Hi, this is a question that popped into my mind when i saw an article about some AWS engineer talking about ai assistants taking over the job of programmers, this reminded me that it’s not the first time that something like this was said.
My software engineering teacher once told me that a few years ago people believed graphical tools like enterprise architect would make it so that a single engineer could just draw a pretty UML diagram and generate 90% of the project without touching any code,
And further back COBOL was supposed to replace programmers by letting accountants write their own programs.
Now i’m curious, were there many other technologies that were supposedly going to replace programmers that you remember?
i hope someone that’s been around much more than me knows something more or has some funny stories to share
Oracle has a product called Oracle Policy Automation (OPA) that it sells as “you can write the rules in plain English in MS Word documents, you don’t need developers”. I worked for an insurance organization where the business side bought OPA without consulting IT, hoping they wouldn’t have to deal with developers. It totally failed because it doesn’t matter that they get to write “plain English” in Word documents. They still lack the structured, formal thinking to deal with anything except the happiest of happy paths.
The important difference between a developer and a non-developer isn’t the ability to understand the syntax of a programming language. It’s the willingness and ability to formalize and crystallize requirements and think about all the edge cases. As an architect/programmer when I talk to the business side, they get bored and lose interest from all my questions about what they actually want.
Edge cases are for teams that have internal testing AND care about quality.
A quick easy way to know if your new job is or isn’t one of those, is when you open a 3 year project and find no unit tests.
It’s happened a few times in my career where people tell me I’ll be obsolete, but it’s always been some company hyping their new product and suits frothing at the prospect of not having to pay me anymore.
So far they’re like 0 for 8 or so.
Now I will say the goalposts move. What I’m doing now is for sure not what I was doing 10 years ago. I’m definitely heavier in devops and infra than where I was before (ironic because they said we’d never have to worry about that stuff again if we moved to the cloud). AI is still basically machine learning, just in a while loop, so I’ve spent time learning that. So, in a way, yes we’re obsolete in the sense that if I was the same engineer I was 10 years ago I wouldn’t be worth nearly this much, I had to grow and evolve with technology.
DevOps was a lie pushed on devs to make them become sysadmins, unfortunately.
“Don’t worry the salesman told me I would not need an infra team anymore ! Also do you know what is a vpc ?”
@scrubbles
coolbut it’s always been some company hyping their new product and suits frothing at the prospect of not having to pay me anymore
i half expected it, after all it’s what’s happening right now
What I’m doing now is for sure not what I was doing 10 years ago.
that’s right, i guess some aspects of programming have really been made obsolete
Programmers become obsolete when they stop evolving with technology
Was before my time, but iirc C and other (then) high level languages were supposedly able to put programmers out of jobs.
SQL was explicitly designed to allow “normal humans” to query the database. Nowadays even “normal developers” aren’t able to use it properly.
sometimes, it feels like managers hate engineers, and are constantly plotting their replacement. maybe its because it hurts their ego to know that the engineers they manage worked harder to get there and deserve a higher salary.
or else, it could be office politics. anyone who can claim to have removed an entire department from payroll is due a huge raise.
I don’t think it’s just managers saying hey we could automate such and such a thing away. It’s human nature to think “how could I improve this” which almost immediately leads to “if I get this right it could mean no work at all”
that explains why the idea to replace engineers would enter peoples minds, but not why they would try so, so hard to get people to believe it.
sometimes, it feels like managers hate engineers
They hate engineers because the engineers ask difficult questions that somebody needs to answer in order to really automate a process, and they take the time necessary to do so.
