Slashdot Mirror
The Extinction of the Programming Species
Max Goff writes "Given the recent chatter surrounding the extinction of the U.S. programmer, /. readers might also be interested in a series of articles I recently penned for java.net -- the Blacksmith and the Bookkeeper (part 1, part 2 and part 3) -- in which I posit that the postmodern programmer (the entire sub-species, not just those domiciled in the U.S.) shares much with the
blacksmith of old, and will become just as extinct in relatively short order. It is not due to work visas or outsourcing, but has much more to do with the evolution of work itself."
Programmers can't reproduce without sex, and sadly, we're not getting any.
Somebody else RTFA! I don't want to know how I'm gonna die.
People should not fear what they do not understand; people should fear because they do not understand.
" Programmers can't reproduce without sex, and sadly, we're not getting any."
Why do you think test tubes were invented?
"It is not due to work visas or outsourcing, but has much more to do with the evolution of work itself."
When we have robotic programmers, then I'll buy your argument.
I will be graduating in december with a bachelor's of Computer Engineering. Just as all the other in my study program, we got work experience up'til now in programming, because that's where the job was. For 50 programmers there is about 1 engineering job offer. Now I have to find my first carreer-job.
So my work experience and part of my academic background was all for nothing this says? Great news! Now that I've studied for more than 4 years, I learn it is going to be useless.
I'm wondering how many other slashdotters feel like me at the moment. Extinction of the programmer species means for me that I lost a few years of my life and now I have to change my carreer. What about the other thousands like me?
Ok...without RTFA...since the blacksmith was generally replaced by industrial production (either directly or indirectly) ...does that mean programmers are going to be replaced by machines that can code on their own?
If that's the direction TFA is taking...I highly doubt it. To quote the Borg Queen from ST: First Contact: "You are an imperfect being created by an imperfect being."
Unless humans as a whole somehow reach perfection, we'll never be able to produce something to completely replace the human element.
It's because the "cool kids" beat them up. Then again, there are less programmers because people aren't AWARE of most of the things that go on (e.g. programming, them being sent overseas, etc). Dont be so harsh on ourselves. Look at those who succeed as programmers AND who get some. Except maybe the geek girls are all already takem :/ )
Just my thoughts!
mysql>SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue > 0
0 Rows Returned
Tools come and go. Knowledgeable people are here to stay. The problem is many people pretend to have knowledge in fields they're not experts.
It's the same with diet/exercise. As the years go on new diets/plans come and go yet the old school traditional "just eat less crap, more good and get off your ass" philosophy is still here.
Wanna make sure you're employable as a software developer? Make sure you're actually knowledgeable about the science *and* the field. It's good to know about things like Java/C++/etc but it's equally important to know about design theory, algorithms, math, etc.
So if you signed up for some 6 month "computer science" program well don't blame the industry for your unemployable status. Code monkeys are a dime-a-dozen.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
It is not due to work visas or outsourcing, but has much more to do with the evolution of work itself
Nonsense. It has to do with the wholesale re-negotiation of the social contract between business and the society it sells to.
Business is no longer satisfied with the simple model of building a product and selling it. That would require work, investment, long-term planning and respect for the skill, education and loyalty of their employees.
Much better, business says, to sell all of that and simply manufacture brands. The modern workplace is therefore obsolete, because business does not want to pay for it. It's really that simple. People are only useful if they are opening their wallets at a cash register. They are not worthy to be employed and paid a fair wage.
There are voluminous statistics to support this, but a few should be sufficient. In the last few years, corporate assets have increased 288%. Employee compensation has increased 9%.
Over half of the working-age population is either a temp, part-time, unemployed or out of the workforce entirely. Read it again: HALF OF THE WORKING-AGE POPULATION IS NOT EMPLOYED FULL-TIME. Companies have no respect for anything: skills, education, experience are all totally meaningless to these companies. ALL that matters is money. That's why it takes five interviews and a credit-check to get hired, but only an e-mail to be fired.
Unless, of course, we're discussing the price tags of all these "brands." Then, it's "you get what you pay for." Like $2500 for a mattress and $4500 for a television, $175 for a basket of groceries and $50,000 for a car. It's nonsense, of course, but everyone's too busy arguing about the problem. Nobody is interested in hearing the facts. All that matters is money.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
The problem lies in the definitions. A bookkeeper of today is nothing like a bookkeeper of the 19th century. The "postmodern" bookkeeper is dependent on a new set of tools -- software written by those outmoded programmers, even. They no longer calculate books by hand, but use automated tools, and they're not so concerned with tracking business' money as they are with audits, GAAP, and finding interesting new ways to conjure a penny more than consensus earnings estimates from the Street.
.NET RAD would be nearly as alien to a systems programmer of forty years ago as a machinist with CAD-driven power machine tools would be to the blacksmith of four hundred years ago.
Similarly, the role of "blacksmiths" evolved. Today, you might call them machinists, or perhaps they're the assembly-line workers. You don't see many blacksmiths making auto parts by hand, but then you don't see many bookkeepers calculating General Electric's quarterly results by hand, either.
It's merely a linguistic quirk that we retained the occupational title for "descendant job 1" and not "descendant job 2". Recall that "computers" themselves were once human beings that did arithmetic.
Similarly, programmers aren't going away, though we may stop calling them "programmers" and the day-to-day details of their methods and tools will change.
