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The premise that we are on the verge of some breakthroughs in software development that will significantly reduce the need for engineers is really weak, and is

The premise that we are on the verge of some breakthroughs in software development that will significantly reduce the need for engineers is really weak, and is something people have been saying for decades (see the failed fifth generation of programming languages from the 1980s for an example). In my experience, software engineering is endless, complicated decision making about how something should work and how to make changes without breaking something else rather than the nuts and bolts of programming. It’s all about figuring out what users want and how to give it to them in a way that is feasible. The idea that we will have some abstraction that will someday (in the foreseeable future) save us from all of this difficult work sounds very far fetched to me, and I can’t imagine how that would work. Even the example of hosting complexity being replaced by cloud companies seems kind of silly to me. Maybe that’s saving very small companies a sizable fraction of their engineering resources, but I really doubt it for medium or larger companies. The cloud saves us from some complexity, but it doesn’t just magically design and run a backend for your application. You still need people who understand things like docker, kubernetes, endless different database options, sharding, indexing, failover, backup, message queues, etc. Even if the pieces are now more integrated and easier to put together, the task of figuring out how the pieces will interact and what pieces you even need is still outrageously complicated.

zxcb1 6y ago
It is easier to understand code and its consequences than human language; hypotheses are testable and verifiable. It helps to think of coding as a form of game. Open source, and Github specifically, can be mined and reused like any other knowledge; pay attention to Microsoft and OpenAI going forward.
- GoblinSlayer 6y ago
  It's easier to understand language on a syntactical level, the program itself is turing complete and we don't even have a decent automatic verification tool.
Random_ernest 6y ago
> Even the example of hosting complexity being replaced by cloud companies seems kind of silly to me. Maybe that’s saving very small companies a sizable fraction of their engineering resources, but I really doubt it for medium or larger companies. This might even lead to an _increase_ in demand for software engineering, since now small companies can write their own custom software cheaper and more reliable. It's called Jevons paradox.
- donw 6y ago
  TIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox "In economics, the Jevons Paradox occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand." Only tangentially related to the thread: I'm struggling to think of how government policy might increase the efficiency with which a resource is used, other than by not existing in the first place. So, an ask: any historical examples where government policy other than deregulation has increased the efficiency with which a resource is used?
  - saberdancer 6y ago
    Not an expert, but I think this qualifies. Government policy to improve energy efficiency (government grants to improve factory production efficiency) can lead to increase in total energy use as the factory is more profitable with better efficiency. EU does have programs to improve efficiency in this manner.
    - donw 6y ago
      I suppose that would make sense if the government was solving a coordination problem? E.g., no manufacturer will install Oliver's Optimizer, which promises a lifetime 10% savings in energy use, because it would force them to shut down operations for a month while the optimizer is installed, and put them at a disadvantage compared to other manufacturers. By requiring the Optimizer (or equivalent) as a licensing requirement for factory operation, all manufacturers share the same burden, and thus suffer no relative disadvantage. Is that the general idea? I'd be worried about regulatory capture in this case -- e.g., Oliver lobbying to force the market to install his Optimizer -- but that's an entirely different discussion. :)
goatinaboat 6y ago
The idea that we will have some abstraction that will someday (in the foreseeable future) save us from all of this difficult work sounds very far fetched to me, and I can’t imagine how that would work. We actually can imagine how a natural-language driven "black box" that translates it into code works: it's called offshore software development. The conclusion that everyone eventually reaches, having experienced varying levels of pain first depending on how quickly they learn, is that writing a spec detailed enough to make that work is as much or more work than just writing the code yourself!
ilaksh 6y ago
> (failed fifth generation of programming) Take a look at AirTable and IFTTT/Zapier. Its not going to save us from all of the work, but it does eliminate a lot of redundant work. For sure. > Even the example of hosting complexity being replaced by cloud companies seems kind of silly to me. Maybe that’s saving very small companies a sizable fraction of their engineering resources, but I really doubt it for medium or larger companies. I think that hundreds of billions of dollars has been spent moving from localized IT to cloud. Do you really believe that was all a waste of money? For example, most of those medium or large companies had their own operations software backends, and most of it was eaten by clouds services/APIs. > You still need people who understand things like docker, kubernetes, endless different database options, sharding, indexing, failover, backup, message queues, etc. Even if the pieces are now more integrated and easier to put together, the task of figuring out how the pieces will interact and what pieces you even need is still outrageously complicated. Docker/K8s is a good example. I spent more than a year building a Docker orchestration/hosting startup (eventually decided not to try to compete as an individual with Amazon). But when I recently needed a reliable way to host a new application and database, I did not have to configure Docker or K8s at all. Why? Because I used AWS Lambda and RDS. Those are examples of software eating software. AWS can handle all of the containers for you if you do it that way. As far as failover and backup, that was handled by checkboxes in RDS. I did not need a message queue because that was built into the Lambda event injection service.
- quonn 6y ago
  > Because I used AWS Lambda and RDS. Just like people put some PHP scripts on fully hosted Apache+MySQL 20 years ago. This was very common and far easier than AWS. (And reliable, too, although not as scalable, but the needs then were different). The point being that all of this has been here before. Every few years some complexity creeps back in (in exchange for some other benefits) and then it‘s eliminated again and some progress is made. But works always expands. Recently I helped a friend who is a teacher with her Excel sheets to do grade reports. Pretty well done for Excel, yet it was a terrible user experience. Even if there are only 1000 users, working with this 1 hour per month, a proper custom made software would have been better and easily economically viable. Even no-code has existed for a long time, but it never fits perfectly. Similarly, people regularly complain about just glueing components together. As opposed to what? Copying sorting algorithms right out of a CS class? It‘s a strange idea. Looking at the code I work with, over the years, I find very little glue. True, there are abstractions and sometimes they get in the way. But they are there for a reason. Whether you start out from scratch or use frameworks, much of the application will revolve around business-related data structures. You can give it a try: Take your real-world product, strip out the abstractions, replace the built-in UI widgets, sorting routines, hash tables of your language and maybe that OR-Mapper and your GraphQL-server framework and so on with your custom code and something minimalistic. It won‘t take that much time and code and compared to the stuff on top you‘ll find it‘s not that much that you actually used in the end. Nothing to glue together anymore. Not that it makes sense to do this. But the idea that glueing things together has replaced „real“ development is very much mistaken.
JSavageOne 6y ago
> You still need people who understand things like docker, kubernetes, endless different database options, sharding, indexing, failover, backup, message queues, etc. Large companies at significant scale need to know these things. Smaller companies don't need kubernetes, message queues, or anything beyond a simple standard off-the-shelf setup. I'm guessing the author was referring more to small/mid-sized companies that aren't at FAANG-scale and have no need for that complexity.
- bavell 6y ago
