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>I like how no one cites employment figures for engineers and programmers in these articles. That's going to be the future employment prospects for men in the l

by nir 17y ago

>I like how no one cites employment figures for engineers and programmers in these articles. That's going to be the future employment prospects for men in the long term. In the long term, can't a significant amount of engineering & programming be automated and/or offshored? Obviously not all, but I'm not sure engineering can be counted as a future-proof career path.

philwelch 17y ago
I'm not sure about automation (it seems unlikely to automate creative work) but offshoring, in the long run, won't eliminate jobs because there isn't a limited, set number of creative work that can be done.
nostrademons 17y ago
How many large-scale software projects have you worked on? ;-) In the small scale, it always looks like a program is just a bunch of lines of code, and any monkey can type in lines of code. But in the large scale, there're lots of judgments calls and architectural decisions that require that you weigh competing factors, with incomplete information, and try to come up with a "least bad" solution with possibly unforseen results in the future. You can't automate this, and if you try to outsource it without open lines of communication, you'll probably end up with a solution that satisfies nobody. The interesting part of a software project is all the stuff you have to do after the rote parts have been automated.
- nir 17y ago
  Isn't large scale software actually where most of the automation and offshoring take place? The "judgments calls and architectural decisions" can be made just as well by software architects in India or China or Brazil. >The interesting part of a software project is all the stuff you have to do after the rote parts have been automated Absolutely. For example: 6502 Assembly -> C -> Java -> Python. Each step is exactly about that: Letting you focus on the interesting parts, and thus produce more value with less human effort. This is automation, we just call it abstraction or whatever. We didn't see a drop in the job market as result, since the demand for software had been rising even faster. The question is whether this will remain the case.

by nir 17y ago

philwelch 17y ago

I'm not sure about automation (it seems unlikely to automate creative work) but offshoring, in the long run, won't eliminate jobs because there isn't a limited, set number of creative work that can be done.

nostrademons 17y ago

How many large-scale software projects have you worked on? ;-) In the small scale, it always looks like a program is just a bunch of lines of code, and any monkey can type in lines of code. But in the large scale, there're lots of judgments calls and architectural decisions that require that you weigh competing factors, with incomplete information, and try to come up with a "least bad" solution with possibly unforseen results in the future. You can't automate this, and if you try to outsource it without open lines of communication, you'll probably end up with a solution that satisfies nobody. The interesting part of a software project is all the stuff you have to do after the rote parts have been automated.

nir 17y ago
Isn't large scale software actually where most of the automation and offshoring take place? The "judgments calls and architectural decisions" can be made just as well by software architects in India or China or Brazil. >The interesting part of a software project is all the stuff you have to do after the rote parts have been automated Absolutely. For example: 6502 Assembly -> C -> Java -> Python. Each step is exactly about that: Letting you focus on the interesting parts, and thus produce more value with less human effort. This is automation, we just call it abstraction or whatever. We didn't see a drop in the job market as result, since the demand for software had been rising even faster. The question is whether this will remain the case.