Meh I dislike Musk as well but I don’t let that cloud my judgement of his companies or science/engineering in general.

Right because innovation materializes itself when we want … We just flicked our fingers and airplane, cellphone and others just appeared.

Who are you to tell what we should or should not pursue?

Isn’t there space for both? Why not try multiple avenues? Why have this negative view on everything? Wouldn’t you say the airplane and the car have tremendously improved humanity, even with all its downsides? Or the cellphone?

I bet at the time of their inventions you would be opposing it because “billionaires are bad and this industry is going to explore the working class”. Guess what? Yes billionaires are bad and explore people and you (all of us) should be fighting against that, not against scientific and engineering inovation.

You seem to be letting your hatred for Musk confuse you about space exploration. NASA and other governmental agencies do very important work when it comes to space exploration

Is this sub-populated mostly by Facebook people? Some of the answers really feel like it.

• You will spend your entire career chasing trends.

Depends on the language, that’s mostly a JavaScript/typescript issue.

• The market is volatile. People are constantly getting abruptly laid off. SD has never been very stable, so you should plan on getting a new job every few years.

Depends on the country, where I’m from there has been very few layoffs.

• Software companies are constantly looking for ways to make SD easier. As a result, your value will decrease over time, in preference for bootcampers and 2 year degree graduates.

Not sure what to say, I haven’t felt my value decrease. All I see are bubbles saying they will replace me… and then they burst.

Nobody listens to developers. Your manager’s beliefs about SD come entirely from consultants, magazines, and Elon Musk tweets.

Agree but that’s more of an engineering wide problem, specially when you get managers with very few engineering experience. Take the Apollo landings as an opposite example: great managers that were great engineers.

• Nobody cares about quality software. If you take the time to make your code efficient and lightweight, all your manager sees is you taking longer to make something than your peers. After all, we can just raise hardware requirements if the software is slow.

This is a bit too generic to argue against. You can get that in electrical engineering no? If you take more time designing that PCB because you want to better place the components to improve heat dissipation, will your manager care in the end?