  As a counter-point, I run a one-man tech business and use kubernetes to run some 60+ application and db servers. I don't have time to babysit each application I'm running and kubernetes is a force mutliplier that I rely on heavily. There is a cost to managing it but even so, without the automation it provides I simply wouldn't have the capacity to do what I do.
  - JSavageOne 6y ago
    Interesting, though the fact that you're managing that many servers as a one-man show is a testament to the author's point.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
hinkley 6y ago
I spend a lot of time thinking about how to make development easier, or at least less error prone. Every once in a while I have a moment of clarity. I remember that the other part of our job is extracting requirements out of people who don't really understand computers, even the ones who are ostensibly paid to do so (and if we're honest, about 20% of our fellow programmers). The more you talk to them the more you realize they don't really understand themselves either. which is why shadowing works. If building the software gets too easy, we'll just spend all of our time doing the gathering part of the job. And then I will do just about anything to forget that thought and go back to thinking about less horrific concepts.
- panta 6y ago
  It’s even stronger than that: the other part of the job is extracting requirements from people who don’t understand the problem they want to solve - even when the problem is not technological. There is no silver bullet (AGI would be it, but we are far from achieving it imho).
  - brodo 6y ago
    Exactly. Most of the time, the problem is not to find out what people want and put it into software. The problem is to help people in the process of discovering what they want and what can be done. After that, development can begin.
    - ben_w 6y ago
      A truth that I wish I had known before I graduated.
    - groestl 6y ago
      > After that, development can begin. And trigger another cycle, as (successful) software inevitably changes the way people understand their own problem.
  - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
    AGI would negotiate salary higher than all people it replaced, though.
amasad 6y ago
I disagree with the author that it will be "no code." But I would also not dismiss how much more productive the cloud and better devtools has made developers. And as much as people, especially on HN, like to pick on bootcamp graduates, it's undeniable that you can get someone with no to little experience building complicated software in a matter of month. What I think will happen to software engineering is that the middle will shrink. We'll see many more frontend and product engineers, and slightly more infra and systems programmer. I think the fullstack, middleware rails/django type engineering will all but disappear (most will move towards product).
- LouisSayers 6y ago
  >it's undeniable that you can get someone with no to little experience building complicated software in a matter of month. Yeah, and who do you think comes along and cleans up their mess, extends and maintains that software once your cowboy coders are gone? We might be more productive, but only to a certain point. The complexity comes when people want to twist and bend the off the shelf solutions in ways they weren't designed for, and when systems become so large and complex that adding just one more feature takes a significant amount of time. This is what differentiates your low cost bootcamp grads from highly paid software engineers. Experienced engineers aren't just building for today, but for the future. I don't buy that fullstack devs are going anywhere. The real world is complex, the devil is in the details and the complexity of those details can't simply be chucked into an off-the-shelf solution and be expected to survive. We'll still have to have people that glue all the pieces together, we'll still have to name and compose things, to make modifications and optimisations, to maintain existing products, and we'll need people that push the boundaries of what's been done before and explore the new.
  - barry-cotter 6y ago
    > Yeah, and who do you think comes along and cleans up their mess, extends and maintains that software once your cowboy coders are gone? Sometimes someone with a CS or SE degree, sometimes someone who learned to program as a hobby while doing something completely irrelevant like Music, English, bar tending or high school and sometimes the cowboy coders themselves with more experience. There’s an enormous amount of theory in programming which is highly relevant to many, many people but you can be amazing at CS theory and write scientific code that’s garbage, uncommented spaghetti like the Imperial epidemiology model. At the other end you can have a great grasp of how to write clean, modular, well commented code and have no idea how you would start parsing a text file to extract all nouns or some other introductory undergraduate project for one of the infinitude of topics in CS.
wolframhempel 6y ago
I think the real change is the rising threshold between commodity software and specialised solutions. When I started my career more than a decade ago, I built handmade static websites and online shops for small and medium shops. Today these are commodity software, easily served by Squarespace/Wix/Shopify etc. At the same time, when I started, Basecamp was amongst the top SaaS solutions on the planet. Today, its simple form based approach wouldn't cut mustard with consumers accustomed to instant feedback, realtime collaboration and behind the scenes saving. This is especially apparent in the games industry. Early games like Doom or Wolfenstein were often developed by less than five people. Today's open world titles like AC Odyssey or Cyberpunk 2077 require 100 times as many people.
- dijit 6y ago
  I work in the games industry and I want to ride your sentiment a little; it's not 100 times, it's more like 200 times. It was >1,000 artists, designers, programmers and sound engineers to make each entry in the series of games I worked on.
  - spyke112 6y ago
    And it has become really frustrating to be forced to sit through the credits at the end of a AAA game, it just seems to keep going forever these days!
lemiffe 6y ago
I second those thoughts. When I was 10 years old I started coding in Qbasic, a few years later I told my dad I wanted to be a programmer when I grew up, he told me that it would likely be automated soon (as had happened with his industry, electronic engineering) and I'd be struggling to find a job. 23 years later and the demand still seems to be rising. I'd say we're still quite far from such level of abstraction; but a certain degree of it is already possible as you say... k8s/docker/kafka/glue/databricks/redshift, all of these technologies mesh together "seamlessly", but more problems arise as a result. The problems we must tackle just shift elsewhere.
- isolli 6y ago
  I distinctly remember talking to programmers at a job fair in the mid-80s who warned me that there was not much future in programming.
- dave84 6y ago
  What level of automation happened in electronic engineering?
- xtracto 6y ago
  And when UML started getting in vogue in the mid 90s a lot of people said that "intelligent code generators" would automate a large amount of programming. It did not happen the way people predicted, but it has somehow happened in the form of Angular, Ionic, Express, Ruby-on-Rails and similar frameworks: More and more programming means "writing glue code", being it to glue Machine Learning libraries (yay, ML developer!), HTTP libraries (yay, Web developer!), AMQP/SQL/NoSQL (yay, backend developer!) or even OpenGL/DirectX/SDL (yay, game developer!). The fact is, as more and more of these abstraction libraries are created, "programming" will go one level of abstraction up, but still need people to do it.
  - lonelappde 6y ago
    In 2002 the inventor of Microsoft Office (Charles Simonyi) took his $billions and left to create a company to replace programming with an Office-like app. In 2017 the company (Intentional) was acquihired back into MS after failing to generate a profit or popular product.
0xfaded 6y ago
I have to admit that as a technical person it's easy to ignore the tools which are being built for non technical people. A non-technical is currently building a wordpress site for me that is better than what I would have thrown together as css/html.
- wolco 6y ago
  They sound like a tech. Wordpress is powerful and is made up of more than css/html.
  - 0xfaded 6y ago
    Check out elementor
osdiab 6y ago
Eh, I also think a lot of people overengineer things that are made simple with recent technology and that in fact most companies don't need the best engineers to get their job done. I think it's totally true that one can leverage new tools to get more work done with less people, especially when it's for a service that doesn't reach scale and what not. Most companies don't need that to be lucrative. But I think the space of problems expands, whether that is more fields valuing tech, feasible complexity increasing in others, or competition just ratcheting up by lowering technical barriers to entry.
onion2k 6y ago
