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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
by 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 agoI'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.