Which pretty much sums up today's work culture. I was just talking about this same exact thing, yesterday.
That's absolutely heartbreaking.
In the old days, we would have a team, that would compete, as a team, against other corporations. Our team would stick together, work together, and, quite often, function as a unit; leveraging each others' strengths, and compensating for each others' weaknesses.
Nowadays, we look at our team members as "the competition." In fact, we may actually be making plans to move to the other team.
But I have written programs in C, that were still in use, 25 years later. I have written programs in PHP, that were still (are still) in use, 15 years later.
There'll always be room for the classics.
That said, I'm quite looking forward to seeing what I can do with the new AI stuff.
I never publish or react to individual velocity as a manager. It's all about what the dev and QA team gets across as a whole to the Done pile each week, and I use a rolling ten week average. I know what each person is doing still but if they spend four hours collaborating on something nobody loses points.
Well my team wins more than most others and we've replaced teams and fixed many failed projects so that helps too. And if the company is dense there's others that aren't and lots that will follow where I go to next.
Everyone is at best a temporary ally, friends and community groups are just atrophying daily as we continue to not invest in people and community and invest in more alienation.
The idea that nobody saw their coworkers as competition for a promotion, or bonus, or face-time with the boss in the past, and that there are no teams that stick together and work together today, is fanciful at best.
These are "Because I can find an exception, your position is invalid." arguments. Not sure I can recall the exact fallacy title, but it's a fairly typical debating tactic.
I disagree that there's a fallacy at play here. The GP (GGP) should support their bold claim that "times have changed" and "people/teams aren't the same as they used to be." If anything, that's an extremely common fallacy and is not to be believed without sufficient evidence.
Actually, that's a fairly typical thing to say to someone that's older, and has lived through those times.
And I am sorry. Things definitely used to be better than they are now, in some ways, and definitely used to be worse, in other ways (for example, it used to be a very white, very male demographic). It's not my fault that things went the way they did. Folks liked money, so folks built a culture that maximized profit, and eschewed humanity.
I am quite sorry about that, but it doesn't change the fact that it was not always so.
It's not in my personal interest to go about creating a slideshow on "how things used to be." I know what I know. I lived it. I ran teams, exactly like I described, and I was a proud member of very large, high-functioning teams that stuck together for decades without stabbing each other in the back.
I don't disbelieve you, but I'm saying your experience can't be generalized in that way. Only aggregate data can tell us these things. Your experience may well have followed the exact trajectory you've described, but maybe 90% of people see the opposite.
While maybe it does sum up our work culture it shouldn't influence how you work. Rarely have I seen someone who "runs faster" be more valued (monetarily or among senior peers) than someone who churns out quality and runs "a little slower".
Team is still very much a thing and if your team members are looking at each other as competition then that sounds like a culture thing, maybe the norm, still not acceptable.
The collateral damage of careerism is objectifying your coworkers as either enemies or things to manipulate in order to advance yourself. It's the belief that all software devs are temporarily embarrassed FAANG devs.
This mindset will damage you over the long run, and the resulting career success may or may not be able to offset it. A zero sum mindset will lock you into this view along with the accompanying anxiety.
Given how quickly income inequality is rising, can you blame people for taking any advantage possible to try to stay ahead of the curve? If it means throwing your teammates under the bus to get more money, that's unfortunate but it's going to happen.
With those new interpreted language that are easy to pick and have a low-barrier of entry you are constantly having to run faster than an influx of fresh energetic high school dropouts and boot camp graduates.
With less fashionable language that require significant expertise and experience in picking them up like C (understanding the hardware level) and Java (understanding the JVM and OOP concepts) the barriers of entry are much higher and this will mean you have to outrun fewer people in the long run to survive.
I am pretty sure that you can programm java without knowing details about the JVM and I would think, that most java programmers do exactly this. I think only in high performance scenarios knowing more is beneficial?
But I have not touched java in a long time .. as I have indeed choosen the web as plattform.
But I don't feel threatened by the high school kids coming from boot camps.
Edit:
I know what a pointer is, so I can work closely with wasm libaries.
I know algorithms and how to structure data and why I am structuring data this way in this case, so I can adopt in another case.
I know how to achieve performant simple code.
I know how to debug layers of code with sideeffects over sideeffects. Raceconditions, memory leaks, etc. (All a thing in js, too). Using and understanding the profiler etc.
Someone coming from a coding bootcamp, does not know this. He or she might learn it after years of practice, which is allright by me - but they are no direct threat to me, despite that I don't even really know react for example.
not feeling threatened doesn't mean you're not under threat.
It's entirely possible that between your skill level and those boot campers is a few(dozen) percents of workforce. But at the same time it's entirely possible that if you are not as quickly progressing as the growth of the industry, you could become a part of the same percentile as bootcampers in no time.
It's not only about performance, it's also about maintainability. Codebases written by inexperienced programmers are extremely convoluted, nothing is decoupled and functions are extremely long and do multiple things. Extremely hard code to maintain or add features to.
A lot of the Java programmers I know professionally know fuck all about JVM internals, etc. Its largely unnecessary unless you have to chase down some extremely subtle bug most of the time.
A lot of them are senior or principal product engineers at companies you will have heard of.
Whereas with C, its extremely necessary to get into the weeds - otherwise your code just crashes or suffers some memory corruption issue, race condition, etc etc.
> I am pretty sure that you can programm java without knowing details about the JVM
yeah that was the whole point of object oriented programming and Java to begin with. You don't need to know the details of the underlying implementation, focus on the problem you're trying to solve.
"You don't need to kill a chasing bear to survive, you just need to run faster than your friend."
Problem with this approach is you run out of friends quick. People in bear country cary bear spray, have dogs to scare off bears and electric fences to keep them out.
We have tools and culture to not have to deal with/rely on survival of the fittest if we don't let fear control us - whether at work or in nature.