And if you are concerned simply with a narrow focus on specific methods of today, then programmers have already survived the postmodern shift. As scarce as blacksmiths are professional programmers who key in word values with switches on the front on their machine, and almost as scarce as those that deal with any significant amount of assembly language. Programmers and their tools have already evolved with time, and a modern programmer mucking about in
The reader comments on these articles are themselves interesting. I especially think this one is telling: "As a Java programmer I haven't looked up searching and sorting algorithms in Knuth". Being a Java programmer myself, I can certainly appreciate having these kinds of algorithms in a standard library. I still think you should spend some time with Knuth or some other book (or online documentation) and understand how they work. That's one problem I see, not enough programmers today learning the fundamentals and just letting the libraries do all the hard lifting for them.
Eric
Thanks to All-Bran, William Shatner 'goes like no man has gone before'
At first I thought, "Of course! Everybody knows that." My wife and I were just chatting about that last night before bed. (Maybe the rest of you should use romantic talk like that, and you'd get some more often.)
Then I realized that the author knew way more words than I do. He must be right.
sigs, as if you care.
A proof of the demise of the programmer the article points out:
The advent of the Codeless Development Environment (CDE)
I wonder if these "Codeless Development" environments are they themselves written in a codeless environment. If you have ever coded in a pure gui environments with boxes and connectors and such you will quickly learn the limitations.
i started playing with computers in 1985, earning my living from them since '89, and since before that i hear about the dismissal of the programer... and it never happened.
i lost count of how many "friendly" languages were created that would allow a "normal" human being to code, and we still have programers doing the actual work or fixing the snafus of "normal people".
What ? Me, worry ?
I should have known better but after all it was the early 70's and I was still into the free love thing and all and the Beatles made those guru dudes look so cool. Besides the Indian chicks were really nice looking. Who new knew my nerd seed would start such a problem. Sorry about all those job stealin' bastards. Really!
Your analogy only works if you insist that the names used to describe the professions haven't changed.
The need to pump a belows and pound on the iron with a hammer may have vanished, but the need for people skilled at using tools to produce parts for other tools is still filled quite comfortably by machinists.
And they still get paid pretty well.
I no longer care if I am ever again employeed in the IT industry. It was fun for a while, it provided a very nice income for a while also. The thing is, while I love the technical aspects of "making shite work", there is little reward in the career as a whole. You ( most of us ) fight daily battles just to make things work, and at the end of the day it is a thankless proposition.
Most of you have to know that your employers have utter disdain for you by now. If not, keep working and it will become evident one day. We are expected to accomplish miracles, we take the heat from both management and the userbase, work stupid hours, and most likely will die young doing it. For what? To make something work that never should have passed the first meeting of the minds. The trouble is, the minds in the meeting were not fit to determine if the solution was correct in the first place. You optimists can have one less resume' to compete against, I no longer want to work in IT. It is a thankless, never-ending struggle that solves nothing at the end of the day.
For those lucky enough to do interesting work or admin some sort of Unix environment, you made the right move somewhere. Most IT jobs suck, and offer little to no actual satisfaction.
I am off to embrace a new career, preferably one that offers the possibility of holding something of value in my hands at the end of the day.
While I think that programmers are "evolving", the
analogy with "Blacksmith and the
Bookkeeper" is not right.
Bookkeepers, blacksmiths, even secretaries are
disappearing because their jobs can be automated and computers are taking over.
Programmers are disappearing because of a different reason. It is not because computers are
taking over us; to this day no computer can write a program or fix a bug.
I believe that the problem is that the software is
becoming so complex that what could have been done by one-person years ago, takes a team
these days. I remember that in 1991 I wrote several systems like inventory managers, stuff
like that. Today you require testers, DBA expert, GUI designers...
I think it is more like what happened to the
aviation industry. In the 1900 you could build your own airplane, there were people building
airplanes all over the world. Today, only a few companies can do that,
and the demand for airplane-building skills is gone. Well, not gone,
its just that it has changed, now you have to specialize in some area, you can not know ALL what
is required to build an airplane. ( well, unless you are Burt Rutan)
I think that software is evolving the same.
Eventually we will have to specialize in GUI, or DB or whatever. The generic programmer is not
disappearing, just evolving. ( Read with Hannibal Lecters accent. )
My 2 cents...
-Ale
Posting my comment from the other "extinction" article here...
.com years. I personally know at least 5 administrators and programmers that refused to ever accept a lower-paying job when things went bad. They lost their cars, their houses, and their dignity as a result, and all for a job none of them liked doing in the first place.
These judgement day scenarios are based on a big fallacy I haven't yet seen addressed:
The market for software developers is not standing still; it's growing tremendously. We're just not seeing it because a lot of new development is going overseas. However, there's no sign that the demand is going to slow down, and there's not an infinite number of tech workers overseas.
Already Indian workers are concerned about having their own tech bubble, as other countries start coming online with cheaper workers. China, Phillipines, and others are starting to take work away from India.
Further, despite claims to the contrary, it's not just as easy to move programming jobs overseas as it is for manufacturing jobs. Indian programmers aren't just plucked from the trees...they've gone through years of training and education just like we have. It costs a lot more time and money to train a programmer than to train an assembly-line worker. Again, there are not infinite resources available. It just seems that way because India has been building up a highly-trained workforce for a long time--without work to give them.
