festus

Here's my pet theory as to why CS did so well for so long and why that probably won't remain true moving forward.

Programming / tech is a relatively new field that, as a proportion of how much time it takes as part of people's waking hours (as a rough indicator of how much of the economy it can penetrate), has gone from essentially 0% to 99% in only a few decades. We went from only large corporations having one or two mainframes, to office computers, to home computers, to smartphones, etc. Add in social media, streaming, etc. and people have gone from spending virtually no time on programmable devices to all their time on programmable devices.

As tech continued to have this (apparently) exponential growth, there was a chronic shortage of programmers, leading to massive salaries. As salaries exploded, programming developed a reputation for being a relatively easy, well-paying job, provided you were somewhat intelligent. As a result, hordes of students studied CS to help keep up with the growing demand, although always lagging. For seniors the lag for new hires to reach their level is quite a bit longer, so seniors have remained in high demand.

Now as we catch up to the present though, it's hard to see spaces where new jobs for programmers can be created without cannibalizing existing ones. VR? You'd take work away from game developers. Metaverse? From traditional social media sites. In short we've put computers on watches, sleep trackers, fridges, TVs, cars, light switches, etc. There's no more room for the industry as a whole to grow. AI might be the exception for this - if it actually succeeds it could keep tech growing by eating into the jobs of other industries, but then I expect it would end up eating many tech jobs too, so for the purpose of my argument it'll either hurt the programming job market or have minimal effect.

So - we reach the present. Lured in by the high salaries of previous years, and the high salaries seniors currently have, we have an overabundance of juniors on the job market. If tech had continued its previous rate of growth, things would have been fine - but it can't. As a result, there just aren't enough jobs for all the current juniors and there likely won't ever be - the industry can't grow to accommodate them. Many of them will need to switch to other careers and for less students to study CS for balance to arrive. There's still a shortage of seniors at the moment, but as the current juniors who are employed gain experience and move up the job ladder, this will change. Current seniors can't count on older tech workers retiring quite yet, due to how young-skewed tech is (because of the job growth pattern we previously had), so they should expect growing job competition as juniors develop and for salaries to stagnate (already seeing this at my employer).

This isn't all bad news though - consumers will benefit. With a shortage of new industries to move into, the glut of workers who remain will best find work opportunities by selling products that outperform and/or are cheaper compared to the existing products. In other words, expect more alternatives to MS Office, social media, Photoshop, etc. People will be able to create work for themselves by undercutting the current incumbents - we should expect to see an explosion in competitors for existing products. In some ways we're seeing this already - more and more great indie games that outperform the AAA giants, open source software that provide better experiences against the proprietary options (Lemmy vs Reddit, Mastadon vs Twitter, Forgejo/Gitea vs Github, etc.)

I fully expect to see deviations to this - new hype cycles that temporarily create demand, boom / bust cycles depending on the present economic circumstances, an eventual (short-term) shortage of workers once today's tech workers do start to retire, but long-term I expect 'programmer' to become just another generic white-collar job with similar pay.

TL;DR - unless you're already a senior in tech, you might want to look at professions that are actually in demand as the glory days for software developers won't come back.

In this case the big telecoms are divided (or, well, Telus vs. everyone else).

No. Thankfully (at the moment) vendors are allowing us to install other OSes, but if a vendor really wanted to lock you down to Windows all they'd need to do is hide one option in the bios. I'm uncomfortable with the idea that there's no technical reason preventing the PC industry from getting as locked down as Android phones did over time.

Only if the motherboard vendor allows you to. Imagine buying a Dell or Asus laptop and being forced to only run Windows.

Someone I know started torrenting for the first time ever (American shows only) and cancelled their streaming services. Cancelled Prime. I'm avoiding American products as much as possible.

At some point you have to let them fail. Remind them of it again, so that when they cause a major issue in prod you can point out that you communicated it to them multiple times. If this team keeps causing outages (and aren't covered for by other teams) then, hopefully, management high enough will become aware of it and start to crackdown on them. I know you said elsewhere you don't want them to lose their jobs but if they can't do it, they shouldn't have it. It's not like you're sabotaging them - you're still helping them with advice and warnings. If despite that help they still can't get by, then them getting terminated is the remaining best outcome.

Not sure how straightforward this is, but maybe instead of fixing things directly, point out to them what the fix needs to be. "Oh, you have an extra comma here. Try removing that and then see if it works."

By forcing them to be the ones that work in their code base, and also forcing them to have to fix their own problems (even if you hand-hold them through it), then maybe they'll start to show a little more care.

That's been the official position forever. Canada wants a Palestinian state, but it's not recognizing one yet. Basically they put out a nothing statement and people are thinking it's something new.

For people who enjoyed Descent, you may enjoy Overload. It was created by some of the original creators and is also a 6DOF shooter.

Let's not say he has decency. His other option was probably to be fired.

Yes and no. Wasm has no "standard library" so if you wanted to use Dates, your wasm would need to have its own implemation bundled for when the user visits the page. Ditto for everything else including string support! As you can imagine having to ship all this basic functionality can bloat the wasm and slow page loads.

You also can't fully escape JS, as the only way wasm can interact with the page & browser are through the JS functions you write and make available to your wasm. I suppose you could take advantage of this to not have to ship your own standard library & use the JS Date implementation, but at that point why not just use JS?

Wasm has strengths but it's not suitable for replacing JS for everyday websites.

In practice I doubt Americans would end up qualifying for refugee status, at least not yet. I'm pretty sure you have to show there are no safe places in your country, and many US states are more reasonable for LGBT folks than some Canadian provinces are.