The idea that we will have some abstraction that will someday (in the foreseeable future) save us from all of this difficult work sounds very far fetched to me, and I can’t imagine how that would work. The problem here is that word "all". It's never going to be easy to do everything. Some part will be hard. That's where the value lies, and that's what your best people focus on. But everything else will be abstracted away. It's already happened. 30 years ago making a GUI was hard, but VB changed that. Then making a web app was hard, but PHP changed that. Then app layout was hard, and Bootstrap changed that. Then ML was hard, and Torch changed that. Every hard problem gets a 90% working solution that's more than good enough for most companies. There'll always be a few companies that pay people to work in the last 10%, so the problem never really disappears, but fewer and fewer people work on it. The key to keeping growth going in tech is to keep finding new problems, not to keep everyone working on the same old problems.
- wongarsu 6y ago
  Even with just the advances in better programming languages (and newer versions of old languages) and better IDEs we have achieved tremendous productivity increases in the last 30 years. It's just that so far the amount of work has grown to absorb the added productivity. There are some parallels to induced demand in road construction: when you build a new road to ease traffic, traffic increases to use up that capacity. But that isn't a sign that demand is infinite, it's just that demand is limited by the available resources. If you keep building roads, at some point they will become emptier. Similarly, at some point development productivity will outpace demand, and we will start optimizing our own jobs away.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    I'm not convinced. I think new abstractions beget new abstractions. There's so much left to explore in software. Imagine being in the first century of the printing press and imagining that the press is going to put all these poor monks out of business or that there's not much left to explore with writing. Speaking of writing, how much has our word processing technology succeeded in making authors obsolete?
jerome-jh 6y ago
'The premise that we are on the verge of some breakthroughs in software development' There will be breakthroughs in SW development but as with all breakthroughs no one can exactly tell when they will occur, so let's say within the next 40 years. The microelectronics industry has largely moved to automated validation. Some of the ideas have already migrated to SW validation, although progress and adoption is slow. Probably a key idea for automatic SW generation and "no-code" is to realize that a Turing complete language is not required at all times, well most of the times it is even counter productive. Too often SW engineers fail to realize that as well.
holstvoogd 6y ago
Yeah, the whole premise is nonsense imo. I personally think we have not made any significant progress in 20-30 years with regards to development and the number of software developers is still growing at a rate where the majority has probably less than a year experience. So no progress can be made as the industry never matures. The kind of optimism displayed in the article reminds me of my early years as a developer ;)
- JacobiX 6y ago
  In software engineering, languages and tooling the progress is really slow. RAD tools existed for decades, OOP and functional programming paradigms remained largely the same for a very long period of time ... incremental enhancements but not really a breakthrough.
belorn 6y ago
In my experience, for the small companies you have an endless stream of custom jobs that need quick unique solutions. You get the same outrageously complicated work, just with the ability to use more duck tape and one-time solutions. Cloud solution is, with some exceptions to self contained commodity solutions (such as email), about managing costs of spinning up or down hardware. Pay a premium on what you need right now, rather than investing into what you might need tomorrow with the possibility of guessing wrong.
virvar 6y ago
I think there has been a steady reduction in the required IT personal needed to do a lot of things. Need a web-page/web-store? You buy a standard product for almost no money, and you don’t really need anyone to run it for you. 25 years ago that was a several month project that involves a dozen of engineers and had a costly fee attached to after launch support. At the same time we’ve come up with a bunch of new stuff which gave those engineers new jobs. I do see some reduction in office workers by automation. We still haven’t succeeded with getting non coders to do RPA development for their repetitive tasks, but the tools are getting better and better and our workers are getting more and more tech savvy. In a decade every new hire will have had programming in school, like they have had math today. They may not be experts, but they’ll be able to do a lot of the things we still need developers to do, while primary being there to do whatever business logic they do. But I’m not too worried, we moved all of our service to virtual a decade ago and are now moving more and more into places like Azure, and it hasn’t reduced the need for sysops engineers. If anything it’s only increased the requirements for them. In the late 90ies you could hire any computer nerdy kid to operate your servers, and you’d probably be alright, today you’ll want someone who really knows what they are doing within whatever complex setup you have. The same will be true for developers to some extend, but I do think we’ll continue the trend where you’ll need to be actually specialised at something to be really useful. If virtual reality becomes the new smartphone, you’ll have two decades of gold rush there, and that’s not likely to be the last thing that changes our lives with entirely new tech.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  > 25 years ago that was a several month project that involves a dozen of engineers and had a costly fee attached to after launch support. 25 years ago, yes, but white-label hosted web store things were around in the early noughties. I think there were even a few in the late 90s, but those weren't very good.
bhouston 6y ago
I've been around long enough to see these claims over and over again. You and me will be right that this claim again is false, but I think each time developers get more productive, they can do more with less time, and at some point developers will be able to do so much with so little time that we need few of them. So far though, the need for software has continued to grow even as developer productivity has increased, thus there has been no significant employment issues.
ojr 6y ago
contrary to what whiteboard interviews test for, programming is more of an art than science, and computers are generally bad at determining what is good art.
denster 6y ago
"I can't imagine how that would work" -> hearing that kills me inside :( I think we have 2 options: OPTION 1) We've reached a plateau -- software will continue to be developed as it is now, no new abstractions. OPTION 2) Mankind will create a better set of tools to: - reduce the effort needed - increase the # of people who can participate in the translation of ideas/requirements -> software. For everyone's sake [1], I really hope it's the second! :) As one crazy idea, imagine if you could have a spreadsheet that would let you build software instead of crunch numbers... ... anyway, probably a bad idea, we should stick to our current abstractions and tools :D [1] Take the above with 2.42 lbs of salt, I'm the founder of https://mintdata.com https://mintdata.com
austincheney 6y ago
> The premise that we are on the verge of some breakthroughs in software development that will significantly reduce the need for engineers is really weak We are on the brink of economic contraction which is forcing a rethinking for the need of software engineers. The necessary disruption is there. It is economic, not technological. Yes, there will continue to be a need for software engineers, but business expectations will change as budgets will adjust. I suspect fewer developers will be needed moving forward and those developers will be required to directly own decisions and consequences, which has not been the case in most large corporations. > In my experience, software engineering is endless, complicated decision making about how something should work and how to make changes without breaking something else rather than the nuts and bolts of programming. Agreed, but that is not the typical work culture around software development. Thanks to things like Agile and Scrum developers are often isolated from the tactical decisions that impact how they should execute their work, and for good reason. While some seasoned senior developers are comfortable owning and documenting the complex decisions you speak of many are not so comfortable and require precise and highly refined guidance to perform any work. This is attributable to a lack of forced mentoring and mitigated by process.
treespace89 6y ago