Our own tech boom and bust resulted in scads of untrained, unskilled workers getting paid too much to do too little. Reality check: there's no such thing as an HTML programmer. Writing VB is not going to earn you $50/hr. If you don't like what you're doing, you're not in the right line of work. The lion's share of jobs lost to offshoring are jobs that were filled by wannabes during the
Finally, as other posts have noted, the cost of paying a programmer is not the largest portion of developing software. Gathering requirements, testing, working with customers and clients, managing change, administering systems; all enter into it and have similar contributions to the overall cost. In the case of offshoring, almost all of these become more expensive...in some cases much more expensive.
Look, that technology is already here!!
Behold, a program which is capable of designing a new program!!
#include <stdio.h>
int main ( void )
{
FILE * output = fopen ( "c:\\newprogram.c", "w" );
fprintf ( output, "#include <stdio.h>\nint main ( void )\n{\nprintf(\"hello world!\");\nreturn 0;\n}" );
fclose ( output );
return 0;
}
Were all doomed you fools!!
The easy problems with general solutions have been solved. The hard problems will only be solved when someone wishes to gamble sufficient resources on them. (A programmer can gamble his spare time, anyone else must gamble money.)
This DOESN'T mean that programming will become an extinct job classification, but it sure means that the number of jobs will decline.
What's uncertain is the time frame. And nobody knows. I include the author (both me, and the guy who wrote the article).
Who hires people to write the kind of program that spreadsheets can handle? Nobody! (But just last year I automated an office procedure in MSExcel using scripting. Python wasn't portable enough in the desired environments. [I wasn't allowed to install a new language interpreter.])
But notice that there are two complemenatry trends in action:
1) Most of the things that used to be programmed have available general solutions
2) Most of the things that need doing are programmed interaction of higher level tools.
So long as this trend continues, there will be a declining, but continuing, need for programmers.
At some point, though, an AI will become general purpose enough to handle some reasonable subset of the tasks of a programmer. At this point, the job of the programmer will change drastically. At this point a programmer will become one who can describe a task sufficiently well that the atomaton can implement it. This already exists in specific problem domains. Screen painting programs like glade, e.g., but the transition point will occur when the automatic programmer becomes much more general.
We've probably got a decade. Possibly two. I'd be surprised if it takes longer than that.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
That time for me was this morning. My clients still appreciate small, fast code that can be developed quickly, doesn't fall over and is agile enough to adapt to new requirements. Most of it is in Python, some of it is in Pyrex or C and yeah, some of it is still in assembly. Assembly is not a waste of time or a hangover from the Apollo days but a useful addition to any coder's arsenal especially given the insight into Leaky Abtractions that it brings. YMMV of course - asm is really not required for high-level business apps but it comes in really handy for certain kinds of video processing.
The vast majority of coding today is ignorant of such constraints. A 2K limit for even the simplest of applications -- even those written in Java, which was ostensibly designed to minimize an executable's footprint -- would today be considered absurd. And that's just for the minimalist application. Never mind the JVM, which is sort of required for anything meaningful to occur. But an entire operating system squeezed into 2K? It is obvious that the skills required for a successful programmer in 1969 are very different from the skills required for a successful programmer today.
And yet they're surprisingly similar. Given:
can you do X for us in time T? I contend that all programming is about limitations and overcoming them: whether they be memory, time, operating system capability or human. No super-genetically evolved system is going to replace a smart human anytime soon. This guy needs to do two things: a) learn a real programming language and b) read the Mythical Man Month. There are no silver bullets.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Is this guy joking?? The field of programming or software engineering is far from obsoleted/superceded/replaced.
Go and ask computer users (both novices and professionals) about what they think of the software they use day to day. Most will complain about the software they use (unreliable, unstable, missing essential capabilities...). That alone tells us there is still much more work to be done.
I don't think it matters whether you use UML diagrams, Java, C#. What matters is that everyone in business today is a computer user, and a large percent of these computer users are not happy with the software they are using.
There is plenty of work for those that can solve these problems. IMHO.
The automobile is a mature technology. If everyone would settle for one styling of car, then we could drive the price of the car so low that the profit margin is barely 1 penny. There would be no need to change the metal stampers. There would be no need to modify anything in the car. All 200 million adults in the USA would drive the exact same 4-door sedan. The economies of scale for the exact same car would be enormous. The cost could probably be driven down to $5000 per vehicle.
Yet, this scenario will never materialize, for people's tastes change constantly. This constant change requires new metal stamps and the ensuing alterations to the engine and powertrain. So, mechanical engineers will always have work.
Now, consider the word processor. It is a mature technology. There is nothing fundamentally new on the horizon. Yet, we still need programmers to change the look and feel as the tastes of the customer change.
Further, one payroll processing system does not meet the styling tastes of all the corporate customers. Each company will want programmers to tailor the payroll system so that it just suits the tastes of the company's management. No two companies will have the same tastes.
People are different, and these differences change eternally. Rod Stewart sung "The First Cut Hurts the Deepest". Now, Sheryl Crow sings "The First Cut Hurts the Deepest". The songs are identical, but the delivery is different. The new style of delivery now addresses the tastes of the new generation of punks in high school.
"...do you think I'm sexy, and you want my body....come on sugar, tell me so!" -- Rod Steward, 1977.
Extinction of the programmer species means for me that I lost a few years of my life and now I have to change my carreer.
If it happened, but it hasn't.
To succeed as a programmer, develop better powers of discernment (by observing others you respect) and learn how to maintain confidence in your decisions.
..."self writing programs in the armchair IT publication "PC World". I think it was the July or August edition. It was about this company that is writing the "next generation" of development tools. They suggest that in the near future everyone will be a programmer because this new approach basically lets anyone build their own applications by pointing and clicking and writing basic text descriptions of what they want the application to do. Then this development environment sets out to building the application to their specs.
