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> "My personal hypothesis is that we’re increasingly being treated like assembly line workers." Developers don't like hearing this but the vast majority of us
by ThrowawayR2 4y ago
> "My personal hypothesis is that we’re increasingly being treated like assembly line workers."
Developers don't like hearing this but the vast majority of us _are_ effectively assembly line workers. We do little to no actual engineering, instead we plumb together pre-packaged framework, libraries, and software. We are treated as fungible because that sort of worker is intrinsically fungible; skill is involved in software development but not enough to elevate it from being a trade to being a profession. A symptom of this is the not infrequent HN posts complaining that "Nobody actually uses CS education in the real world"; assembly line workers don't need a degree to do their job either.
- whatarethembits 4y agoBy this logic, who isn’t an “assembly line worker”? I’ve had a few careers, hobbies and view into various different fields due to extended family. I’ve been an architect, an artist (pencil drawings mostly), and pursued medicine for a while. Software development uses more brain power than all of them combined (in my experience). Is everything other than phds “assembly line work” in your estimation?
- ThrowawayR2 4y agoSomebody has to design the things the assembly line worker is assembling. Building the frameworks and libraries that I mentioned earlier, not to mention the database engine, cloud services platforms, language compilers/interpreters, the operating systems, and so forth all do require very deep engineering expertise, though not necessarily a Ph.D.