I would like to add, automation comes in stages. Some jobs are eliminated, then more, then more. I just don't see any of that happening in software. Yes the tools change, but the number of jobs isn't going down.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
Actually the cloud does just magically design and run a backend for your application. This is what Etsy, Ebay, Amazon Marketplace, Alibaba, and the smaller players in this space really do - they provide no-code solutions for people who want to sell goods and services and don't care about web technology. This has been happening for decades now. Even in 2000 you could pay a hosting company $not-much to give you a basic templated site hooked into a payment server. It didn't work all that well, but it worked well enough to provide the commodity service most small business owners wanted. I still see people saying "You can't automate this" - when magic AI automation isn't even needed to do the job and the job is already being done. Of course this kind of no-code won't build you a complete startup. But how often do you really need a complete bespoke startup? For a lot of business ideas a no-code service with some simple customisation and a very basic content engine is all that's needed. You do not need docker etc for any of this. Or at least, you don't need to deal with docker personally for any of this - just as you don't need to deal with your web host's VM technology. So while I don't completely agree with OP, I think it's astoundingly naive to believe that the current level of hyper-complexity cannot possibly be shaken out. In fact current stack traditions are almost comically vulnerably to disruption - maybe not this year, but I would be amazed if the landscape hasn't started to change within ten years.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  With HIPAA, PII, and other regulations I'm not so sure that no-code solutions are the future. There is a lot of nuance in what businesses want. Plugins to WordPress may be an intermediate example, though very quickly one is approaching programming by configuration, theming, or assortment of plugins. And Darwin help you if things go sideways.
  - enchiridion 6y ago
    On the other hand, why would I want to code to those regulations? Seems like a good way to mess something up and get sued. A no-code site that meets spec and transfers liability would be great.
    - 6y ago
SuoDuanDao 6y ago
I think if something like that happens, it will be on the scale of the shift from alchemy to chemistry - some sort of as-yet-unimaginable standardization which changes what is currently an art to something more like a science. I don't expect to see anything of the sort in our lifetimes, barring some very extreme advances in medicine.
LordHumungous 6y ago
Yeah it reminds me of a project at my company that was an attempt to automate certain development processes so that people could ship features without developer involvement. Cool idea! So they built this wonderful system and now there's a team of 6 devs solely dedicated to maintaining it lol.
sakoht 6y ago
So true. Believing we will “finish” needing computer programmers because “the work is done” misses the basic physics that governs this process. And naively believing we are finally there is a regularly resurgent myth. We have been predicting machines would not need programmers since there were programmers. It is true for a _given_ task at a given complexity level. But overall the demands on, and for, a modern programmer have only gotten higher, because the demand of all business and human activity is to offer more than we might have otherwise. Just wait until, for an app to differentiate itself in business, you have to create intelligent responses in a variety of augmented reality interfaces, correctly predict human behavior, and interface with the physical environment in a routine and nuanced way. And the companies that can do it well are suddenly dominating the ones who do a sloppy job.
ksj2114 6y ago
I completely disagree. The new tools (bubble, zapier, airtable, webflow etc.) are an order of magnitude easier to create applications (and even relatively complex ones!)
- edem 6y ago
  And according to the law of leaky abstractions, they are 4 more complex systems you need to understand when they break down.
- randtrain34 6y ago
  None of this will scale to more than 10 users/sec.
cynoclast 6y ago
>The idea that we will have some abstraction that will someday (in the foreseeable future) save us from all of this difficult work sounds very far fetched to me, and I can’t imagine how that would work. If it ever exists it will be a real AI (not the marketing wank people today are calling AI) that does the entirety of the work for us....and then maybe makes us slaves for its robot colony...
ashtonkem 6y ago
Also: whenever significant reductions in complexity are achieved, the result is a more expansive usage of software, not a reduction of engineers to achieve the same result.
jrs95 6y ago
RPA seems to be the biggest area where this is currently popular. The "citizen developer" bullshit they're pushing IMO sounds good on paper but will lead to fragile bots that end up falling apart and not being properly maintained at scale. I can't imagine handing someone with no programming experience UiPath or whatever and having them basically deploying software directly to production. As far as I know there isn't a "code first" approach to this set of problems but there probably ought to be as someone who can't write code isn't likely to produce a high enough quality product even with a dumb downed drag and drop tool to make it worth it.
peter303 6y ago
Similar claims were made in the early 1960s when high level language compilers arrived: "Computers will practically program themselves." "There will be little need for programmers anymore." Every new software technology since then has sometimes triggered similar claims.
elihu 6y ago
> The premise that we are on the verge of some breakthroughs in software development that will significantly reduce the need for engineers is really weak Well, there hasn't been one single major breakthrough but rather a lot of small ones that cumulatively mean that software has become easier to write. Most of it is more mundane than new fundamental abstractions, it's more about distributed version control, better bug trackers, better libraries, more accessible documentation and learning materials, and so on. These things allow software to be written more quickly with smaller teams. Even someone writing in a language like C that hasn't changed much in decades will have a far easier time of it in 2020 than it 2000, simply because of the existence of StackOverflow and the progress that has been made in getting compilers to warn about unsafe code. This is combined with the fact that as more software is written, less software needs to be created to fill some functionality gap. As long as we have computers and people who care to use them, there will always need to be new software written. Most software that people get paid to write is not written for fun or for intellectual exercise, though, it's written to solve a business need. If that business need can be satisfied with existing software, there's less motivation for a businesses to write their own.
jaylossless 6y ago
You make some great points. There's a humanistic quality that can't be replaced. I realized this even more so while self-isolating. For example, instead of going on TikTok, I decided to build an entire app from scratch. A few of my friends thought it would be a useless app - one "anyone could make." But if I did make it, it should be with severless tech, GraphSQL, AWS amplify, etc. I decided to just use a $10 Digital Ocean server. With stocks so cheap, my goal was to build an automated trader during COVID-19: https://stockgains.io https://stockgains.io I initially used Google spreadsheets but it wasn't effective. I spent a week with Docker, learned MySQL 8's new features, and Ruby on Rails 6 for rapid development. There are so many nuances with storage engines, libraries, query and cache optimizations, and UI/UX design that requires human thought, experience, and skill. Sometimes plenty of it. Now the beauty of this tool isn't the price difference of a stock before COVID (a robot could do that), but the filters. These filters were created from a human (me) reading over 100 books on trading stocks and writing down quantitative and psychological parameters. And I kept track of what could be "automated" over the years. I just can't imagine a robot reading all those books and doing the same thing. Not just the design, but just building a vision. There's an art and complexity involved in solving problems.
lonelappde 6y ago
Even more simply, if something took a person year to write, it will take at least a person to maintain in perpettuity, as bits rot, especially after the profit authors disappear.
Shorel 6y ago
I think software development improvements follow an exponential curve. It is, and has been, extremely slow. Until it is not, and then it will grow very fast in a short time. And then it will grow even faster.