To me, I thought... "Aha! He wants to make programming go the way that word processing and data entry did after the 80s". For the youngsters in the audience, believe it or not, but there used to be a very short lived period of time when people went to school to learn how to become word processors or data entry specialists. As soon as GUI based word processing and office suites were released, those people lost their jobs because "anyone could do the tasks". Is that really true though? Read on...
Yes, it is true that pretty much anyone who is plunked down in front of GUI based word processing software or an office suite can build a pretty impressive looking document. It doesn't require schooling anymore, just some introduction and you're off. But, does that mean that same person can design a glossy publication like a magazine or even a well done news letter? No. What about the person who can set up a basic spreadsheet? Would you want them being the DBA for your Oracle database? Probably not. So the titles have changed and the availability of jobs shrunk. I think you're going to see the same thing with programming.
There probably will be a point when the average office jockey will be able to build a basic application for use in their workplace. But that guy isn't going to be a programmer and the program he built isn't going to be efficient, compact or reliable. Programmers will still be needed, but just not in the way that they are now. It's likely that programmers will become more specialized. (Just like you now have graphic design people who are the extension of the more talented word processors of the late 70s) Programmers aren't going to disappear. They are going to become something else.
Un-news
Goff seems to believe that high-level programming tools and genetic programming will soon eliminate the need for programmers, but nothing I have seen suggests that such tools are anywhere near able to do this. Maybe someday, but not in the near future. What we've really seen is that the combination of more advanced tools and greatly increased computer power has enabled people with very limited skills to do things that would once have required a real programmer. The result is that lots of people can make web pages and create spreadsheets and so forth, but these are essentially all additions to the work that must still be done by real programmers. Real programmers are still needed both for the more difficult tasks and for even fairly simple ones that nobody has taken the trouble to create high-level tools for.
It seems to me that there is a parallel in medicine. With all the modern medicines, tests, and instruments (such as thermometers, blood pressure meters, glucose meters) available to the average person, the non-physician can successfully diagnose and treat many illnesses. This hasn't, however, eliminated the need for real experts to deal with the harder stuff.
... from the article, the author states that 'coding is dead' because
Ahh, the mythical Blue Unicorn; users will be able to make their own Uber Apps and developers will sink into the La Brea Tar Pits. That could be the case if development was only banging code. It is actually deconstructing a business process/issue into manageable chunks, then writing code to make those chunks work together. I have yet to meet a business person who can explain the function of their job in a linear process, so there is no way that person could write their own program, unless you had a magical CDE that could translate abstract, random process descriptions into real code (forget about efficient code/processes).
Ahh, the anonymous factory that churns out components that our business person can then assemble into a working application? Been there, tried that with EJB. Somehow that whole promise of component EJBs never really took off. I wonder why? Could it be that this idea is CRAP? Hmm...
Non Sequitur. The number of quality jobs aren't decreasing. The monkeys that thought they could get a MCSE and start making $65k with no experience are (hopefully) flushed out of the pool. Soon the monkeys who are unable to do the work of Business Analyst/Junior Project Manager will also be gone/outsourced. The jobs are there; you just have to know how to look for them.
Another non-sequitur. A degree means nothing in terms of fitness for doing a job---except to PHBs who don't know how to judge a candidate's worth other than by dead trees (resume/degree: equally worthless). You can certainly be a good developer without having ever taken one college class. What matters is skill, experience, adaptability, talent, and self motivation to learn new stuff.
More:
Yes, last week, in fact. I've been plowing through Vol 3 looking for a better way to search a bunch of stuff across multiple iSeries/DB2 files. So what? Reading Knuth doesn't mean you're a better code monkey. It can help, but just like any other resource, it is in the application. Einstein said something to the effect that the most important fact one could know is the Library's address.
Yeah, right.
In the 80's when I was studying for my first degree in C.S. (yes, I'm an old fart), the fad of the time was formal methods. The basic idea is this: a problem is specified using a formal language, the specification is then translated into code automatically. This was supposed to herald the end of imperative programming languages and programmers. The major flaw was assuming anyone could put together a specification in the first place.
Slashdot will become extinct if they keep posting this mindless dreck.
/.
I posit that AI out there can already write articles better than this dreck. So perhaps Dreck writing should already be extinct, but here we yet again see more dreck on
About the time we have code writing AI, we will have passed Vinge Singularity and all professions will be extinct.
I have to wonder if the author ever worked on anything other than web pages. Or very simple coding issues.
I work in telecom with a university educated work force (including PHDs and Masters degrees) and these folks have a tough time building quality systems given the constantly changing requirements , competitive demands and huge complexity of the systems.
Complexity is only increasing as we go forward. In almost any field you now have much larger programming teams working on more complex problems.
This is as Naive as when the thought high level laguages (moving from assembly) Cobol, Visual Basic, OOP, 4GL, 5GL etc... would eliminate programming as a profession.
As the tools became more powerfull, the problem space became more complex. If anything there has been a push beyond the toolsets and coding today is more difficult than it has been in the past, rather than simpler.
Programming large scale complex systems is so difficult now that hardly any groups out there consider it manageable.
If there is any profession where we currently can't easily get a handle on, it is programming in the large. Once you have AI that can handle this, what couldn't it do?
You do realize that historically it is normal for around 35-40% of the non-institutionalized working age (ie not imprisoned or commited) population not be employed?
t xt
ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/lf/aat1.
