articles with this identical thesis and conclusion have been published from time to time for the past 25 years. i started coding in the early 1980's and began

articles with this identical thesis and conclusion have been published from time to time for the past 25 years. i started coding in the early 1980's and began coding professionally just after graduating from MIT in 1992. The "guidance counselor" at my high school recommended that i major in something other than computer science because he has read several thoughtful pieces that suggested the job of professional programmer would become "extinct" not because programming wasn't important but because it was too important (to leave to programmers)--sort of like the way many companies 50 years ago had large "typing pools"; these are gone because everyone can type. looking across the span of my career so far, it seems these predictions are correct, in a horizon sense--ie, we've reached this distance line we pointed to 20 years ago, but there's no horizon there, it's still far in the distance. here's what i mean: in 1992, my first job involved writing small extensions to numerical libraries, in C and FORTRAN. Probably 90 percent (if anything it was higher) of my time was spent "managing memory"--allocating it, deallocating it, pointing to it, etc. now, the time i spend on those sorts of tasks is de minimis. So the march of technology never took away my job (the only job i have ever wanted to do) but it did take away 90% of it. With 90% of my former tasks now handled elsewhere, far more interesting and challenging tasks have taken their place. this is the trend i see--not the one-sided (or perhaps short-sited) trend described in the Wired post--but a continuous iteration of the programmer's work characterized by swapping well-characterized, routinized tasks for more challenging ones, most of which are would take some thought to foresee.