Magic Innovation
Yet another thing I saw at proggit: Jason Kester writes about how using too much magic in your software is bad, i.e. frameworks that abstract much of the dirty details and make software development easier.
Now, wether you use tons of framework or still write all your SQL yourself is your choice, but this got me thinking about something I read somewhere recently - shortage of new hires in the job market can cause innovation. I’m sure you didn’t see that one coming, so let me explain.
The core of this idea is simple - there is still lots of work to be done, even if (or perhaps especially if) it’s difficult to find new employees. Thus, innovation comes out of necessity: if the workload doesn’t diminish, and you can’t find new employees, you’ll have to innovate to make work more efficient, as to increase the work each employee can do. Apparently, this happened in Sweden around the time Ericsson was built up. Is this what is happening in software development now? I don’t know.
What I do know is that software development is here to stay, and there will probably be a lot more of it in the future. Without “magic” we’ll still be writing our own SQL statements for every single little query 10 years from now, and that’s just not efficient work.
No magic? I say more magic.