And if you'd like to see about part-time workers you can get recent statistics here:
http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab5.htm
Please note, there's nothing wrong with a part of the population being employed part time by choice. The BLS statistics differentiate these as people employed part time for economic/non-economic reasons... if you look at the stats you'll see around 4-5 million people are employed part-time for economic reasons. You can find those stats here:
http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab5.htm
According to the BLS the labor force is around 150 million:
http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab1.htm
Out of a labor force of around 150 million that means that we have about 3-4% of the labor force working part time because they can't get full time work. While I'd prefer this to be a lower percentage, it doesn't seem to be a great and shocking problem.
Also, would you please source your data above. Absent primary sourcing I've absolutely no reaon to believe your facts.
1. Article is a bit wordy. If the author's Java code is as wordy as that article, then no wonder he sees code generators replacing him. The trick is factoring repetition so that you don't need code generators. If Java is not dynamic enough to factor, then use Python or Lisp or the like.
2. Automation has NOT been a significant factor in my domain. Code generators are usually used by people who write bloated code to begin with. OOP's poorly-defined relationship with relational databases has also created a demand for tools attempting to bridge that gap by generating code. If anything, this OO/R conflict increased demand for coders. (Note I am not bashing OO here, just saying there is a philosophical conflict with relational that has yet to be resolved, resulting in tedious translation efforts.)
3. AI is irrelavant because cheaper bandwidth means that machines and people can hook up with cheap overseas human brains. Why invent cheap brains when we have billions of starving eager brains around the world?
4. I don't see bookkeeping safe from the same forces. As more and more transactions are electronic, your bookkeeper can be in Asia also, along with the coders. Programmers may be the first hit, but I doubt they will be the last.
Table-ized A.I.
Obviously, Goff knows nothing about the practice of computing science. But he still manages to hawk out three crappy articles about it. Which get on the /. frontpage... Man, that guy is good.
First of all, your argument comparing programmers to blacksmiths is already a counter-proof for what you are saying.
Sure, we don't have many blacksmiths, but let's look at the role of a blacksmith:
All they did was make things out of metal. They were what we now replaced with machines. The few innovative blacksmiths, who created new advances, were what are now engineers. Nothing has changed - only evolved. And what was once a role for a person is no longer.
Now, you are saying that there will be no need for programmers in the same sense of how we no longer need blacksmiths. But I ask you, do we have a programmer re-type every line of code for each and every piece of software that is sold? Because that would be the role of a 'blacksmith' programmer.
A programmer (or large group of) writes the first piece of software, which must usually be innovative, or better then what exists, in order to provide a use. Sure, there are countless pieces of code being re-written, or written poorly, but that is more for learning than for business, at least if they plan to survive. And when there are copies of software in the mainstream it is merely for economical competition, which will never change.
With the open source movement, or even with API's of old, there is no need to write every line of code over again, but rather to use them to make whatever new piece of software it is that you are planning to make. This involves making software that has never existed, which cannot be automated.
So I conclude that software programmers have never from the start been blacksmiths, or at least have not been for a very long time. What we provide is a constantly changing, evolving, and adapting use of logic in the form of code. No automation will ever replace that.
The number of programmers will not be decreasing to extremely low numbers either, since the more advanced software becomes the harder it is for individuals to create it. Large groups are required, for long periods of time (How long does it take to make a new game or operating system compared to 20 years ago).
You argument is not only wrong in practice, but wrong in theory. It's ridiculous.
Writing software is hideously complicated.
The skills required to successfully design and impliment software remain light-years beyond quantification - unlike the skills required to build a cart wheel or hammer, or, for that matter, a car body or a silicon wafer.
The concept of a "software" factory, building generic components, is more or less exactly that originally touted by OO back in the 80s.
This approach failed because large components have not been made (people tend to make "stack" and "list", not "user interface" and "VPN") and because of the huge front-loaded cost of making such components general-purpose rather than one-shot.
--
Toby
So somehow this stuff is going to start writing itself? I don't think so.
The software components idea is like building a machine out of stock parts rather than designing every little bit yourself. That's great but it still doesn't make up for the vastly increasing complexity of software. If you count parts and inter-relationships, you've still got more complexity that needs to be engineered.
OK, so yes, some narrow classes of software like certain office apps can be designed and built in more and more automated ways, but this also doesn't make up for the explosion of what computers and software can do.
Just because people don't readily see code, they seem to think it can be magically woven in ways that engineered physical objects like ships and planes and cars obviously cannot. They also think that code is code is code, which is like saying a machine that designs and builds toasters automatically can also design and build ships.
Sorry, code is like matter and components are like parts and you still need engineers to put the crap together.
I wonder if once nerds lose their jobs and therefore their money, they will return to the bottom of the social pyramid again.
I'm not sure if you're just trying to troll, but there is a lot of truth in this. When I was in my 20's, before so many people were making so much money with software, a nerd was an extremely pejorative term to call someone. Today people in our industry get so much more respect. I fear that once money starts leaving high tech, we will again be returned to this position.
I'm begging someone to take away this blow-hard's keyboard.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
There's a better model than blacksmiths: musicians.
Before the advent of recorded music, if you wanted music, you paid musicians to come around and play it for you. It was expensive to keep them, they became status symbols, but they were commonplace in wealthy households and courts.
After recorded music came, the number of musicians required dropped off amazingly. Just tanked.