zxcb1 6y ago

It is easier to understand code and its consequences than human language; hypotheses are testable and verifiable. It helps to think of coding as a form of game. Open source, and Github specifically, can be mined and reused like any other knowledge; pay attention to Microsoft and OpenAI going forward.

GoblinSlayer 6y ago
It's easier to understand language on a syntactical level, the program itself is turing complete and we don't even have a decent automatic verification tool.

Random_ernest 6y ago

> Even the example of hosting complexity being replaced by cloud companies seems kind of silly to me. Maybe that’s saving very small companies a sizable fraction of their engineering resources, but I really doubt it for medium or larger companies. This might even lead to an _increase_ in demand for software engineering, since now small companies can write their own custom software cheaper and more reliable. It's called Jevons paradox.

donw 6y ago
TIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox "In economics, the Jevons Paradox occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand." Only tangentially related to the thread: I'm struggling to think of how government policy might increase the efficiency with which a resource is used, other than by not existing in the first place. So, an ask: any historical examples where government policy other than deregulation has increased the efficiency with which a resource is used?
- saberdancer 6y ago
  Not an expert, but I think this qualifies. Government policy to improve energy efficiency (government grants to improve factory production efficiency) can lead to increase in total energy use as the factory is more profitable with better efficiency. EU does have programs to improve efficiency in this manner.
  - donw 6y ago
    I suppose that would make sense if the government was solving a coordination problem? E.g., no manufacturer will install Oliver's Optimizer, which promises a lifetime 10% savings in energy use, because it would force them to shut down operations for a month while the optimizer is installed, and put them at a disadvantage compared to other manufacturers. By requiring the Optimizer (or equivalent) as a licensing requirement for factory operation, all manufacturers share the same burden, and thus suffer no relative disadvantage. Is that the general idea? I'd be worried about regulatory capture in this case -- e.g., Oliver lobbying to force the market to install his Optimizer -- but that's an entirely different discussion. :)

goatinaboat 6y ago

The idea that we will have some abstraction that will someday (in the foreseeable future) save us from all of this difficult work sounds very far fetched to me, and I can’t imagine how that would work. We actually can imagine how a natural-language driven "black box" that translates it into code works: it's called offshore software development. The conclusion that everyone eventually reaches, having experienced varying levels of pain first depending on how quickly they learn, is that writing a spec detailed enough to make that work is as much or more work than just writing the code yourself!

ilaksh 6y ago

> (failed fifth generation of programming) Take a look at AirTable and IFTTT/Zapier. Its not going to save us from all of the work, but it does eliminate a lot of redundant work. For sure. > Even the example of hosting complexity being replaced by cloud companies seems kind of silly to me. Maybe that’s saving very small companies a sizable fraction of their engineering resources, but I really doubt it for medium or larger companies. I think that hundreds of billions of dollars has been spent moving from localized IT to cloud. Do you really believe that was all a waste of money? For example, most of those medium or large companies had their own operations software backends, and most of it was eaten by clouds services/APIs. > You still need people who understand things like docker, kubernetes, endless different database options, sharding, indexing, failover, backup, message queues, etc. Even if the pieces are now more integrated and easier to put together, the task of figuring out how the pieces will interact and what pieces you even need is still outrageously complicated. Docker/K8s is a good example. I spent more than a year building a Docker orchestration/hosting startup (eventually decided not to try to compete as an individual with Amazon). But when I recently needed a reliable way to host a new application and database, I did not have to configure Docker or K8s at all. Why? Because I used AWS Lambda and RDS. Those are examples of software eating software. AWS can handle all of the containers for you if you do it that way. As far as failover and backup, that was handled by checkboxes in RDS. I did not need a message queue because that was built into the Lambda event injection service.

quonn 6y ago
> Because I used AWS Lambda and RDS. Just like people put some PHP scripts on fully hosted Apache+MySQL 20 years ago. This was very common and far easier than AWS. (And reliable, too, although not as scalable, but the needs then were different). The point being that all of this has been here before. Every few years some complexity creeps back in (in exchange for some other benefits) and then it‘s eliminated again and some progress is made. But works always expands. Recently I helped a friend who is a teacher with her Excel sheets to do grade reports. Pretty well done for Excel, yet it was a terrible user experience. Even if there are only 1000 users, working with this 1 hour per month, a proper custom made software would have been better and easily economically viable. Even no-code has existed for a long time, but it never fits perfectly. Similarly, people regularly complain about just glueing components together. As opposed to what? Copying sorting algorithms right out of a CS class? It‘s a strange idea. Looking at the code I work with, over the years, I find very little glue. True, there are abstractions and sometimes they get in the way. But they are there for a reason. Whether you start out from scratch or use frameworks, much of the application will revolve around business-related data structures. You can give it a try: Take your real-world product, strip out the abstractions, replace the built-in UI widgets, sorting routines, hash tables of your language and maybe that OR-Mapper and your GraphQL-server framework and so on with your custom code and something minimalistic. It won‘t take that much time and code and compared to the stuff on top you‘ll find it‘s not that much that you actually used in the end. Nothing to glue together anymore. Not that it makes sense to do this. But the idea that glueing things together has replaced „real“ development is very much mistaken.

