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

Short sight

[CRC'99]

The entire world has gone to Java or .Net

*cough* What a crock of shit.

Re: Short sight

[Oscaro]

Yep, fir example I work on medical diagnostic software and the amount of data you need to manage and render on screen smoothly is so huge that C++ is the most reasonable and common choice (even if not the only possible one). There are lots of fields where C++ is still king. And that's a shame, because it's a crock of a language.

Re:Short sight

[Dutch Gun]

C++ employers will be employable in the videogame industry for the foreseeable future, at least. I presume that they'll also be employable for working on any large-scale applications that requires support or compatibility beyond what some of the newer, safer, high-performance compiled languages can provide.

People always talk about how terrible C++ is (and it's hard to argue with many of their points), but it continually shows up in the language rankings as a steady #3 to #7 or so, depending on how language "popularity" is figured. It benefits less from being "pure" and more from being incredibly pragmatic as a language, similar to C. R and Go are still lagging far behind, with D almost out of sight. Swift is moving up thanks to iOS, and maybe Kotlin will do the same thanks to Android (but we'll see - I'd literally never heard of it until recently), but those are almost pre-destined to be one-trick ponies due their strong platform ties.

Ultimately, the big problem is that I don't see a real universal contender for high-performance native code taking over from C/C++. There are a lot of promising languages, but at the moment, nothing is really taking off. Simple inertia is pretty hard to overcome, as it turns out.

Final point:

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."

Bwahahahahahaha! Oh damn, we can't even get our chat bots working reliably (we use them to auto-generate bugs and tasks). And in three years they're going to be replacing programmers? Fucking priceless!

Re:Short sight

[Kremmy]

Ultimately, the big problem is that I don't see a real universal contender for high-performance native code taking over from C/C++. There are a lot of promising languages, but at the moment, nothing is really taking off. Simple inertia is pretty hard to overcome, as it turns out.

The whole reason that people claim C/C++ are dying or going out of style is that they are entirely disconnected from this point. They explicitly overlook the fact that the languages they are always citing are written in C/C++ and rely to an extreme degree on libraries written in C/C++ even when they manage to self-host the languages. It's an ignorance of what the tools they are using actually are.

Re:Short sight

[TheRaven64]

Let's look at some examples of things running on a typical computer:

• Operating system: If it's *NIX, mostly C with some C++. If it's Windows, then mostly C++ with some C.
• Web browser: Chrome, Firefox and Edge are all written in a mixture of languages, with C++ being the dominant one.
• Office suite: Microsoft Office, Open/LibreOffice, and KOffice are all mostly C++.
• Video and music player: The UI is often C# or Objective-C, but the code that handles the file metadata parsing, decoding, and playback is all C or C++, depending on the platform.

Yup, sounds like the entire world has gone to Java or .NET to me...

Re: Short sight

[Anonymous Coward]

Speed is becoming less and less of an issue. As computers are getting faster all the time.

People have always been saying that, and it was never true, and still isn't.
Why? Because software, software stacks, entire operating systems are becoming slower all the time, eating up all those resources that your newer computers are capable of.
It has always been this way, and people like you have always been wrong.

Re:Short sight

[angel'o'sphere]

Those "how popular a language" is topics are not really relevant.

Most languages more or less work the same, the details and flaws are mostly in the libraries (see PHP) or in some niche corners of automatic type conversions (see JavaScript and also C).

Bottom line it does not really matter if you write Java or C++. A competent programmer should learn the other language in a day or two and get good in it in a few weeks or months.

Of course there are edge cases. I don't expect everyone to become super fluent (quickly) in SQL, Smalltalk, Groovy or Lisp or Prolog or Haskell, OCaml or COBOL or Fortran.

However: even if you are not fluent in any of those languages, with a little bit of intelligence you should be able to fix simple bugs. Writing a new program from scratch is obviously more difficult. Look at COBOL e.g. with its "strange" PIC data layouts and so many "divisions". I mean I fixed a bout 1M lines of code in COBOL for Y2K faults, however I could not really "write COBOL".

Kotlin is around about 5 or 6 years, not sure. I don't see a big advantage over Scala or Java 8, probably easier than Scala as it is closer to Java. However the company, JetBrains, offers Kotlin to JavaScript and native code compilation. Kotlin to native could be interesting on Android, on other platforms I fear they don't have the cross platform libraries (GUI, Networking etc.)

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."

This is actually true. I wrote a "spec" (as in heavy formalized use case descriptions) to Java/Groovy source code "converter" about 10 years ago. It was super easy to make proof of concept prototypes.

Look e.g. at https://cucumber.io/

However you are right, too. Programming/programmers wont go away for the foreseeable future and most likely never.

Languages are tools, not jobs.

[Oscaro]

I hate this fact that "java programmer" is considered by some people a different job than "C++ programmer". A good programmer should be able to learn a language in a month and become proficient in three months at most. Functional languages apart, all languages are more or less the same. It doesn't matter if your hammer has a red handle or a green one, as long as you know how to hammer.

Re:Languages are tools, not jobs.

[serviscope_minor]

I hate this fact that "java programmer" is considered by some people a different job than "C++ programmer". A good programmer should be able to learn a language in a month and become proficient in three months at most.

Yesbut. There's also a difference between proficient and expert. Becoming an expert in either takes much, much longer. For example a friend of mine is an expert in Java. I can hack code in the language and do plenty of things. He seems to have committed half the standard library to memory and knows the JVM in depth too. There's all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff you can do if you know those manipluations.

It would take me many years to reach his level.

It doesn't matter if your hammer has a red handle or a green one, as long as you know how to hammer.

Unless the hammer has a wooden head and is used for knocking chisels. It takes a long time to learn how to do that effectively no matter how well you can smash rocks with a sledge.