Programmers are increasingly headed in that direction because of automation: better and better libraries, software packages with increased configurability, better management of software projects. It's gradually getting easier to make a given problem go away with fewer and fewer programmers.
The countertendancy - as large problems become cheaper to solve, more people pay for them to be solved - is sustaining us for the moment, but there is no guarentee that those two forces will remain in step indefinitely.
But even in the age of fluidly configurable, massively integrated software packages (try: Apache 2, MySQL4 and WordPress - millions of lines of code with a nice user interface, and all it does is run your blog) there's still a need for the "rockstars" - the programmers who actually produce those systems.
Professional musicians these days have to fight to stay in the game, and they have to be really, really good at *something* even if it's just pouting on posters.
Programming is going the same way: it's no longer the easy option. If you're programming right now for a reason other than "I'm really good at this" or "I love this" and, preferably, both - get out of the game while you still have an income. You have less than ten years, possibly more like five.
Two more jobs, if you're lucky.
But for the rest of us? The people who can hack it under these conditions? I think it's going to be a return to the Golden Age of Hacking - the time when it was a game for the profoundly talented and educated - rather than these hordes of analgorithmic munchkins we've been competing with for years.
Rock star programmers, dude. Not garage mechanics, rock stars. You can see it already in the celebrity accorded to people like Linus, or EvHead. As software is increasingly "one hit, one kill" - packages which simply dominate an entire category - that kind of rapid rise and fall is going to be the norm, rather than the exception, in the publically popular software sphere.
That's the rock star niche.
And the rest of us will be like those touring rock bands you see all over America, or the players at your local symphony hall.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
I think the author was rewarded in school for writing long sentences with big, trendy words. This sort of ridiculous blather is the result.
Some of my favorites:
uh-huh
Sure, they'll mechanize that one any day...
mt
I knew I should have studied accounting...
Seriously though. I believe that the same things he uses to point to the demise of the programmer could also be applied to his test case of the bookkeeper. I believe that it would be nearly as easy to create a "bookkeeping factory" as it would be to truly create a "Programmer factory". But, I don't believe that either of them are going to happen any time soon.
Other pieces of his logic are suspect as well. Yes there has been a decline in the number of computer science students enrolled, but the article doesn't say if that statistic takes into account the number of students enrolled in Information Technology majors, or other related majors. I know that a lot of the students that started in Computer Science with me eventually switched to Business Information Technology to avoid having to take all the math required in CS.
IANAL... But I play one on
to say bookeeping has advanced/evolved to accountant, CPA, auditor, banker, financial advisor, finance professor, .... while saying blacksmithing has dies is so totally incorrect and unfair.
We today have welders and all the related fields of metal working that back then did not exist.
Also the writer seems to have skipped over the 300 year lapse between the introduction of the hindu-arabic decimal system and its finally becomming mainstream over the roman numeral system. Hmmm, seems the elitest roman numeral accountants pursued the lies and arguements that it is silly to think that nothing "zero" can have value....
It should be noted that roman numeral mathmatics is so limited that we could have never developed computers with it.
I also noted in skimming over the article that the writer mentions the "software factory" in MS terms.... this two is with error for a number of reasons, the least of which is not the fact the the book being referenced uses "pattern" as a catch all phrase where as a matter of convience it is converted to various things thruout the book.
MS is a market company first and formost and a third party integrator second. MS's POV on software factories is with distortion of reality and biasing towards MS, rather then honesty about "putting things together" in a manner that automates alot more of what a programmer wouold otherwise do manually ---- but then isn't the act of programming the goal of creating automations of complexity, typically made up of simpler complexities, and done so in order to make the use and reuse of teh complexity easy for the users of the complexity.... hence a natural evolution of the field of programming....rather than an MS invention...
I'd imagine this is enough to bring doubt to the writers message, but I'm sure there is more in error..... though hey.... it sound sooooo good.....
30 years ago, a large percentage of the programmers out there were writing what was basically spreadsheet code. Some manager needed some information, and that meant a programmer had to write a program to read data, generate reports, and add them to the daily jobs. Then came spreadsheets, and the manager could do that work instead. The programmer was out of a job...
Well, no. Instead, he worked on more sophisticated analyses, software that didn't fit in Visicalc or Lotus 1-2-3.
Time after time over the decades there's been predictions that some new productivity tool was going to replace programmers. It hasn't happened. Because what a programmer does, basically, is to do the things that people havethought up that haven't yet become popular enough or common enough to be canned in a tool.
The advent of the Codeless Development Environment
If what you're doing doesn't involve code, it's not development, it's configuration. And that's great, because having programmers wasting time on configuration is a drag on productivity. Anything you already know how to do, that you've already written code to do, you don't do it again. If you do, well, that's a problem you need to fix, write a program to do it, go on to something else...
Chances are if you're a blacksmith in this day and age, you're actually in pretty high demand. My father-in-law does it as a side "hobby". Sells some of his stuff a local craft shows, demonstrates at schools...he's really good, and people are willing to pay decently to get him to make them stuff.
There may come a time when we need fewer programmers, like blacksmiths. But those that are will be special "craftsman". We'll just have to change our style to fit with the times.
Adapt or die...the way of nature.
Sean D.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
The author seems to think that smithy means the same thing as smith or blacksmith. A smithy is a smith's workplace.
The author posits that blacksmithing has died out, while bookkeeping has continued, because the knowledgebase that the blacksmith needed was ripe for scientific analysis and automation, while the bookkeeper has to deal with constantly changing requirements. Therefore, since bookkeepers have to always change/upgrade/modify/tweak their craft, they aren't as likely to be automated.