JSavageOne 6y ago

> You still need people who understand things like docker, kubernetes, endless different database options, sharding, indexing, failover, backup, message queues, etc. Large companies at significant scale need to know these things. Smaller companies don't need kubernetes, message queues, or anything beyond a simple standard off-the-shelf setup. I'm guessing the author was referring more to small/mid-sized companies that aren't at FAANG-scale and have no need for that complexity.

bavell 6y ago
As a counter-point, I run a one-man tech business and use kubernetes to run some 60+ application and db servers. I don't have time to babysit each application I'm running and kubernetes is a force mutliplier that I rely on heavily. There is a cost to managing it but even so, without the automation it provides I simply wouldn't have the capacity to do what I do.
- JSavageOne 6y ago
  Interesting, though the fact that you're managing that many servers as a one-man show is a testament to the author's point.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

hinkley 6y ago

I spend a lot of time thinking about how to make development easier, or at least less error prone. Every once in a while I have a moment of clarity. I remember that the other part of our job is extracting requirements out of people who don't really understand computers, even the ones who are ostensibly paid to do so (and if we're honest, about 20% of our fellow programmers). The more you talk to them the more you realize they don't really understand themselves either. which is why shadowing works. If building the software gets too easy, we'll just spend all of our time doing the gathering part of the job. And then I will do just about anything to forget that thought and go back to thinking about less horrific concepts.

panta 6y ago
It’s even stronger than that: the other part of the job is extracting requirements from people who don’t understand the problem they want to solve - even when the problem is not technological. There is no silver bullet (AGI would be it, but we are far from achieving it imho).
- brodo 6y ago
  Exactly. Most of the time, the problem is not to find out what people want and put it into software. The problem is to help people in the process of discovering what they want and what can be done. After that, development can begin.
  - ben_w 6y ago
    A truth that I wish I had known before I graduated.
  - groestl 6y ago
    > After that, development can begin. And trigger another cycle, as (successful) software inevitably changes the way people understand their own problem.
- GoblinSlayer 6y ago
  AGI would negotiate salary higher than all people it replaced, though.

amasad 6y ago

I disagree with the author that it will be "no code." But I would also not dismiss how much more productive the cloud and better devtools has made developers. And as much as people, especially on HN, like to pick on bootcamp graduates, it's undeniable that you can get someone with no to little experience building complicated software in a matter of month. What I think will happen to software engineering is that the middle will shrink. We'll see many more frontend and product engineers, and slightly more infra and systems programmer. I think the fullstack, middleware rails/django type engineering will all but disappear (most will move towards product).

LouisSayers 6y ago
>it's undeniable that you can get someone with no to little experience building complicated software in a matter of month. Yeah, and who do you think comes along and cleans up their mess, extends and maintains that software once your cowboy coders are gone? We might be more productive, but only to a certain point. The complexity comes when people want to twist and bend the off the shelf solutions in ways they weren't designed for, and when systems become so large and complex that adding just one more feature takes a significant amount of time. This is what differentiates your low cost bootcamp grads from highly paid software engineers. Experienced engineers aren't just building for today, but for the future. I don't buy that fullstack devs are going anywhere. The real world is complex, the devil is in the details and the complexity of those details can't simply be chucked into an off-the-shelf solution and be expected to survive. We'll still have to have people that glue all the pieces together, we'll still have to name and compose things, to make modifications and optimisations, to maintain existing products, and we'll need people that push the boundaries of what's been done before and explore the new.
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  > Yeah, and who do you think comes along and cleans up their mess, extends and maintains that software once your cowboy coders are gone? Sometimes someone with a CS or SE degree, sometimes someone who learned to program as a hobby while doing something completely irrelevant like Music, English, bar tending or high school and sometimes the cowboy coders themselves with more experience. There’s an enormous amount of theory in programming which is highly relevant to many, many people but you can be amazing at CS theory and write scientific code that’s garbage, uncommented spaghetti like the Imperial epidemiology model. At the other end you can have a great grasp of how to write clean, modular, well commented code and have no idea how you would start parsing a text file to extract all nouns or some other introductory undergraduate project for one of the infinitude of topics in CS.

wolframhempel 6y ago

I think the real change is the rising threshold between commodity software and specialised solutions. When I started my career more than a decade ago, I built handmade static websites and online shops for small and medium shops. Today these are commodity software, easily served by Squarespace/Wix/Shopify etc. At the same time, when I started, Basecamp was amongst the top SaaS solutions on the planet. Today, its simple form based approach wouldn't cut mustard with consumers accustomed to instant feedback, realtime collaboration and behind the scenes saving. This is especially apparent in the games industry. Early games like Doom or Wolfenstein were often developed by less than five people. Today's open world titles like AC Odyssey or Cyberpunk 2077 require 100 times as many people.

dijit 6y ago
I work in the games industry and I want to ride your sentiment a little; it's not 100 times, it's more like 200 times. It was >1,000 artists, designers, programmers and sound engineers to make each entry in the series of games I worked on.
- spyke112 6y ago
  And it has become really frustrating to be forced to sit through the credits at the end of a AAA game, it just seems to keep going forever these days!

lemiffe 6y ago

I second those thoughts. When I was 10 years old I started coding in Qbasic, a few years later I told my dad I wanted to be a programmer when I grew up, he told me that it would likely be automated soon (as had happened with his industry, electronic engineering) and I'd be struggling to find a job. 23 years later and the demand still seems to be rising. I'd say we're still quite far from such level of abstraction; but a certain degree of it is already possible as you say... k8s/docker/kafka/glue/databricks/redshift, all of these technologies mesh together "seamlessly", but more problems arise as a result. The problems we must tackle just shift elsewhere.

isolli 6y ago
I distinctly remember talking to programmers at a job fair in the mid-80s who warned me that there was not much future in programming.
dave84 6y ago
What level of automation happened in electronic engineering?
xtracto 6y ago
And when UML started getting in vogue in the mid 90s a lot of people said that "intelligent code generators" would automate a large amount of programming. It did not happen the way people predicted, but it has somehow happened in the form of Angular, Ionic, Express, Ruby-on-Rails and similar frameworks: More and more programming means "writing glue code", being it to glue Machine Learning libraries (yay, ML developer!), HTTP libraries (yay, Web developer!), AMQP/SQL/NoSQL (yay, backend developer!) or even OpenGL/DirectX/SDL (yay, game developer!). The fact is, as more and more of these abstraction libraries are created, "programming" will go one level of abstraction up, but still need people to do it.
- lonelappde 6y ago
  In 2002 the inventor of Microsoft Office (Charles Simonyi) took his $billions and left to create a company to replace programming with an Office-like app. In 2017 the company (Intentional) was acquihired back into MS after failing to generate a profit or popular product.

