Seems like groundhog day, although I'm not sure I remember anyone telling me that software engineers were on borrowed time until relatively recently and I'd largely ignored it.
Yet one thing does seem different for anyone who just missed the dotcom crash, is that the roles available have fallen off a cliff while the numbers looking for roles seem to be up, at least in the UK. The UAE is even worse. I've spent 20 years hiding from recruiters and now they're all leaving me on read. Karma, maybe.
"The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession" ... is greatly exaggerated.
Could be the title of the piece.
I agree: throughout my own career as a programmer (I prefer the more blue-collar sounding term—it better fits my skill set) I have also seen large changes in the industry that certainly made waves, did not capsize the profession.
At the same time, the profession I retired from was by no means the profession I entered into in the '90s. I confess I liked the older profession better.
Its just the title, I have read the post texts before posting, he actually says its here to say dispite mainstream claiming coding is dead every other five year.
I posted this link after reading all the way. Jason actually makes a good point - its just that this title is loud. Blog post itself isn't claiming the death of software engineering at all. If anything, it just shows that every five or ten years someone claims software engineering is dead.
Its not dead at all and it wont die either.
Why? chagpt, or figma or v0 can spin up a few pages of brochure site, even some blog posting level web apps, basic cruds you know. But I don't think it will replace full software engineering.
I work with a large codebase, thats almost 30 years old, multiple framework ( backbone, react, angular) and then java, python for backends. All from different phases and everything is stitched together to make it work, and have a well profit making business going on. There is no model or chatxyz that can dig throug all these connected apps and services and replace our engineering team. It helps us here and there- yeah a lot.
Isn't this a bit revisionist? I started to become interested in programming around late 90s and I don't remember anyone floating the idea that OOP, libraries or IDEs will make programming obsolete as a profession. If anything, pre-2023 most programmers considered their job as one of the hardest ones to automate.
> I started to become interested in programming around late 90s and I don't remember anyone floating the idea that OOP, libraries or IDEs will make programming obsolete as a profession.
The version of this hype that I remember from circa 2004 was UML[1] was going to make most programming automated. You'd have an architect that would draw out your problem's architecture in a GUI[2], press a button to automate all the code to build that architecture, and have a programmer fill in a couple dozen lines of business logic. Boom, program done by two or three people in a couple weeks, let's all go home. It uh, didn't work out that way.
You can read a lot more about all this by following the various links to concepts & products from Rational's Wikipedia page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Software . It wasn't badly intentioned, but it was a bit of a phase that the industry went through that ultimately didn't work out.
There was definitely a widely held belief in the late 90s, early 00s that programming was commoditized to the point that it would be fully offshored to the lowest cost of labor. This happened in some areas and failed. It still happens now and then. But I remember hearing some of that based on OO and libraries making it so unskilled people could just put together legos.
I remember that. I studied CS in that period and some professors were convinced that software development was going to become an unskilled job, analogous to bricklaying, and that our goal as future CS graduates should be to become managers, just like someone that studies a university degree about making buildings is intended to become an architect and not a bricklayer.
I never believed it, though (if I had, I would probably have switched degrees, as I hate management). And while the belief was common, my impression is that it was only so among people who didn't code much. The details on how it would happen were always highly handwavy and people defending that view had a tendency to ignore any software beyond standard CRUD apps.
In contrast, if I had to choose a degree right now, I'd probably avoid CS (or at most study it out of passion, like one could study English philology or something, but without much hope of it being a safe choice for my career). I think the prospects for programmers in the LLM era look much scarier, and the threats look much more real, than they ever did in that period.
It's a bit too generalizing that it failed and happens "now and then", offshoring is a multi-billion industry employing millions of people.
And the "unskilled people putting together legos" is also very much a thing in the form of low/no-code platforms, from my own circles there's Mendix and Tibco, arguably SAP, and probably a heap more. Arguably (my favorite word atm) it's also still true in most software development because outside of coding business logic, most heavy lifting is done by the language's SDK and 3rd party libraries.
It's an idea that surfaces every few years - back in 1981 I can remember reading about "The Last One" - named because it was supposed to be the last computer program that would ever need to be written:
> before LLMs I definitely thought coding would be the last thing to go.
While LLMs do still struggle to produce high quality code as a function of prompt quality and available training data, many human software developers are surprised at the speed at which LLMs (software) can generate software.
I wonder to what extent this surprise is because people tend to think very deeply when writing software and assume thinking and "reasoning" are what produce quality software. What if the experience of "thinking" and "reasoning" are epiphenomena of the physical statistical models present in the connections of our brains?
This is an unsolved and ancient philosophical (essentially the problem of duality) of whether consciousness and free will affect the physical world. If we live in a materialist universe where matter and the laws of physics are unaffected by consciousness then "thinking", "reasoning", and "free will" are purely subjective. In such a view, subjective experience attends material changes in the world but does not affect the material world.
Software developers surprised by the capabilities of software (LLMs) to write software might not be so surprised if they understood consciousness as an epiphenomenon of materiality. Just as words do not cause diaphragms to compress lungs to move air past vocal cords and propagate air vibrations, perhaps the thoughts that attend action (including the production of words) are not the motive force of those actions.
"The dream of the widespread, ubiquitous internet came true, and there were very few fatalities. Some businesses died, but it was more glacial than volcanic in time scale. When ubiquitous online services became commonplace it just felt mundane. It didn’t feel forced. It was the opposite of the dot com boom just five years later: the internet is here and we’re here to build a solid business within it in contrast with we should put this solid business on the internet somehow, because it’s coming."
