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Amazing listening to all of the HN coder apologists here come up with excuses for why they aren't going to lose their jobs, too. If anything, abstraction, ever

Amazing listening to all of the HN coder apologists here come up with excuses for why they aren't going to lose their jobs, too. If anything, abstraction, ever-tighter vendor lock-in, and improvements in static analysis will kill off many coder jobs. There aren't too many jobs out there for recreating basic UNIX tools like sed or grep -- soon, this will be true for higher level tools as well, until what you're doing now at your desk as a coder becomes a "tool" or already exists as a library. It will eventually be like self-driving cars: Not totally automated, but enough to make the job of programming like a modern-day pilot's -- throw it in autopilot, and then step in whenever (rarely) necessary. Then people will realize fewer people are needed to keep watch and step in, and that one person is enough to do the same thing as many people.

origami777 10y ago
I do some coding but not as a full time job. And I have to admit that when I think of AI replacing a coder's job it seems so far off. Maybe it's because I'm in the thick of it and can't see the forest for the trees. When this comes up I often wonder what part is AI going to replace? Will it: 1) Assess a business opportunity, design, and develop, deploy, and operate an entire technology solution? 2) If not that, will it pick up at some part of the value chain above and be able to figure out how to do the rest? It seems more likely to me that the tooling for workers in this value chain will get more advanced. Some of that might include some computer intelligence that is able to perform some tasks on its own.
- Hydraulix989 10y ago
  "WIll it? 1) Assess a business opportunity, design, and develop, deploy, and operate an entire technology solution?" At all of my software engineering jobs, I only ever performed tasks that accomplished what one would consider a small fraction of one list item here -- "develop." So to answer your question, mostly no. You're describing something that an entrepreneur does, not a coder. "2) If not that, will it pick up at some part of the value chain above and be able to figure out how to do the rest?" Yes, the "develop"-ment (deployment is getting automated already -- Chef, Heroku, etc. -- and operate is also largely automated now thanks to things like cloud computing services). Case in point: Why did WhatsApp have so few employees for its billion users? Well, automation made launching a web startup (doing (1), as you described) a much leaner proposition. As you can see, AI is not a necessary condition for automation. I have no reason to believe these trends will reverse course.
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
Sigh. Apologists? Really? Look, people have been declaring the end to programming since it became a profession. Heck, man, Visual Basic was supposed to put us all out of work. Good grief, dude.
- Hydraulix989 10y ago
  There's actually a great underlying point here, to make up for this comment's lackluster delivery thereof. If anything, Visual Basic is a great example of something that ended (a significant part of) programming. I don't know too many people these days writing WIN32 C GUIs any more, thanks to my above-described forces of abstraction. Sure, VB wasn't the best abstraction for graphical user interfaces -- it looks like web was the real winner here, but GUI programming has been "abstracted out" or automated, if you will.
  - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
    That didn't end because of VB. The web has taken over desktop GUI programs because of how lucrative your personal information has become.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- unprepare 10y ago
  so you believe that 0 web development jobs have been lost since the creation of squarespace/wordpress? You believe that not a single datacenter has shuttered its doors since the success of AWS? You think that every single person who was developing game engines for every one off indie game is still doing so after the success of various game engines? Youre being obviously defensive here. Programming as a concept is obviously not going away, but many segments of the industry have already been taken out by automation. >the end to programming since it became a profession Would be as laughably ignorant as declaring the end of manual labor. It will always continue to be done, but its need appears far lesser over time, requiring fewer people fewer hours to do the same tasks. Automation isnt a sign on a door one day that says "shops closed, programmers dont exist anymore" Automation is you slowly taking on more responsibility because technology makes that possible. Automation is the marketing team creating the company's website, because tools like squarespace have made it easy enough for them to do. Thats 1 web development job automated away, there's no pronouncement that we no longer need web developers worldwide, just that for an increasing number of cases, it is unnecessary to hire a specialist.
learc83 10y ago
Did the need for programmers dry up when off the shelf operating systems became mainstream, or when most of us started writing in higher level languages instead of assembly? Software just gets more complex and expands in scope when we can build on top of new abstractions. Each time this has happened we've ended up with more programming jobs not fewer.
- Hydraulix989 10y ago
  Ever heard a coder jokingly call themselves a "professional Googler" or "StackOverflow copy&paster"? Why is it so unreasonable to think that some of these very real "trivialities" can't be automated in some way?
  - learc83 10y ago
    >Ever heard a coder jokingly call themselves a "professional Googler" or "StackOverflow copy&paster"? It's just that--a joke. Any employed programmer who copy and pastes any significant amount of code from stack overflow is doing more harm than good. And googling a problem, looking at examples and modifying them to solve your particular problem is certainly not trivial. When AI can do that for arbitrarily complex problems, we have a lot more to worry about than out of work programmers.

