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The thing is, I hear people give as examples "excel", "visualbasic", and all I can think of is "wow, these are wildly successful technologies that improved the

by rsj_hn 5y ago

The thing is, I hear people give as examples "excel", "visualbasic", and all I can think of is "wow, these are wildly successful technologies that improved the lives of millions of people" Also, these types of technologies do not reduce demand for real programmers. And a desire to deploy them - effectively to make a product more "programmable" by end users - may not be rooted in a desire to replace developers, but rather to make the product more useful, and thus be able to charge a higher premium for it.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I know a guy that had the best thing ever happen to his career, because of this. Back in the last century, he was a well-paid employee of a bank (C++). He managed a group of experienced engineers. The bank wanted to roll out a new product, and they asked him to submit a bid from his group. He specced out a reasonable 18-month plan for a C++ project. A Vice-President then stepped in, and yanked the project, stating that he, and a small team of sycophants, could do the project in six months, using VB. My friend quit, and spent the next two years, traveling the world. When he came back, the project was a shambles, the VP had been fired, and the bank was begging my friend to come back. He vowed never to be an employee again, and signed on as a contractor, for an eye-watering rate; which the bank immediately paid. Last I talked to him, he’d brought a house in a Tony neighborhood, for cash, and he wasn’t even 40, yet.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  That's a great story! And it makes a lot of sense - you are getting people used to thinking about automation, demanding automation, and trying to deploy automation to more places than before. You are also creating all sorts of APIs exposed by documents and making things more scriptable. That's going to increase demand for developers of all languages, even if some of that demand consists of hiring professionals when people recognize they are in over their head with one of these scripting languages, or that they've stretched their existing tools and it's time for a more powerful tool. The downside is horror stories of developers being called in to fix a tangled mess of VB macros. But there's also gold to be mined in those hills.

by rsj_hn 5y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I know a guy that had the best thing ever happen to his career, because of this. Back in the last century, he was a well-paid employee of a bank (C++). He managed a group of experienced engineers. The bank wanted to roll out a new product, and they asked him to submit a bid from his group. He specced out a reasonable 18-month plan for a C++ project. A Vice-President then stepped in, and yanked the project, stating that he, and a small team of sycophants, could do the project in six months, using VB. My friend quit, and spent the next two years, traveling the world. When he came back, the project was a shambles, the VP had been fired, and the bank was begging my friend to come back. He vowed never to be an employee again, and signed on as a contractor, for an eye-watering rate; which the bank immediately paid. Last I talked to him, he’d brought a house in a Tony neighborhood, for cash, and he wasn’t even 40, yet.

rsj_hn 5y ago
That's a great story! And it makes a lot of sense - you are getting people used to thinking about automation, demanding automation, and trying to deploy automation to more places than before. You are also creating all sorts of APIs exposed by documents and making things more scriptable. That's going to increase demand for developers of all languages, even if some of that demand consists of hiring professionals when people recognize they are in over their head with one of these scripting languages, or that they've stretched their existing tools and it's time for a more powerful tool. The downside is horror stories of developers being called in to fix a tangled mess of VB macros. But there's also gold to be mined in those hills.