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It’s non existent. It’s weird how people were obsessed with coal miners losing their jobs, but right here in tech we literally saw a profession vanish. There is

It’s non existent. It’s weird how people were obsessed with coal miners losing their jobs, but right here in tech we literally saw a profession vanish. There is no ‘website developer’ anymore, not really. It just ... went away. That group had to shift overnight (in relative terms) to app development. This might be more foreboding than people realize. Aside from those who need to write complex queries stitching big data together or generating reports, will we need a typical backend engineer ever again? How complex are schemas ever going to get that a UI can’t do it (and generate the corresponding api)? It happened to the first version of the frontend developer and I think backend is next. Then frontend again at some point, and Data people have another thing coming when the backend folks need to find another job when theirs goes away. If tech is going to replace industries, it’s going to start with replacing parts of itself first. We’ll be the first to know how this is going to go down.

dleslie 6y ago
App Development is the next to go; there's already a handful of competitive tools that will build an App, complete with cloud services, without any need for writing code. And yah, there's only so many ways to write CRUD, auth, profile, and presence; backend is already commodified as B2B products.
- xupybd 6y ago
  I've been hunting for good low code CRUD tools. I'm not having a lot of luck finding any good ones.
  - arey_abhishek 6y ago
    Try Appsmith, I'm a founder of it. Easy to build CRUD apps using pre-built UI components that talk to any database or API. Check out our repo here: https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith
- cglace 6y ago
  And yet I’ve never worked on a product that was just simple crud.
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    Then you aren’t thinking hard enough.
ReactiveJelly 6y ago
I'm not a web developer, but at work I run a couple small app servers for internal tools. They have business logic specific to our product, and owned by the company, so although I'm doing a lot of pointless "plug together HTML" work for my learning, I'm also doing stuff that, AFAICT, has to be original code written by me. Did I manage to successfully duck out the entire web trend already? When I was a kid, the web barely worked. When I was in college, web apps were a strange novelty Google was working on. When I started my career as a developer, I heard murmurs that web was the only kind of developer left. 10 years on, I'm still working steady and still not a web / mobile dev. I learned a little TS and started using Rust for backends, and that's about it. I knew SQL from college. The web trend came and went and I only learned how HTTP works in the last 5 years. Doesn't seem like the hardest thing in the world. Is it just a combo of luck and privilege that I missed it? > If tech is going to replace industries, it’s going to start with replacing parts of itself first. We’ll be the first to know how this is going to go down. Probably. At first it was funny - Software was a coal vein that just kept going deeper and deeper the more we dug, and high-level languages kept lowering the barriers to entry, making more programmers who each made more money. Some day the vein's either got to run out, or widen so much that everyone is a programmer getting paid nothing. Since I have enough money to save, I'm hoping to retire before the sigmoid inflects fully.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  I’d pay close attention to it. We don’t talk about the death of website development as a career because app development was available for everyone to transition to, so it mostly got ignored. But it happened, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. It’s a dirty little secret that if we honestly told new people switching to web dev ‘hey, yeah, just so you know, our jobs as we knew it kind of vanished once’, they’d think twice. The other dirty little secret is we almost sent all the work to India once. The new dirty little secret is there’s going to be apps like Airtable which will be another rug pull when Enterprise stops giving a shit about custom branding. If businesses didn’t start moving their apps off Desktop and into the browser, what the hell were we all going to do? We’d have to goto the Java bootcamps, instead of the web app ones. Pay attention because I don’t think business wants a fancy new UI and backend every few years (especially in the Enterprise space). I think we’re going to be done with this too. They will one day just load all that crap into Airtable and standardize business tools industry wide.
cutler 6y ago
Meanwhile the web development jobs market is booming like never before. WordPress and Squarespace aren't the answer to everything.
AlchemistCamp 6y ago
A lot of back-end people have already moved into ML or blockchain and I expect the trend to continue. Devs have been so resilient because learning new things has been a part of the job description for decades.
blacktriangle 6y ago
The difference between web devs and coal miners is that coal miners were losing their jobs due to the government regulating them out of business, web devs were losing their jobs due to underlying changes in technology. We have a precedent for dealing with government intervention in established industries which usually involves providing support to transition to other industries. Fisheries management is full of examples of government paying fishermen to fish less for example. Yet somehow coal miners became a target of derision by a certain branch of American politicians who gleefully cackled about regulating them out of work.
earthboundkid 6y ago
TIL, I don’t have a job? Guess it’s an Office Space situation. Better get my own stapler.
- Melkman 6y ago
  Can you move your desk to the basement ? And while you're there....
scsilver 6y ago
Web devs learned how to program, coal miners didn't.

