Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am so appreciative of the employment protection laws we have in Europe so I don't have to deal with managers like you.
Yeah but you are paid less than half for a reason
But they get to live in Europe
The recurring dream of replacing developers
511–520 of 535 posts
Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#512Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the the most coveted ability of a skilled senior developer, is precisely this "uncanny" ability to predict beforehand if some particular detail is important or irrelevant. This ability can only be obtained through years of experience and hubris.
Yeah, most of that intuition only comes from making those mistakes yourself originally, and getting it wrong. At least for me that was the case
Not just getting it wrong, but also learning from it and be able to internalize those mistakes. There are certainly people who do the same mistakes over and over again (either realizing or not) - it's not just a matter of experience.
Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#513In the end, I think the dream underneath this dream is about being able to manifest things into reality without having to get into the details. The details are what stops it from working in every form it's been tried. You cannot escape the details. You must engage with them and solve them directly, meticulously. It's messy, it's extremely complicated and it's just plain hard. There is no level of abstraction that sav…
It's essentially the same as an engineering lead writing a good jira ticket
Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#514Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
Respectfully, you seem to love the sound of your writing so much you forget what you are arguing about. The topic (at least for the rest of the people in this thread) seems to be whether AI assistance can truly eliminate programmers. There is one painfully obvious, undeniable historical trend: making programmer work easier increases the number of programmers. I would argue a modern developer is 1000x more effective t…
There is no respectful way of telling someone they like the sound of their own voice. Let’s be real, you were objectively and deliberately disrespectful. Own it if you are going to break the rules of conduct. I hate this sneaky shit. Also I’m not off topic, you’re just missing the point. I responded to another person in this thread and it’s the same response I would throw at you. You can read that as well. Your “hist…
How ironic of you to call my argument an analogy while it isn't an analogy, yet all you have to offer is exactly that - analogies. Analogies to pilots, drivers, "a thousand examples of careers".
My argument isn't an analogy - it's an observation based on the trajectory of SWE employment specifically. It's you who's trying to reason about what's going to happen with software based on what happened to three-field crop rotation or whatever, not me.
I argued that a developer today is 1000x more effective than in the days of punch cards, yet we have 1000x more developers today. Not only that, this correlation tracked fairly linearly throughout the last many decades.
I would also argue that the productivity improvement between FORTRAN and C, or between C and Python was much, much more impactful than going from JavaScript to JavaScript with ChatGPT.
Software jobs will be redefined, they will require different skill sets, they may even be called something else - but they will still be there.
Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#516Remember "No Silver Bullet" by Fred Brooks.
Found the essay here: https://www.cs.unc.edu/techreports/86-020.pdf
Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no respectful way of telling someone they like the sound of their own voice. Let’s be real, you were objectively and deliberately disrespectful. Own it if you are going to break the rules of conduct. I hate this sneaky shit. Also I’m not off topic, you’re just missing the point. I responded to another person in this thread and it’s the same response I would throw at you. You can read that as well. Your “hist…
How ironic of you to call my argument an analogy while it isn't an analogy, yet all you have to offer is exactly that - analogies. Analogies to pilots, drivers, "a thousand examples of careers". My argument isn't an analogy - it's an observation based on the trajectory of SWE employment specifically. It's you who's trying to reason about what's going to happen with software based on what happened to three-field crop…
>How ironic of you to call my argument an analogy while it isn't an analogy, yet all you have to offer is exactly that
Bro I offered you analogies to show you how it's IRRELEVANT. The point was to show you how it's an ineffective form of reasoning via demonstrating it's ineffectiveness FOR YOUR conclusion because using this reasoning can allow you to conclude the OPPOSITE. Assuming this type of reasoning is effective means BOTH what I say is true and what you say is true which leads to a logical contradiction.
There is no irony, only misunderstanding from you.
>I argued that a developer today is 1000x more effective than in the days of punch cards, yet we have 1000x more developers today. Not only that, this correlation tracked fairly linearly throughout the last many decades.
See here, you're using an analogy and claiming it's effective. To which I would typically offer you another analogy that shows the opposite effect, but I feel it would only confuse you further.
>Software jobs will be redefined, they will require different skill sets, they may even be called something else - but they will still be there.
Again, you believe this because of analogies. I recommend you take a stab at my way of reasoning. Try to arrive at your own conclusion without using analogies.
Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#518I'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…
As an M$ hater from last life I've to disagree it's more expensive. You numerate the instance where they've lost value, but can you even count the value it produced over the years by lowering the entry bar? I don't even excel, but it unarguably produced way more value than it's taken away. I tend to believe history speaks for itself, solely unethical practices won't undermine truly superior products. 50% of the population aren't stupid by definition, they just specalize on different things.
Those work not done by specialist, would not have been done by a specialist nicely, it simply won't get done at all, we just don't have the scale. Of course there's a fine line in some cases it produces negative value, but more often than not it's some value discounted by maintenance versus zero.
Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#519I'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…
As an M$ hater from last life I've to disagree it's more expensive. You numerate the instance where they've lost value, but can you even count the value it produced over the years by lowering the entry bar? I don't even excel, but it unarguably produced way more value than it's taken away. I tend to believe history speaks for itself, solely unethical practices won't undermine truly superior products. 50% of the popul…
We’re agreeing. Excel produced massive value because it accepted catastrophic failures. That’s my point.
The problem isn’t Excel. It’s trying to get Excel’s accessibility in infrastructure whilst demanding engineering reliability. You cannot have both. Kubernetes won’t accept Excel-style disasters, so it still needs specialists; now specialists who must learn the abstraction and the fundamentals.
You’re right: work not done by specialists often wouldn’t happen at all. That’s the choice. Accept Excel-esque failures for democratisation, or accept expertise is required.
My point is that currently available tools promise both, deliver neither.
Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an M$ hater from last life I've to disagree it's more expensive. You numerate the instance where they've lost value, but can you even count the value it produced over the years by lowering the entry bar? I don't even excel, but it unarguably produced way more value than it's taken away. I tend to believe history speaks for itself, solely unethical practices won't undermine truly superior products. 50% of the popul…
We’re agreeing. Excel produced massive value because it accepted catastrophic failures. That’s my point. The problem isn’t Excel. It’s trying to get Excel’s accessibility in infrastructure whilst demanding engineering reliability. You cannot have both. Kubernetes won’t accept Excel-style disasters, so it still needs specialists; now specialists who must learn the abstraction and the fundamentals. You’re right: work n…
We're mostly agreeing except I'm optimistic about current generation of tools being closer to assembly > C than C > VB.
There are good signs AI would eliminate whole classes of costly human errors, whether the new classes of machine only problems would cost more as models iterate is remain to be seen, which I think would be lower. I'm not super optimistic about the social economical future coming from this but from a pure tech standpoint I'm optimistic about building cost.
Edit: also to address reliability, I think a lot of things are net positive to this world without five 9s, heck even two 9s.
Edit 2: s/building cost/tco