origami777 10y ago

I do some coding but not as a full time job. And I have to admit that when I think of AI replacing a coder's job it seems so far off. Maybe it's because I'm in the thick of it and can't see the forest for the trees. When this comes up I often wonder what part is AI going to replace? Will it: 1) Assess a business opportunity, design, and develop, deploy, and operate an entire technology solution? 2) If not that, will it pick up at some part of the value chain above and be able to figure out how to do the rest? It seems more likely to me that the tooling for workers in this value chain will get more advanced. Some of that might include some computer intelligence that is able to perform some tasks on its own.

Hydraulix989 10y ago
"WIll it? 1) Assess a business opportunity, design, and develop, deploy, and operate an entire technology solution?" At all of my software engineering jobs, I only ever performed tasks that accomplished what one would consider a small fraction of one list item here -- "develop." So to answer your question, mostly no. You're describing something that an entrepreneur does, not a coder. "2) If not that, will it pick up at some part of the value chain above and be able to figure out how to do the rest?" Yes, the "develop"-ment (deployment is getting automated already -- Chef, Heroku, etc. -- and operate is also largely automated now thanks to things like cloud computing services). Case in point: Why did WhatsApp have so few employees for its billion users? Well, automation made launching a web startup (doing (1), as you described) a much leaner proposition. As you can see, AI is not a necessary condition for automation. I have no reason to believe these trends will reverse course.

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

Sigh. Apologists? Really? Look, people have been declaring the end to programming since it became a profession. Heck, man, Visual Basic was supposed to put us all out of work. Good grief, dude.

Hydraulix989 10y ago
There's actually a great underlying point here, to make up for this comment's lackluster delivery thereof. If anything, Visual Basic is a great example of something that ended (a significant part of) programming. I don't know too many people these days writing WIN32 C GUIs any more, thanks to my above-described forces of abstraction. Sure, VB wasn't the best abstraction for graphical user interfaces -- it looks like web was the real winner here, but GUI programming has been "abstracted out" or automated, if you will.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  That didn't end because of VB. The web has taken over desktop GUI programs because of how lucrative your personal information has become.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
unprepare 10y ago
so you believe that 0 web development jobs have been lost since the creation of squarespace/wordpress? You believe that not a single datacenter has shuttered its doors since the success of AWS? You think that every single person who was developing game engines for every one off indie game is still doing so after the success of various game engines? Youre being obviously defensive here. Programming as a concept is obviously not going away, but many segments of the industry have already been taken out by automation. >the end to programming since it became a profession Would be as laughably ignorant as declaring the end of manual labor. It will always continue to be done, but its need appears far lesser over time, requiring fewer people fewer hours to do the same tasks. Automation isnt a sign on a door one day that says "shops closed, programmers dont exist anymore" Automation is you slowly taking on more responsibility because technology makes that possible. Automation is the marketing team creating the company's website, because tools like squarespace have made it easy enough for them to do. Thats 1 web development job automated away, there's no pronouncement that we no longer need web developers worldwide, just that for an increasing number of cases, it is unnecessary to hire a specialist.

learc83 10y ago

Did the need for programmers dry up when off the shelf operating systems became mainstream, or when most of us started writing in higher level languages instead of assembly? Software just gets more complex and expands in scope when we can build on top of new abstractions. Each time this has happened we've ended up with more programming jobs not fewer.

Hydraulix989 10y ago
Ever heard a coder jokingly call themselves a "professional Googler" or "StackOverflow copy&paster"? Why is it so unreasonable to think that some of these very real "trivialities" can't be automated in some way?
- learc83 10y ago
  >Ever heard a coder jokingly call themselves a "professional Googler" or "StackOverflow copy&paster"? It's just that--a joke. Any employed programmer who copy and pastes any significant amount of code from stack overflow is doing more harm than good. And googling a problem, looking at examples and modifying them to solve your particular problem is certainly not trivial. When AI can do that for arbitrarily complex problems, we have a lot more to worry about than out of work programmers.