I think there's 2 opposing forces that will affect "us" (rich country engineers) over the coming decade.
1) An absolutely insatiable demand for software as _everything_ needs to be remote friendly and digital.
2) An equally insatiable demand to offshore engineering talent for a fraction of the cost.
I'm not sure which will have a greater effect. Technically, if the demand for software grows faster than the world's ability to educate developers, salaries might actually grow. However, there's a real chance the gold rush of super high California $300k+ software salaries is coming to an end.
Personally, I'm seeing moving into management as more attractive everytime I see an article posted here about remote work. People here are understandably dismissive of this, but it's happened before in a lot of industries.
A: Two thoughts. First, you can leave a foreign country behind in an orderly way. Ask the British Empire, which mostly ended its colonial occupations in an orderly way.
The interviewee says this as though it's common sense, but is it true? The examples that stick out to me are India, Israel/Palestine, and the South African colonies. Can these really be described as safe and orderly withdrawals? What are the examples of successful withdrawals? Are they really that much better than US withdrawal from Vietnam or Afghanistan?
It's no coincidence that the following events seem to coincide
* Distrust of traditional media
* Collapse of local media
* Rise in social media platforms
Traditional media isn't competing with rival newspapers on a stand anymore. It's competing on platforms like facebook, twitter, and reddit. Getting clicks on these platforms is correlated with what drives engagement - usually some cultural outrage or some "out-group mocking". Newspapers are really just catching up to the psychology hacking that social media has already profited from. It's more economics than ideology that enforces this imo.
Frankly, you see this shift on HN as well. Half the time I log on here, at least 2/10 of the top articles are appeals to whatever cultural outrage triggers this site's demographics (let's be honest, this article does that too), and these articles will always have 10x the comments of other on the front page.
I'm a little suprised they're still around tbh. Their competitor in New York, Knotel, straight up went bankrupt and got sold for parts. They must've had a lot more cash to endure this.
Selling short term leases on your own long term leases can probably work in places with expensive office space, but covid in NYC just completely annihilated this. The market rate for their office space now has got to be less than what they owe on their lease.
It's probably been great for the businesses who only had short term leases through them when WFH started though.
Idempotency is a pretty critical concept in system design, and I think most developers have run into issues related to it even if they aren't directly familiar with the term.
To give another simple example as the OP - Suppose you have a product that relies on time series data. For demo purposes you might create a curated data set to present to clients, but the presenter doesn't want to show data from 2019 as the "most recent"
Naturally, you decide to write a script. Do you
A) Write as script that moves the data forward by 1 week explicitly, and simply run this once per week or
B) Write a script that compares the current date to the data and moves it forward as much as it needs
At first glance, these two approaches work the same, but what if (A) triggers twice? What if it runs once every 6 days by mistake? (B) is idempotent however - subsequent executions won't change the state. It's usually impossible to predict all of the ways that software breaks, but designing with idempotency in mind eliminates a lot of them.
1) An absolutely insatiable demand for software as _everything_ needs to be remote friendly and digital.
2) An equally insatiable demand to offshore engineering talent for a fraction of the cost.
I'm not sure which will have a greater effect. Technically, if the demand for software grows faster than the world's ability to educate developers, salaries might actually grow. However, there's a real chance the gold rush of super high California $300k+ software salaries is coming to an end.
Personally, I'm seeing moving into management as more attractive everytime I see an article posted here about remote work. People here are understandably dismissive of this, but it's happened before in a lot of industries.