Software developers might be obsolete by 2030

Towards Data Science ^ | 10/19/2020 | Rhea Moutafis

[depressed in 06]

Now, what are all those coal miners going to do?

I think they should cut down a tree per day.

[beef]

“To write the code for the machines that write the code.”

And then to describe to the machines that write code what code they need to be writing.

Advances in this field has never resulted in fewer programmers. Instead they wind up with more programmers writing more code faster.

[libertylover]

What are you driving at? Come on, spit it out!

Well, I don't quite know, except that I'm getting old and I'd probably be a tad bit behind the learning curve if I tried to write code again. Sigh.

[minnesota_bound]

I use at work a phone system from Twilio. It was started in 2008 and is now valued at $46 billion....

GUI - graphical user interfaces are just terrible.
See Windows 10. The ticket system I use at work is to convoluted. too many steps compared to the last one we used.
A log in for a website we have has a how to that contains 14 pages with many screenshots. The link to the site went out to nearly 90,000 people. I believe most called us as they could not log in!

I use to be able to tell anyone who did what at work and when the issue would be fixed but they have in the past few years outsourced to India and Pakistan and I have no clue and can only say a few days instead of today. Now even the help desk is being outsourced.

[The Truth Will Make You Free]

Steve McConnell wrote a brilliant book on Rapid Development. The first 5 chapters were gold. He laid out the principles of good software development, which must be mastered before development can be rapid. Section two was how to manage programmers. Section three was 30 or so best practices, with descriptions of when to use them, their risk, effort, etc.

This classic became my model for training the first professional software developers in the history of a third world country. We had large posters made of key points of section one. I even flew to Bellevue WA and met with McConnell. He graciously provided his list of categorized training resources for no cost. Later I sent my top programmer there. He became the top programmer in the nation.

True story... we were funded by USAID. They sent an inspector who had already defunded projects in two countries. We used a projector to walk through how we did projects (using McConnell’s methodology and materials). After a while she leaned back in chair, took a sighing breath, and said, “You guys are doing everything exactly right.” And I smiled and gave a quiet sigh of relief.