dleslie 6y ago

App Development is the next to go; there's already a handful of competitive tools that will build an App, complete with cloud services, without any need for writing code. And yah, there's only so many ways to write CRUD, auth, profile, and presence; backend is already commodified as B2B products.

xupybd 6y ago
I've been hunting for good low code CRUD tools. I'm not having a lot of luck finding any good ones.
- arey_abhishek 6y ago
  Try Appsmith, I'm a founder of it. Easy to build CRUD apps using pre-built UI components that talk to any database or API. Check out our repo here: https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith
cglace 6y ago
And yet I’ve never worked on a product that was just simple crud.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  Then you aren’t thinking hard enough.

ReactiveJelly 6y ago

I'm not a web developer, but at work I run a couple small app servers for internal tools. They have business logic specific to our product, and owned by the company, so although I'm doing a lot of pointless "plug together HTML" work for my learning, I'm also doing stuff that, AFAICT, has to be original code written by me. Did I manage to successfully duck out the entire web trend already? When I was a kid, the web barely worked. When I was in college, web apps were a strange novelty Google was working on. When I started my career as a developer, I heard murmurs that web was the only kind of developer left. 10 years on, I'm still working steady and still not a web / mobile dev. I learned a little TS and started using Rust for backends, and that's about it. I knew SQL from college. The web trend came and went and I only learned how HTTP works in the last 5 years. Doesn't seem like the hardest thing in the world. Is it just a combo of luck and privilege that I missed it? > If tech is going to replace industries, it’s going to start with replacing parts of itself first. We’ll be the first to know how this is going to go down. Probably. At first it was funny - Software was a coal vein that just kept going deeper and deeper the more we dug, and high-level languages kept lowering the barriers to entry, making more programmers who each made more money. Some day the vein's either got to run out, or widen so much that everyone is a programmer getting paid nothing. Since I have enough money to save, I'm hoping to retire before the sigmoid inflects fully.

runawaybottle 6y ago
I’d pay close attention to it. We don’t talk about the death of website development as a career because app development was available for everyone to transition to, so it mostly got ignored. But it happened, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. It’s a dirty little secret that if we honestly told new people switching to web dev ‘hey, yeah, just so you know, our jobs as we knew it kind of vanished once’, they’d think twice. The other dirty little secret is we almost sent all the work to India once. The new dirty little secret is there’s going to be apps like Airtable which will be another rug pull when Enterprise stops giving a shit about custom branding. If businesses didn’t start moving their apps off Desktop and into the browser, what the hell were we all going to do? We’d have to goto the Java bootcamps, instead of the web app ones. Pay attention because I don’t think business wants a fancy new UI and backend every few years (especially in the Enterprise space). I think we’re going to be done with this too. They will one day just load all that crap into Airtable and standardize business tools industry wide.

cutler 6y ago

Meanwhile the web development jobs market is booming like never before. WordPress and Squarespace aren't the answer to everything.

AlchemistCamp 6y ago

A lot of back-end people have already moved into ML or blockchain and I expect the trend to continue. Devs have been so resilient because learning new things has been a part of the job description for decades.

blacktriangle 6y ago

The difference between web devs and coal miners is that coal miners were losing their jobs due to the government regulating them out of business, web devs were losing their jobs due to underlying changes in technology. We have a precedent for dealing with government intervention in established industries which usually involves providing support to transition to other industries. Fisheries management is full of examples of government paying fishermen to fish less for example. Yet somehow coal miners became a target of derision by a certain branch of American politicians who gleefully cackled about regulating them out of work.

earthboundkid 6y ago

TIL, I don’t have a job? Guess it’s an Office Space situation. Better get my own stapler.

Melkman 6y ago
Can you move your desk to the basement ? And while you're there....

scsilver 6y ago

Web devs learned how to program, coal miners didn't.