Jane book’s first night to the future

This morning on Zhihu, I saw myself concerned about a question: will programmers still have today’s income ten years later? There’s a new anonymous answer, and it’s not the most popular answer, but there’s one sentence in it

I mean, do you really think programmers are worth coding software? It’s just part of the day job. The core value is problem solving

It made me think about the value and future of programmers.

Problems in nature

First, back to the problem itself

  • Will programmers make what they do today ten years from now?

If today’s income representative were worth more, the question could be asked the same way:

  • Will programmers be worth as much ten years from now?

Ten years can be replaced by the future to a certain extent, then we will carry out the equivalent transformation of the question:

  • Will programmers be as valuable in the future as they are now?

In today’s society, being valuable is actually a synonym for being valuable.

  • Will programmers ever be as valuable as they are now?

This transformation makes it clear that the real question is about the future value of programmers.

So, let’s do it step by step.

The nature of value

The value of a person lies in what kind of valuable problems he can solve. The more valuable the problem he can solve, the more valuable he is, the more valuable he is. So evaluating a person’s worth is really about the value of the problems he can solve.

However, as society progresses and times develop, the problems and values of each social stage are changing all the time. For example, in Edison’s time when everyone used kerosene lamps, a pollution-free and safe electric light bulb was a great invention that changed the world at that time. Edison solved the problem of lighting the world’s people, how valuable Edison is that goes without saying. Now, you go out on the street and tell people you can make a light bulb, and you can make it better than Edison. People will think you are out of your mind, and may give you 50 cents as a beggar. You can make a light bulb in this day and age is worth 50 cents, or people see you pity you give you.

So, whoever can solve the most valuable problems in society today is the most valuable person.

The nature of the programmer and the nature of the programmer’s value

Programmer before 20th century industry of the biggest obstacles is the problem that high performance diode, however, with the continuous development of high performance chip, hardware becomes more and more small volume, but performance is more and more high, so the mobile phone and the computer industry is developing rapidly, every mobile phone, every family has a computer, the largest of the birth of giant is Microsoft and APPLE, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are also solving the world’s biggest problems, one led the development of the PC era, the other led the development of the mobile era. In today’s society, it’s not too much to say that they are the most valuable people, worthy of the richest people in the world, they should be. They came from the ranks of small programmers, and they were among the most valuable programmers of their time.

With the rapid popularization of PC and mobile phone, the Internet era has come. The world has become flat, and the changes in the generation and speed of information flow are simply breathtaking. As a programmer living on the Internet, you can make a website or app that can be seen and downloaded by people all over the country or even the world. Think about it, can such a person be worthless? We live in such an Internet age, so the value of our programmers is indisputable, and that’s where the high salaries of programmers come from.

However, with the development of the open source community, the threshold of technology is getting lower and lower. After a few months of training, you can get a high salary and enter BAT. It can’t be ignored that now there are a lot of programmers on the street, almost everyone can “make light bulbs”, so the value of those programmers naturally decreases. As an Android developer, I feel that the value of mobile developers is far less than it was a few years ago.

So, given the decades of computer and Internet history, the definition of programmer should refer to people who use computer technology or Internet technology. The personages of the PC Internet era are Bill Gates and his people, the personages of the mobile Internet era are Steve Jobs and his people, and mobile app developers like us.

Each era becomes the work that drives the development of the era. What does not change is the name of our programmers.

The future value of programmers

Is the presence of the era of mobile Internet gradually in the past, stable, mature market has also been gradually subsidence, as programmers, such as: the current age of Android development, the value of the iOS development programmers are slowly become low, its essence is not our grasp of the technology have no value, but we can solve the problem of lower in value, this is the essence.

Going back to the question at the beginning of this article, will programmers make what they do today ten years from now? I would say yes, it will, because the term programmer is a general term, programmer is a group of people who use computer technology and Internet technology to change the world, as long as the computer and the Internet is not outdated, that programmer will never be unemployed, the difference is ten years later your time what is the question of value? Can we still solve it with the technology we have today? If not, I can only say that you are a programmer, but you are an outdated programmer of the future era, you no longer have the capital to compete with contemporary programmers, and certainly not with their income.

So how can you make yourself valuable in the future as a programmer? What I want to say is that you have to always follow the changes of valuable problems in the current Internet era. Computers and Internet technology are only tools, not decisive factors.

conclusion

Era in the development, the problem of each stage society is changing, so for those of us who use computer and Internet technology to solve the problem of the requirements of the people are also changing, not the same thing, only to the development of the society, the problem of the shift, timely adjust oneself, can let oneself constantly in an impregnable position!