cleaning as a common occupation of millionaires. Once it had been pointed out to them they swept in and did everything the doom criers say will happen to dev if we don't fight back. Within a decade dry cleaners became min wage sweatshop workers in central laundries fed by multiple storefront collection points and the millionaire mom&pops are gone. Surviving independent cleaners work on razor thin margins struggling to compete with the economies of scale the big boys have going for them. Investors and employers have been trying to commoditize developers since long before they noticed dry cleaners ... and yet they have utterly failed to do to us what they did to dry cleaners. Assertions that our industry is about to succumb any year now are therefor not credible unless you can also offer a compelling explanation about why it hasn't yet and what has changed recently such that we are now vulnerable.
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Aug 5, 2014 07:40
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