He asks how many people are acquainted with a bookkeeper, and how many are acquainted with a blacksmith. No, I'm not acquainted with many blacksmiths. How many mechanical engineers, or mechanics am I acquainted with? More than bookkeepers, I'm afraid.
The trade of blacksmithing, where one person forges, casts and manufactures something, cradle to grave, is largely gone. However, there are an extensive number of people in this world who know how to shape metal into useful things; I believe they're better known, these days, as engineers. They may not do the actual bending, machinging, forging, etc., but they do the design, which is something a blacksmith did. Also, mechanics may not manufacture their parts (something to which the author alludes), but blacksmiths were ALSO responsible for repairing existing items. Sometimes, that meant fabricating a part, sometimes that meant taking a pre-fabricated part and applying it (or modifying a similar part) to get it working. Mechanics do that, these days, and they have a much larger catalog of pre-fabricated parts to work with, so they don't typically NEED to fabricate a part for the job. Although, in my shade-tree mechanic experience, I've been known to take an existing, not-quite-what-I-needed part, and make it work.
So, while the trade of blacksmithing, as a cradle-to-grave manufacturer, mechanic and engineer has diminished, the different roles they played have spawned their own career fields. Engineers use machines to produce much larger quantities of parts than traditional craftsmen could manage, and their quality is more consistent. Is this the demise of a trade, or simply the application of technology to improve its productivity? I would argue that, if you took all the people who are now working in roles which blacksmiths once filled, the various sub-fields of blacksmithing have MORE people working in it than the bookkeeping field.
I develop websites, for internal use, for my employer. The language and technologies I use were pretty well evolved before I finished college and went to work in this career field. I don't have to code machine language or even assembly; some other developer developed the tools I use. Because I don't have to re-invent the wheel every time my boss wants a new web app, my productivity is much higher. The original programmers were the "blacksmiths" of this field; they created some practical, useful things for their clients, and they create tools which improved their own productivity. Their tools led to the development of other tools. Consequently, there are few if any programming "blacksmiths" in the world today; most all programmers are engineers, mechanics, or factory workers feeding the automated systems. The titles just haven't changed; that's all.
As for bookkeeping not being as ripe for automation, how many bookkeepers do you know who would be willing to go back to pen and paper? Give up their calculators? Give up their computers? I'm willing to be the answer is very few. Their field has also benefitted from automation; a bookkeeper today, with his computers and software, is at least a couple orders of magnitude more productive than an old "quill and paper" bookkeeper of a couple centuries ago. However, the title has changed little, although the career has changed significantly.
As a programmer, I see the technologies I'm working with evolving on a regular basis; I have to adapt to those changes, like the bookkeeper in his analogy. Does that mean that my career will become extinct? I sincerely doubt it; I'll probably be more productive ten years from now, but I sincerely doubt that an automated softwar
... by the Dew of Mountains the thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning
If you apply genetic programming to software and hardware development then we may see the software and hardware breeder. This will be necessary due to genetic load ( you don't want to run microsoft runt office). Breeding or artificial selection is probably the most power full technology we know of and yet so simple. So I will have a software stud and you can purchase my germplasm to introduce to your stock of office productivity software that you are breeding. This will become necessary to cope with the "emergent properties" of the the complexity that we will have to face. In other words we don't know what will happen we we start yanking on those wires. So we will have to breed purely on the phenotype of the software who cares what language its written in
I finally went and RTFA, and I disagree that the blacksmith disappeared. The blacksmith became the machinist, and the machinist population is slowly decreasing, but is unlikely to go away.
Production machinists (who were in many cases still quite a skilled population) are being replaced by CNC machines, and the "machinists" now are the people who turn art into things that the machines can cut, set up the machines, diagnose their problems, etc. Eventually they may be replaced entirely by mechanical/manufacturing engineers, but the function will be much the same-- turn hunks of metal into useful stuff for people. They just do it in a higher tech environment.
The more blacksmith-like machinist is the toolmaker. These people are ever fewer in number, but are likely to never disappear entirely. Just like there is a small but steady need for technical glassblowers (to supply chemists) there will be a need for toolmakers/precision machinists in the foreseeable future.
Programming could be seen in a similar way-- the tools are improving drastically-- my dad started with toggle switches to set the bits, then moved to punch cards. By the time I was programming, the punchcard was all but dead, the microcomputer had just come on scene, and the mainframe was about to become a brontosaurus. Things were done with a command line. Now there are fancy IDEs for all sorts of languages, graphical languages and development tools, automated code generators, etc. It's still programming, just with different tools. The need for codemonkeys may decline, but it probably won't go away. There will be a market for them just like there still is for analog electrical engineers in the digital age. There won't be a need for people to hand produce boring code, but there will be clever things that need to be coded by hand, and probably lots of them.
Maybe you guys didn't catch this sure-fire sign of overly-academic writing (sometimes also found outside academia, alas):
The pomo coder stripe has evolved into something quite different than what it once may have been.
You probably thought that word was "porno" -- but no, it's short for post-modern, and it's thrown around all the time for no good reason in academia. I stopped reading the article after seeing that, and a smattering of insofars and posits when I flipped ahead to part 2. Oh yeah, and I ran into this:
But as we will see, the impact on the exogenous environment of remittable activities of autonomous agents can be profound indeed.