0xfaded 6y ago

I have to admit that as a technical person it's easy to ignore the tools which are being built for non technical people. A non-technical is currently building a wordpress site for me that is better than what I would have thrown together as css/html.

wolco 6y ago
They sound like a tech. Wordpress is powerful and is made up of more than css/html.
- 0xfaded 6y ago
  Check out elementor

osdiab 6y ago

Eh, I also think a lot of people overengineer things that are made simple with recent technology and that in fact most companies don't need the best engineers to get their job done. I think it's totally true that one can leverage new tools to get more work done with less people, especially when it's for a service that doesn't reach scale and what not. Most companies don't need that to be lucrative. But I think the space of problems expands, whether that is more fields valuing tech, feasible complexity increasing in others, or competition just ratcheting up by lowering technical barriers to entry.

onion2k 6y ago

The idea that we will have some abstraction that will someday (in the foreseeable future) save us from all of this difficult work sounds very far fetched to me, and I can’t imagine how that would work. The problem here is that word "all". It's never going to be easy to do everything. Some part will be hard. That's where the value lies, and that's what your best people focus on. But everything else will be abstracted away. It's already happened. 30 years ago making a GUI was hard, but VB changed that. Then making a web app was hard, but PHP changed that. Then app layout was hard, and Bootstrap changed that. Then ML was hard, and Torch changed that. Every hard problem gets a 90% working solution that's more than good enough for most companies. There'll always be a few companies that pay people to work in the last 10%, so the problem never really disappears, but fewer and fewer people work on it. The key to keeping growth going in tech is to keep finding new problems, not to keep everyone working on the same old problems.

wongarsu 6y ago
Even with just the advances in better programming languages (and newer versions of old languages) and better IDEs we have achieved tremendous productivity increases in the last 30 years. It's just that so far the amount of work has grown to absorb the added productivity. There are some parallels to induced demand in road construction: when you build a new road to ease traffic, traffic increases to use up that capacity. But that isn't a sign that demand is infinite, it's just that demand is limited by the available resources. If you keep building roads, at some point they will become emptier. Similarly, at some point development productivity will outpace demand, and we will start optimizing our own jobs away.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  I'm not convinced. I think new abstractions beget new abstractions. There's so much left to explore in software. Imagine being in the first century of the printing press and imagining that the press is going to put all these poor monks out of business or that there's not much left to explore with writing. Speaking of writing, how much has our word processing technology succeeded in making authors obsolete?

jerome-jh 6y ago

'The premise that we are on the verge of some breakthroughs in software development' There will be breakthroughs in SW development but as with all breakthroughs no one can exactly tell when they will occur, so let's say within the next 40 years. The microelectronics industry has largely moved to automated validation. Some of the ideas have already migrated to SW validation, although progress and adoption is slow. Probably a key idea for automatic SW generation and "no-code" is to realize that a Turing complete language is not required at all times, well most of the times it is even counter productive. Too often SW engineers fail to realize that as well.

holstvoogd 6y ago

Yeah, the whole premise is nonsense imo. I personally think we have not made any significant progress in 20-30 years with regards to development and the number of software developers is still growing at a rate where the majority has probably less than a year experience. So no progress can be made as the industry never matures. The kind of optimism displayed in the article reminds me of my early years as a developer ;)

JacobiX 6y ago
In software engineering, languages and tooling the progress is really slow. RAD tools existed for decades, OOP and functional programming paradigms remained largely the same for a very long period of time ... incremental enhancements but not really a breakthrough.

belorn 6y ago

In my experience, for the small companies you have an endless stream of custom jobs that need quick unique solutions. You get the same outrageously complicated work, just with the ability to use more duck tape and one-time solutions. Cloud solution is, with some exceptions to self contained commodity solutions (such as email), about managing costs of spinning up or down hardware. Pay a premium on what you need right now, rather than investing into what you might need tomorrow with the possibility of guessing wrong.

virvar 6y ago

I think there has been a steady reduction in the required IT personal needed to do a lot of things. Need a web-page/web-store? You buy a standard product for almost no money, and you don’t really need anyone to run it for you. 25 years ago that was a several month project that involves a dozen of engineers and had a costly fee attached to after launch support. At the same time we’ve come up with a bunch of new stuff which gave those engineers new jobs. I do see some reduction in office workers by automation. We still haven’t succeeded with getting non coders to do RPA development for their repetitive tasks, but the tools are getting better and better and our workers are getting more and more tech savvy. In a decade every new hire will have had programming in school, like they have had math today. They may not be experts, but they’ll be able to do a lot of the things we still need developers to do, while primary being there to do whatever business logic they do. But I’m not too worried, we moved all of our service to virtual a decade ago and are now moving more and more into places like Azure, and it hasn’t reduced the need for sysops engineers. If anything it’s only increased the requirements for them. In the late 90ies you could hire any computer nerdy kid to operate your servers, and you’d probably be alright, today you’ll want someone who really knows what they are doing within whatever complex setup you have. The same will be true for developers to some extend, but I do think we’ll continue the trend where you’ll need to be actually specialised at something to be really useful. If virtual reality becomes the new smartphone, you’ll have two decades of gold rush there, and that’s not likely to be the last thing that changes our lives with entirely new tech.

rsynnott 6y ago
> 25 years ago that was a several month project that involves a dozen of engineers and had a costly fee attached to after launch support. 25 years ago, yes, but white-label hosted web store things were around in the early noughties. I think there were even a few in the late 90s, but those weren't very good.

bhouston 6y ago

I've been around long enough to see these claims over and over again. You and me will be right that this claim again is false, but I think each time developers get more productive, they can do more with less time, and at some point developers will be able to do so much with so little time that we need few of them. So far though, the need for software has continued to grow even as developer productivity has increased, thus there has been no significant employment issues.

ojr 6y ago

contrary to what whiteboard interviews test for, programming is more of an art than science, and computers are generally bad at determining what is good art.

denster 6y ago

"I can't imagine how that would work" -> hearing that kills me inside :( I think we have 2 options: OPTION 1) We've reached a plateau -- software will continue to be developed as it is now, no new abstractions. OPTION 2) Mankind will create a better set of tools to: - reduce the effort needed - increase the # of people who can participate in the translation of ideas/requirements -> software. For everyone's sake [1], I really hope it's the second! :) As one crazy idea, imagine if you could have a spreadsheet that would let you build software instead of crunch numbers... ... anyway, probably a bad idea, we should stick to our current abstractions and tools :D [1] Take the above with 2.42 lbs of salt, I'm the founder of https://mintdata.com https://mintdata.com

austincheney 6y ago

> The premise that we are on the verge of some breakthroughs in software development that will significantly reduce the need for engineers is really weak We are on the brink of economic contraction which is forcing a rethinking for the need of software engineers. The necessary disruption is there. It is economic, not technological. Yes, there will continue to be a need for software engineers, but business expectations will change as budgets will adjust. I suspect fewer developers will be needed moving forward and those developers will be required to directly own decisions and consequences, which has not been the case in most large corporations. > In my experience, software engineering is endless, complicated decision making about how something should work and how to make changes without breaking something else rather than the nuts and bolts of programming. Agreed, but that is not the typical work culture around software development. Thanks to things like Agile and Scrum developers are often isolated from the tactical decisions that impact how they should execute their work, and for good reason. While some seasoned senior developers are comfortable owning and documenting the complex decisions you speak of many are not so comfortable and require precise and highly refined guidance to perform any work. This is attributable to a lack of forced mentoring and mitigated by process.

treespace89 6y ago

I would like to add, automation comes in stages. Some jobs are eliminated, then more, then more. I just don't see any of that happening in software. Yes the tools change, but the number of jobs isn't going down.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago

