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I'm prone to saying my job is to build robots to do my job for me. Any time I can replace my own labor with a robot (script/program), I do so. I won't ever run

by beat 10y ago

I'm prone to saying my job is to build robots to do my job for me. Any time I can replace my own labor with a robot (script/program), I do so. I won't ever run out of work, because software is inherently creative. It's the uncreative jobs that rely on humans as muscle or control mechanisms that are in danger. It's not like humanity has never gone through this before, either. Two centuries ago, 98% of people were employed in farming. Today, it's more like 3% and falling. But it took generations for the robots (farm machinery) to take over. It wasn't as rapid as, say, the rise of self-driving trucks will be.

system16 10y ago
A lot of software development is far from creative. Many company projects involve making versions of X that do Y (Facebook for the enterprise!), or modifying an existing tool to fit a new requirement. A lot of it comes down to putting together existing pieces, and while there aren't a lot of solutions today that can accomplish this effectively without humans, I think it's a bit short-sighted to think there won't be in the future and that just because you are a developer you are exempt from this.
- beat 10y ago
  I've been creating software professionally for over 20 years. The only tools from the start that are still in my toolbox are Unix (now Linux) and SQL. Java didn't even exist when I started, nor did Python or Ruby or JavaScript or even Apache. But my job feels basically the same. It always will, because the problems are always out there at the edge. They're incredibly specific, and often at the bleeding edge of what software can do. Basically, software meets human needs. You need humans to come up with problems to solve, and describe them specifically enough that a computer can be programmed to repeat the solution. So those creative tasks, and the discipline of turning vague human ideas into strict logic, those aren't going anywhere, at least not with the tools we have today, or a reasonable extrapolation of those tools into the future. Programming languages may change, but the existence of programming languages does not. You still need humans to figure out how to say what they really mean. On the other hand, I could spend days or weeks configuring a development server old-school, or I can run 'vagrant up' and have a perfect, repeatable development environment that works on any server. That's the robots. I love the robots.

by beat 10y ago

system16 10y ago

A lot of software development is far from creative. Many company projects involve making versions of X that do Y (Facebook for the enterprise!), or modifying an existing tool to fit a new requirement. A lot of it comes down to putting together existing pieces, and while there aren't a lot of solutions today that can accomplish this effectively without humans, I think it's a bit short-sighted to think there won't be in the future and that just because you are a developer you are exempt from this.

beat 10y ago
I've been creating software professionally for over 20 years. The only tools from the start that are still in my toolbox are Unix (now Linux) and SQL. Java didn't even exist when I started, nor did Python or Ruby or JavaScript or even Apache. But my job feels basically the same. It always will, because the problems are always out there at the edge. They're incredibly specific, and often at the bleeding edge of what software can do. Basically, software meets human needs. You need humans to come up with problems to solve, and describe them specifically enough that a computer can be programmed to repeat the solution. So those creative tasks, and the discipline of turning vague human ideas into strict logic, those aren't going anywhere, at least not with the tools we have today, or a reasonable extrapolation of those tools into the future. Programming languages may change, but the existence of programming languages does not. You still need humans to figure out how to say what they really mean. On the other hand, I could spend days or weeks configuring a development server old-school, or I can run 'vagrant up' and have a perfect, repeatable development environment that works on any server. That's the robots. I love the robots.