Indeed, indeed. That's a great sign that you are reading a paper that will take thousands and thousands of words to argue something that could have been said in three crisp, short paragraphs. Nothing against the writer -- he's got a great vocabulary, and he's using the words correctly... but you see this all the time in academic writing, because "it just doesn't sound right" without a few latin phrases and a "dialectic" or two, because everyone around you is writing like this, too. Sadly, it only complicates or even loses the real argument, and most of your readers who have never been force-fed this kind of fare and made to like it will also be lost. So, to the author: Fight the impulse!! Turn away from the dark side! Therein lies a twisty maze of passages, all alike....
Bookkeepers also do custom work - but what stops those needs from becoming standardized? Why don't businesses deliberately organize their affairs, so they fit within an exact model of a business, so that accountancy does become standardized? I think the reason is because different organizations of a business is often a competitive advantage - they don't want to standardize it; and if they did, straight off someone else would come up with a better organization and put them out of business.
In rich countries people normally don't starve to death, don't die of preventable diseases, live longer than in most other places and only have bad old years because they are too lazy to go out and do some exercise, stop smoking and eat sensibly.
Unless you are posting from Sudan or a jail cell in China I just think you have no idea what a human standard of living really is.
People in rich countries, even poor people in relative terms, are well fed (heck obesity is frequently associated with poverty in rich countries) and adequatelly clothed, so frankly cut the bullshit man.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I have heard this argument or something like about once every 6 months for the last 15 years.
Basically the argument goes, "in the *future*, things will get more automated so there will be no need for programmers. Programmers are like [insert lousy analogy] and in future will become obsolete just like [insert lousy analogy]."
The whole point of programming is identifying that which can be automated and eliminating the need for mindless repetition. It's almost a tautology to say that the hardest thing of all to automate is the process of reducing what used to be considered a difficult labour/thought intensive process into a program. To do this requires a greater level of understanding than whatever job is being automated. We will write software to deliver packages, perform surgery, teach mathematics to children, etc etc, but until computers are smarter than humans we will never write software that figures out how to write software *for novel applications*. I think its nearer the truth to say that eventually everybody except programmers will become redundant.
This is good thing by the way, it only seems like a bad thing due to our economy which is designed for optimal distribution of scare resources. Until we rejig economics to deal with a post scarcity society, we are doomed to invent bullshit filltime work to make up for all the professions that are made redundant [but that's another story...]
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
This is a very narrow view on what is happening and will happen with a very large number of jobs in the Global Economic structure that has arrived since the 1990's. If you want, you can consider this whole process a Canary in a Coal Mine example of what is going to happen to most jobs in the US and all other first world nations.
There are still blacksmiths in the world today, but the economy supports a much lower density of blacksmiths today in the nation. The only way that the few blacksmiths today can manage to survive is if they are very good and have more of an artistic quality to their nature than a pure smithy skillset.
The only way any American developers will survive is if they have exceptional skills that makes tham capable of competing on a much more competative market or are able to find a density of developers low enough in the local area that they are able to do all the customization work necessary to support the local demand of the software industry.
But the days of every geek making 6 digits a year have long past. It's just as well if you ask me. Now the only people who will code are the people who do it because they love it, not because they can get paid for it. I've run into a lot of pretty useless individuals who have moved into software development because they took a 6 week course in MCSE or JAVA and got picked up by some contract house.
The people that will be left working on software development in countries like US, Canada, and most of the European nations that participate in the Global Economy will follow this pattern.
In the end, the blacksmith and the bookkeeper are only convenient metaphors, not to be confused with inherently meaningful symbols. Any number of contrasting metaphors may have served just as well.
Umm, no. This essay purports to draw an analogy between blacksmiths and programmers, with a contrast to bookkeepers. In the end, the analogy better be as close to perfect as possible. You don't get to cop out in the last paragraph of a three-part essay! If the blacksmith isn't perfectly analogous to a programmer, then keep looking -- you haven't found your analogy yet!
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
One of the article's central claims is that a "book-keeping factory" is impossible. On my home world we have entities called "accountancy firms" which are exactly that.
So programmers won't die off until AI matures, and AI won't mature without programmers. Beautiful!
The problem with this analogy is that it's too simple. "Programming" spans a greater skill set than "blacksmith". A more accurate comparison would be not to "programmers" as a whole, but to "low level programmers" -- people doing tightly coded assembly, or even low level libraries and objects in C, C++ etc. Because these things are equivalent to the things smiths made -- commodity components like fasteners, gears, and even small machines like electric motors.
Like somebody else said, programmers will become more like the engineers who take common components and put them together, only sometimes making any low level changes to the common parts.
Yeah, it was great when we all did amazing things with our 2K of program space in assembly code. I really miss those days. But I dont want to do that anymore than I want to design and fabricate a gear so I can build a robot. Now certainly there are going to be a few people somewhere who need to design things like that, on a low level.
You can find all sorts of similar analogies. How about textiles? Do you know anybody who makes their own fabrics? Do you know anybody who makes their own clothing and who laments the fact that they dont get to weave the fabric first?
I'd rather stand on the shoulders of giants -- and create bigger and better things using the components people have perfected before me.
When I first started to read this article (which I found tedious to read) I thought sh!t, he's right! And then I realized I'll still be programming in the future, just using more tools than low level programming. Already I use code generators and libraries of functions and object components. Programming will be more like engineering the overall structure, or designing the data base or protocols, etc. That's more fun anyway.
Nostalgia aside, hooray for the death of the programmer! Long live the Software Engineer!
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.