Business quacks being forever bamboozled because turns out implementation is the only thing that matters and hacker culture outlived every single promise to eradicate hacker culture.
The recurring dream of replacing developers
51–60 of 535 posts
Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#52[flagged]
Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#53I've watched this pattern play out in systems administration over two decades. The pitch is always the same: higher abstractions will democratise specialist work. SREs are "fundamentally different" from sysadmins, Kubernetes "abstracts away complexity."
In practice, I see expensive reinvention. Developers debug database corruption after pod restarts without understanding filesystem semantics. They recreate monitoring strategies and networking patterns on top of CNI because they never learned the fundamentals these abstractions are built on. They're not learning faster: they're relearning the same operational lessons at orders of magnitude higher cost, now mediated through layers of YAML.
Each wave of "democratisation" doesn't eliminate specialists. It creates new specialists who must learn both the abstraction and what it's abstracting. We've made expertise more expensive to acquire, not unnecessary.
Excel proves the rule. It's objectively terrible: 30% of genomics papers contain gene name errors from autocorrect, JP Morgan lost $6bn from formula errors, Public Health England lost 16,000 COVID cases hitting row limits. Yet it succeeded at democratisation by accepting catastrophic failures no proper system would tolerate.
The pattern repeats because we want Excel's accessibility with engineering reliability. You can't have both. Either accept disasters for democratisation, or accept that expertise remains required.
Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's not so much about replacing developers, but rather increasing the level of abstraction developers can work at, to allow them to work on more complex problems. People do and will talk about replacing developers though.
Were many of the aforementioned advancements marketed as "replacing developers"? Absolutely. Did that end up happening? Quite the opposite; each higher-level abstraction only caused the market for software and demand for developers to grow. That's not to say developers haven't been displaced by abstraction; I suspect many of the people responsible for re-wiring the ENIAC were completely out of a job when punchcards h…
the infinite-fountain-of-software machine seems more likely to replace developers than previous innovations, and the people pushing the button will not be, in any current sense of the word, programming
Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#55Spreadsheets replaced developers for that kind of work, while simultaneously enabling multiple magnitudes more work of that type to be performed.
I do agree, that’s like my go to thought. Citizen developers were already there doing Excel. I have seen basically full fledged applications in Excel since I was in high school which was 25 years ago already.
If anything, there were a bunch of low barrier to entry software development options like HyperCard, MS Access, Visual Basic, Delphi, 4GLs etc. around in the 90s, that went away.
It feels like programming then got a lot harder with internet stuff that brought client-server challenges, web frontends, cross platform UI and build challenges, mobile apps, tablets, etc... all bringing in elaborate frameworks and build systems and dependency hell to manage and move complexity around.
With that context, it seems like the AI experience / productivity boost people are having is almost like a regression back to the mean and just cutting through some of the layers of complexity that had built up over the years.
Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#56The dumb part of this is: so who prompts the AI? Well probably we'd want a person who really gets the AI, as they'll have a talent for prompting it well. Meaning: knows how to talk to computers better than other people. So a programmer then... I think it's not that people are stupid. I think there's actually a glee behind the claims AI will put devs out of work - like they feel good about the idea of hurting them, ra…
The day you successfully implemented your solution with a prompt, you solution is valued at the cost of a prompt.
There is no value to anything easily achieved by generative tools anymore.
Now it is in either:
a. generative technology but requiring substantial amount of coordination, curation, compute power. b. substantial amount of data. c. scarce intelectual human work.
And scarce but non intellectually demanding human work was dropped from the list of valuable things.
Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#57The reverse is developer's recurring dream of replacing non-IT people, usually with a 100% online automated self promoting SaaS. AI is also the latest incarnation of that.
When do we get the Star Trek / Orville dream of every job is a good job?
Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#58[flagged]
>every "no-code will replace developers" wave actually creates more developer jobs, not fewer
you mean "created", past tense. You're basically arguing it's impossible for technical improvements to reduce the number of programmers in the world, ever. The idea that only humans will ever be able to debug code or interpret non-technical user needs seems questionable to me.
Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#59Spreadsheets replaced developers for that kind of work, while simultaneously enabling multiple magnitudes more work of that type to be performed.
And I would argue speadsheets still created more developers. Analytics teams need developers to put that data somewhere, to transform it for certain formats, to load that data from a source so they can create spreadsheets from it.
So now instead of one developer lost and one analyst created, you've actually just created an analyst and kept a developer.
Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#60[flagged]
>every "no-code will replace developers" wave actually creates more developer jobs, not fewer you mean "created", past tense. You're basically arguing it's impossible for technical improvements to reduce the number of programmers in the world, ever. The idea that only humans will ever be able to debug code or interpret non-technical user needs seems questionable to me.
This doesn’t seem immediately false. Industrial society creates more complexity and specializations. There is more work to do all the time.