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question, When were programmers supposed to be obsolete? (poliverso.org)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi, this is a question that popped into my mind when i saw an article about some AWS engineer talking about ai assistants taking over the job of programmers, this reminded me that it's not the first time that something like this was said.

My software engineering teacher once told me that a few years ago people believed graphical tools like enterprise architect would make it so that a single engineer could just draw a pretty UML diagram and generate 90% of the project without touching any code,
And further back COBOL was supposed to replace programmers by letting accountants write their own programs.

Now i'm curious, were there many other technologies that were supposedly going to replace programmers that you remember?

i hope someone that's been around much more than me knows something more or has some funny stories to share

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 week ago (9 children)

It's happened a few times in my career where people tell me I'll be obsolete, but it's always been some company hyping their new product and suits frothing at the prospect of not having to pay me anymore.

So far they're like 0 for 8 or so.

Now I will say the goalposts move. What I'm doing now is for sure not what I was doing 10 years ago. I'm definitely heavier in devops and infra than where I was before (ironic because they said we'd never have to worry about that stuff again if we moved to the cloud). AI is still basically machine learning, just in a while loop, so I've spent time learning that. So, in a way, yes we're obsolete in the sense that if I was the same engineer I was 10 years ago I wouldn't be worth nearly this much, I had to grow and evolve with technology.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (2 children)

DevOps was a lie pushed on devs to make them become sysadmins, unfortunately.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

And DBAs. I'm currently working on a project where I said from the very start, I can set up this DB in k8s and I can get it to work decently, but I have neither the knowledge nor the time to get it right. Please give me someone who knows how this works.

No, don't worry, it'll be fine, we don't need that, this kuverneles thing I keep hearing about handles that!!!

Six months of hard contact with the enemy on production later:

Well, we're currently looking for someone who actually knows how DBs work, because we have one of those issues that would cost a proper DBA 5min and me 5 months.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

I feel like there is a lost art of DBAs, where in their mystical knowledge rests how to make perfect cheap and scalable databases, and business cast them away because "Why not pay Google twice that amount?"

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