3 ms·

Is there any reason to think there's a ceiling on these types of products or a big distinction between different types of engineering? I understand there will s

Is there any reason to think there's a ceiling on these types of products or a big distinction between different types of engineering? I understand there will still be software engineers to validate, supervise, etc. But what if every team of 10 people today can be reduced to 3? What will that do to the industry? I have two FANG companies on my resume, so I'm pretty confident that if there were a decimation I'd survive, but I think life would be very different.

throwawaygh 5y ago
> But what if every team of 10 people today can be reduced to 3? This article uses the phrase "Automating Programming", but that phrase is not new. The term "Automatic Programming" was coined in 1958 by John Backus, and he was referring to his FORTRAN compiler. Think about the tens of billions of humans who could have been employed writing Assembly over the past half century if we hadn't invented high-level programming languages. What happens to programmers? They move up the abstraction ladder and tackle bigger problems, faster. Some people get left behind, sure. But then, ask the operators of punchcard machines how life is going. So maybe the "learn Python+HTML+JS in six months and become employable" status quo evaporates. But for at least another century there will always plenty of work for clever problem solvers who know how to tell computers to do things. (FWIW, I'm not a programmer and haven't been employed as one since I was in school as an undergraduate, but I do I employ/manage a fair amount of people who program.)
visarga 5y ago
> But what if every team of 10 people today can be reduced to 3? We would do 3x the projects we're doing now, and salaries would go up as well as hiring.