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
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.
“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
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?”
@scrubbles
cool
i half expected it, after all it’s what’s happening right now
that’s right, i guess some aspects of programming have really been made obsolete
I’d agree that some specifics have been made obsolete. Some habits and routines are currently being ignored or skipped, but the amount of skill that’s gone away is very small.
As mentioned before, we downsized brutally after Y2K. The people most affected were the highest-paid who weren’t the best code-grinders, and these were the documenters, the programme people, and the mentor types. We lost our guides, our structure, and our historians. We’ve been growing again like feral children rebuilding society from the wasteland like it’s Mad Max, and there’s a LOT of the Why that we either don’t know, that we ignore, or that we skip in the interests of (insert manufactured urgency here).
We are re-learning some of the whys, but we haven’t yet seen the half-assedry chickens come home to roost on that. The symptoms are there: Boeing’s Gilligan’s Island in Space, supply-chain sploits in waves, personal information lost weekly, all these things that are clipboard hassles we stopped doing that pelrevent massively expensive things later.
Crowdstrike may die now, mainly because they were marauding leopards we allowed to eat our face. Solarwinds before that, same issue but they seem to be okay. There are dozens of ohShit moments that could lead to similarly preventable problems, that we knew not to do … once.
Well get there again but we’ll be rediscovering a lot of what some techbro will claim is obsolete, old-practice, too-cautious, hand-wringing in our neu and moderne go-hard/break-lives paradigm.
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