The Working Dead: Which IT Jobs Are Bound For Extinction? (infoworld.com)

Slashdot reader snydeq shares an InfoWorld article identifying "The Working Dead: IT Jobs Bound For Extinction." Here's some of its predictions.

• The president of one job leadership consultancy argues C and C++ coders will soon be as obsolete as Cobol programmers. "The entire world has gone to Java or .Net. You still find C++ coders in financial companies because their systems are built on that, but they're disappearing."
• A data scientist at Stack Overflow "says demand for PHP, WordPress, and LAMP skills are seeing a steady decline, while newer frameworks and languages like React, Angular, and Scala are on the rise."
• The CEO and co-founder of an anonymous virtual private network service says "The rise of Azure and the Linux takeover has put most Windows admins out of work. Many of my old colleagues have had to retrain for Linux or go into something else entirely."
• In addition, "Thanks to the massive migration to the cloud, listings for jobs that involve maintaining IT infrastructure, like network engineer or system administrator, are trending downward, notes Terence Chiu, vice president of careers site Indeed Prime."
• The CTO of the job site Ladders adds that Smalltalk, Flex, and Pascal "quickly went from being popular to being only useful for maintaining older systems. Engineers and programmers need to continually learn new languages, or they'll find themselves maintaining systems instead of creating new products."
• The president of Dice.com says "Right now, Java and Python are really hot. In five years they may not be... jobs are changing all the time, and that's a real pain point for tech professionals."

But the regional dean of Northeastern University-Silicon Valley has the glummest prediction of all. "If I were to look at a crystal ball, I don't think the world's going to need as many coders after 2020. Ninety percent of coding is taking some business specs and translating them into computer logic. That's really ripe for machine learning and low-end AI."

Comments

They also never look at embedded software

[Sycraft-fu]

These days, everything is a computer. Your stove, your car, your cable modem, your TV, all are computers. They all have microcontrollers or microprocessors in them to handle various functions. It is cheaper and easier than doing discrete dedicated logic, even for simple things. Well, those need software of course and it turns out C/C++ are the thing that gets used a lot because you have little memory and power to work with. Pennies count in mass production and the smaller a CU, RAM, flash, etc you can get away with the better, but that means the code needs to be small. You aren't loading up Windows and running .NET on a microwave, you are getting a little PIC24 or something and putting on some highly efficient, directed code.

Because of all these embedded devices, there's a lot of market for this kind of thing, it just isn't the trendy shit you see on hip "Web 3.0" sites. It gets done by people with engineering backgrounds at big companies.

Also, speaking of small embedded computers, regular computers themselves have tons of computers in them. Crack open a desktop and you find a lot of chips in there, many of them computers in their own right. Your NIC is a computer. A simple one to be sure, but it is a processor that runs code, it is not all hard wired. Your SSD is a computer, it has a little chip (ARM usually) that runs the code it needs to do its job. Again, someone is writing the code for all that and that code is not being written in Java.

Even when you have a platform that at a high level runs Java/.NET/whatever it had a bunch of lower level code on it.