TECHIES: Easier technoligies result in lower salaries?

[Descartes]

I'm a senior developer for a local firm, and with that comes the responsibility of evaluating new methodologies, techniques, technologies, etc.. I often hear things like, "Why can company X do this for N dollars less?", and am often very frustrated by it. With the advent of MS' .NET, development is (ostensibly) simpler for the Windows environment. Albeit, we're not quite to the point where marketing folks could build a distributed application that servers 10,000 concurrent users whilst serving up content to a diverse number of platforms.

For every MS conference I go to concerning .NET, I get the very disconcerting feeling that there's going to be a serious infestation of unqualified developers, and that this will hurt my market value. Management doesn't care if a developer likes to build systems w/ naming conventions like "printIt" and "addIt" (I used this example because I observed this recently), they only care about cost cutting. Throw investors into the mix, and you've got a volatile situation for a quality developer making a nice salary.

Opinions?

Btw, aside from my anticipation of the future, I'm very much a .NET advocate, and most certainly will (and am currently) leverage the platform for my future needs.

[edit]spelling[/edit]

 

[StormRider]

If you ever watched Star Trek you would know that in the future, Computer Science jobs are going to be the equivalent of working in McDonalds. Why? Have you ever seen a Star Trek tech "program" a computer?

It goes something like this:

Tech: "Computer, have there been any anomolies that might explain the explosion on deck 5?"

Computer: "There are several anomolies in system parameters that might result in an explosion on deck 5 within the past 24 hours"

Tech: "Sort these anomolies and give me the 3 anomolies with the highest probability of being the cause of the explosion".

Later on the Captain praises the Tech for a job well done.

But let's face it. Any moron could have done what the tech did. All he did was ask the computer for the answer.

And in the same way, we now have great development environments (FrontPage, Delphi, Borland C++ Builder) that make it really easy to do complicated stuff with hardly any effort. In essence, computer scientists/programmers are shooting themselves in the foot. In the future, people will think it's so easy to do computer science stuff that it will be equivalent to having a McDonalds type job in terms of prestige.

Discuss...

 

[Descartes]

Woah there...

Someone still has to write the software to facilitate the level of functional AI for any given system. You can never get away from software, until we get to a point where evolutionary algorithms are just that (but, still, someone has to develop the catalyst).

C++ is hardly easy, and although you can use a wizard to probably spit out a single document interface in a few minutes, it won't do much. Delphi still requires in depth programming knowledge, and I don't see any development neophytes tackling that.



<< In the future, people will think it's so easy to do computer science stuff that it will be equivalent to having a McDonalds type job in terms of prestige. >>



I think this is the problem, and we're already experiencing this now. There are so many people that think they're knowledgeable, skilled, etc., but yet they're about as lucid in terms of comp sci as my dead hampster is in the internet. CASE tools have been around for how long? These will replace the programmer they said? Code generating tools have also been around forever, even ones that allow your average idiot to orchestrate systems interfaces to homogeneous data sources, but yet.... they're hardly used. Why? No matter how you look at it, you'll always need software developers. Someone has to build the software so the average idiot can interface with the system.

 

[ratkil]

Well for pete's sake Stormbringer, why don't you come over and kick my dog also, friggin spoil sport..... ;-)

 

[atom]

It's a far fetch to say CS jobs will be the equivalent of working at McDonalds. Take a look at Engineers. They have advanced $100,000 programs at their disposal to assist them in modeling and testing their designs, be it aerospace, electrical, civil, etc. Is any random geek off the street with this program going to be able to design a skyscraper, or the next AMD processor design? Hardly.

 

[HardcoreRobot]

It may be becoming easier and easier to USE technology (ex develop web pages in frontpage), but you are still going to need educated people to create it.