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.
So far one of the best use cases for AI in software engineering has been identifying idiots and sociopaths.
- can AI replace the job of a real programmer, or a team of software engineers? Probably not for a long time.
- can manager abuse the fantasy that they could get rid of those pesky engineers that dare telling them something is impossible? Yes totally. If they believe adding an AI tool to a team justifies a 200% increase in productivity. Some managers will fire people against all metrics and evidence. Calling that move a success. Same occurred when they try to outsource code to cheaper teams.
“AI” is just another productivity tool, copilot let’s you remove some of the tedious patterned work you do, like writing all those asserts in Unit tests, it’s decent at guessing html structures too.
So basically it makes a developer faster, but then so do stuff like a good IDE, good plugins for your workflow, etc.
i saw somewhere an interesting take, even if AI could generate all the code for all the edge cases, you’d still need people to translate what business wants for the AI to understand properly.
Writing code is already a small part of a developers job, completely eliminating it won’t eliminate a developers job.
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.
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.
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.
Every business’s biggest expense is labor. Skilled labor costs more. The people in charge like it when you save money.
I think it’s wrong. But only because the interests of the people who own the machines and businesses diverge from the worker’s interests. I’d like to see more worker cooperatives. If the workers own the machines, then it’s good when things are automated.
I also don’t believe anything will ever be truly automated, or that it’s a good idea to try.
All that to say we don’t have to resort to an explanation of “managers must hate engineers” to understand why they would want to eliminate positions.
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.
It was a fancy lie about their spare time, but especially in dotcom, there IS no spare time to learn architecture.
What I’ve seen of dev AND ops is that their knowledge is focused well on their own things. And when it comes to the other half of devops they just want the shortest path back to doing their thing. This has caused absolute princess devs to be nearly screaming about the hassle of security and change control and infrastructure and proper code deployment and testing and … Well, a lot of things.
It doesn’t pay to have people learning to half-ass dev because ops is your thing. You need advocacy on both sides of that line, still.
And DBAs. I’m currently working on a project where I said from the very start, I can set up this DB in k8s and I can get it to work decently, but I have neither the knowledge nor the time to get it right. Please give me someone who knows how this works.
No, don’t worry, it’ll be fine, we don’t need that, this kuverneles thing I keep hearing about handles that!!!
Six months of hard contact with the enemy on production later:
Well, we’re currently looking for someone who actually knows how DBs work, because we have one of those issues that would cost a proper DBA 5min and me 5 months.
I feel like there is a lost art of DBAs, where in their mystical knowledge rests how to make perfect cheap and scalable databases, and business cast them away because “Why not pay Google twice that amount?”
“Don’t worry the salesman told me I would not need an infra team anymore ! Also do you know what is a vpc ?”
Oh don’t worry, you can just pay <<cloud provider>> 30x what you were your infra team before, or if that’s too expensive just pay a consulting form 10x what you would have before. Then they can go dine on steaks while they have the same infra guy you had hired before doing the same stuff just now in “teh cloud”, but making less money
Salesforce advertised “No more developers” for awhile in the mid 2010s. It was great fun trying to clean up the mess all the “not programmers” made of those systems. I really hate Salesforce. They must have some of the best sales people on the planet.
And now job boards are full of ads for ‘salesforce developers’ that pay ridiculous amounts because nobody really wants to work on salesforce.
I know I’ve chosen to take lower paid jobs rather than work on Salesforce.
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.
