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New Book Argues Automation Is Making Software Developers Less Capable
dcblogs writes: Nicholas Carr, who stirred up the tech world with his 2003 essay, IT Doesn't Matter in the Harvard Business Review, has published a new book, The Glass Cage, Automation and Us, that looks at the impact of automation of higher-level jobs. It examines the possibility that businesses are moving too quickly to automate white collar jobs. It also argues that the software profession's push to "to ease the strain of thinking is taking a toll on their own [developer] skills." In an interview, Carr was asked if software developers are becoming less capable. He said, "I think in many cases they are. Not in all cases. We see concerns — this is the kind of tricky balancing act that we always have to engage in when we automate — and the question is: Is the automation pushing people up to higher level of skills or is it turning them into machine operators or computer operators — people who end up de-skilled by the process and have less interesting work?
I certainly think we see it in software programming itself. If you can look to integrated development environments, other automated tools, to automate tasks that you have already mastered, and that have thus become routine to you that can free up your time, [that] frees up your mental energy to think about harder problems. On the other hand, if we use automation to simply replace hard work, and therefore prevent you from fully mastering various levels of skills, it can actually have the opposite effect. Instead of lifting you up, it can establish a ceiling above which your mastery can't go because you're simply not practicing the fundamental skills that are required as kind of a baseline to jump to the next level."
I certainly think we see it in software programming itself. If you can look to integrated development environments, other automated tools, to automate tasks that you have already mastered, and that have thus become routine to you that can free up your time, [that] frees up your mental energy to think about harder problems. On the other hand, if we use automation to simply replace hard work, and therefore prevent you from fully mastering various levels of skills, it can actually have the opposite effect. Instead of lifting you up, it can establish a ceiling above which your mastery can't go because you're simply not practicing the fundamental skills that are required as kind of a baseline to jump to the next level."
Wearing shoes prevents you from developing a thick layer of skin on the bottom of your feet.
Please re-read:
Brooks, F. P. , J. (1987). "No Silver Bullet—Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering". Computer 20 (4): 10. doi:10.1109/MC.1987.1663532
http://faculty.salisbury.edu/~xswang/Research/Papers/SERelated/no-silver-bullet.pdf
Automation removes accidental complexity. /discussion
Employer's have no incentive to care whether or not their employees are bored.
That may be true, but it has absolutely nothing to do with what OP was about.
What the book author seems to miss is that today, one good person with good development tools (not even necessarily an "IDE" as OP says), can do the work that 20 good people could do 16 years ago. And I know, because I am doing it now AND I was doing it then.
Example: when 2000 rolled around I worked for a programming company (and was VERY bored there, by the way, no matter how hard I worked). I wasn't a manager or receptionist; I coded all day.
Today, on a decent day, I can easily accomplish 20 times as much, because the languages and tools have improved. But that would not be possible if my tools were "dumbing me down".
Author might as well argue that typewriters were nirvana, and word processors made authors stupid.