Actually the cloud does just magically design and run a backend for your application. This is what Etsy, Ebay, Amazon Marketplace, Alibaba, and the smaller players in this space really do - they provide no-code solutions for people who want to sell goods and services and don't care about web technology. This has been happening for decades now. Even in 2000 you could pay a hosting company $not-much to give you a basic templated site hooked into a payment server. It didn't work all that well, but it worked well enough to provide the commodity service most small business owners wanted. I still see people saying "You can't automate this" - when magic AI automation isn't even needed to do the job and the job is already being done. Of course this kind of no-code won't build you a complete startup. But how often do you really need a complete bespoke startup? For a lot of business ideas a no-code service with some simple customisation and a very basic content engine is all that's needed. You do not need docker etc for any of this. Or at least, you don't need to deal with docker personally for any of this - just as you don't need to deal with your web host's VM technology. So while I don't completely agree with OP, I think it's astoundingly naive to believe that the current level of hyper-complexity cannot possibly be shaken out. In fact current stack traditions are almost comically vulnerably to disruption - maybe not this year, but I would be amazed if the landscape hasn't started to change within ten years.

paulryanrogers 6y ago
With HIPAA, PII, and other regulations I'm not so sure that no-code solutions are the future. There is a lot of nuance in what businesses want. Plugins to WordPress may be an intermediate example, though very quickly one is approaching programming by configuration, theming, or assortment of plugins. And Darwin help you if things go sideways.
- enchiridion 6y ago
  On the other hand, why would I want to code to those regulations? Seems like a good way to mess something up and get sued. A no-code site that meets spec and transfers liability would be great.
  - 6y ago

SuoDuanDao 6y ago

I think if something like that happens, it will be on the scale of the shift from alchemy to chemistry - some sort of as-yet-unimaginable standardization which changes what is currently an art to something more like a science. I don't expect to see anything of the sort in our lifetimes, barring some very extreme advances in medicine.

LordHumungous 6y ago

Yeah it reminds me of a project at my company that was an attempt to automate certain development processes so that people could ship features without developer involvement. Cool idea! So they built this wonderful system and now there's a team of 6 devs solely dedicated to maintaining it lol.

sakoht 6y ago

So true. Believing we will “finish” needing computer programmers because “the work is done” misses the basic physics that governs this process. And naively believing we are finally there is a regularly resurgent myth. We have been predicting machines would not need programmers since there were programmers. It is true for a _given_ task at a given complexity level. But overall the demands on, and for, a modern programmer have only gotten higher, because the demand of all business and human activity is to offer more than we might have otherwise. Just wait until, for an app to differentiate itself in business, you have to create intelligent responses in a variety of augmented reality interfaces, correctly predict human behavior, and interface with the physical environment in a routine and nuanced way. And the companies that can do it well are suddenly dominating the ones who do a sloppy job.

ksj2114 6y ago

I completely disagree. The new tools (bubble, zapier, airtable, webflow etc.) are an order of magnitude easier to create applications (and even relatively complex ones!)

edem 6y ago
And according to the law of leaky abstractions, they are 4 more complex systems you need to understand when they break down.
randtrain34 6y ago
None of this will scale to more than 10 users/sec.

cynoclast 6y ago

>The idea that we will have some abstraction that will someday (in the foreseeable future) save us from all of this difficult work sounds very far fetched to me, and I can’t imagine how that would work. If it ever exists it will be a real AI (not the marketing wank people today are calling AI) that does the entirety of the work for us....and then maybe makes us slaves for its robot colony...

ashtonkem 6y ago

Also: whenever significant reductions in complexity are achieved, the result is a more expansive usage of software, not a reduction of engineers to achieve the same result.

jrs95 6y ago

RPA seems to be the biggest area where this is currently popular. The "citizen developer" bullshit they're pushing IMO sounds good on paper but will lead to fragile bots that end up falling apart and not being properly maintained at scale. I can't imagine handing someone with no programming experience UiPath or whatever and having them basically deploying software directly to production. As far as I know there isn't a "code first" approach to this set of problems but there probably ought to be as someone who can't write code isn't likely to produce a high enough quality product even with a dumb downed drag and drop tool to make it worth it.

peter303 6y ago

Similar claims were made in the early 1960s when high level language compilers arrived: "Computers will practically program themselves." "There will be little need for programmers anymore." Every new software technology since then has sometimes triggered similar claims.

elihu 6y ago

> The premise that we are on the verge of some breakthroughs in software development that will significantly reduce the need for engineers is really weak Well, there hasn't been one single major breakthrough but rather a lot of small ones that cumulatively mean that software has become easier to write. Most of it is more mundane than new fundamental abstractions, it's more about distributed version control, better bug trackers, better libraries, more accessible documentation and learning materials, and so on. These things allow software to be written more quickly with smaller teams. Even someone writing in a language like C that hasn't changed much in decades will have a far easier time of it in 2020 than it 2000, simply because of the existence of StackOverflow and the progress that has been made in getting compilers to warn about unsafe code. This is combined with the fact that as more software is written, less software needs to be created to fill some functionality gap. As long as we have computers and people who care to use them, there will always need to be new software written. Most software that people get paid to write is not written for fun or for intellectual exercise, though, it's written to solve a business need. If that business need can be satisfied with existing software, there's less motivation for a businesses to write their own.

jaylossless 6y ago

You make some great points. There's a humanistic quality that can't be replaced. I realized this even more so while self-isolating. For example, instead of going on TikTok, I decided to build an entire app from scratch. A few of my friends thought it would be a useless app - one "anyone could make." But if I did make it, it should be with severless tech, GraphSQL, AWS amplify, etc. I decided to just use a $10 Digital Ocean server. With stocks so cheap, my goal was to build an automated trader during COVID-19: https://stockgains.io https://stockgains.io I initially used Google spreadsheets but it wasn't effective. I spent a week with Docker, learned MySQL 8's new features, and Ruby on Rails 6 for rapid development. There are so many nuances with storage engines, libraries, query and cache optimizations, and UI/UX design that requires human thought, experience, and skill. Sometimes plenty of it. Now the beauty of this tool isn't the price difference of a stock before COVID (a robot could do that), but the filters. These filters were created from a human (me) reading over 100 books on trading stocks and writing down quantitative and psychological parameters. And I kept track of what could be "automated" over the years. I just can't imagine a robot reading all those books and doing the same thing. Not just the design, but just building a vision. There's an art and complexity involved in solving problems.

lonelappde 6y ago

Even more simply, if something took a person year to write, it will take at least a person to maintain in perpettuity, as bits rot, especially after the profit authors disappear.

Shorel 6y ago

I think software development improvements follow an exponential curve. It is, and has been, extremely slow. Until it is not, and then it will grow very fast in a short time. And then it will grow even faster.