I was, for a long time, scared of my future due to the low/no-code, automation, LLMs, outsourcing, etc. Until, at some point, I realised something simple - the risk factor for my job is not determined by how good new tools are, but only by how lazy people are about learning and adopting them. And here history gives another lesson - we never learn, eternal cycle of mistakes will continue.
The outsourcing is the only real threat in your list. In the past, we have eliminated jobs in the primary (eg farming) and secondy (eg manufacturing) industries through automation and outsourcing with the goal of moving workers into higher level industries, including tertiary industries (eg software). If we are outsourcing tertiary industry jobs as well, what does that leave us?
The US outsources something like 300k jobs annually, with over half of these being IT jobs. Adding 10k IT jobs per month could change the employment numbers and economic outlook we've been seeing lately. It seems like we're in a race to the bottom. I do think AI will make things worse, economically at least, with the reduction in jobs. But this could be offset by policies promoting on-shore employment.
Incredible comment. I live on biz side of insurance but use tech/automation skills all the time. My industry should have solved so many problems so many years ago.
But it didn't because of exactly what you said: "how lazy people are about learning and adopting them"
Except in other industries it is usually the lazier people who got the power to fix the things as they were like 30 years ago. While in IT they got washed out quickly.
Just to react to the "i automated myself out of a Job" part: happened to me at my first job, as we automated more and more our deployment, we could take more and more clients, and I ended up spending 90% of my time fixing routing issues, onboarding clients, integrating their ETLs or inhouse software, or fixing their "chmod -R 777 /" and other mistakes. Which wasn't an issue when it was 30%, or even 50% of my job to be clear, but became extremely boring and soulcrushing at the end.
I'm still happy i automated stuff, that was the interesting part of the job,
"We need people who understand how computers work more than ever."
In small numbers, yes. In current/large numbers, maybe not. Do college students need to understand language, grammar, or the subject to write B grade papers? No, they can just prompt an LLM to do it for them. Same thing for basic CRUD apps and websites. We will always need people who understand computers, but it seems likely that the proportion of the overall IT employees that need to know how it works will approach a horizontal asymptote.
Sure, they can do it for them - but the purpose of college is not to write papers. The papers are so that the students can demonstrate that they understand the subject and that they have "learned to learn". If an LLM writes it for them then they haven't proven anything other than that they can prompt an LLM. Which is great if your college degree is for "LLM prompting", but not much else.
I hope people that use LLMs to generate papers fail in other tests, else the value of a degree will be reduced to nothing - it's already suffering from a lot of "inflation" due to lowered standards and oversupply. (The lowered standards are because graduation rate became a metric and a target)
Forgive me but a lot of the examples seem like strawman.
> The dream of “multimedia” became commonplace and everyone just accepted it as normal. I’m not aware of any industries that collapsed dramatically due to multimedia.
But "multimedia" was never purported to be something that would lead to collapse of any segment of the industry, much less industries. If anything, the multimedia hype was purported to increase IT work which it did for some years.
> In 2000 a coworker took me aside and showed me his brand-new copy of IntelliJ IDE. “It’s over for us,” he said, “this thing makes it so programmers aren’t strictly necessary, like one person can operate this tool and they can lay the rest of us off.”
I've a hard time believing this. Literally nobody I've met was ever mistaken that IntelliJ would mean the doom of software engineering work. It's a great IDE and all IDE including IntelliJ required engineers to write code with them. Nobody was foolish enough to really think one engineer or one manager or one salesperson can "operate" IntelliJ and generate all the code to meet business requirements.
> And then he showed me the killer feature “that’s going to get us all out of a job:” the refactoring tools.
I'll bet there was no such "coworker". No sane person would think "refactoring" could mean "magically understand business requirements and write code"? All of this sounds like strawman setup so that the author could go on to making their next point like the bit where he challenged his "coworker" and asked if refactoring tools can write new code.
Don't get me wrong. The rest of the post is on money though. I just think the post would do better without these fake stories to set up strawmans only to take them down. Feels a bit forced!
Seems like groundhog day, although I'm not sure I remember anyone telling me that software engineers were on borrowed time until relatively recently and I'd largely ignored it.
Yet one thing does seem different for anyone who just missed the dotcom crash, is that the roles available have fallen off a cliff while the numbers looking for roles seem to be up, at least in the UK. The UAE is even worse. I've spent 20 years hiding from recruiters and now they're all leaving me on read. Karma, maybe.
"The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession" ... is greatly exaggerated.
Could be the title of the piece.
I agree: throughout my own career as a programmer (I prefer the more blue-collar sounding term—it better fits my skill set) I have also seen large changes in the industry that certainly made waves, did not capsize the profession.
At the same time, the profession I retired from was by no means the profession I entered into in the '90s. I confess I liked the older profession better.
Its just the title, I have read the post texts before posting, he actually says its here to say dispite mainstream claiming coding is dead every other five year.
I posted this link after reading all the way. Jason actually makes a good point - its just that this title is loud. Blog post itself isn't claiming the death of software engineering at all. If anything, it just shows that every five or ten years someone claims software engineering is dead.
Its not dead at all and it wont die either.
Why? chagpt, or figma or v0 can spin up a few pages of brochure site, even some blog posting level web apps, basic cruds you know. But I don't think it will replace full software engineering.
I work with a large codebase, thats almost 30 years old, multiple framework ( backbone, react, angular) and then java, python for backends. All from different phases and everything is stitched together to make it work, and have a well profit making business going on. There is no model or chatxyz that can dig throug all these connected apps and services and replace our engineering team. It helps us here and there- yeah a lot.
Isn't this a bit revisionist? I started to become interested in programming around late 90s and I don't remember anyone floating the idea that OOP, libraries or IDEs will make programming obsolete as a profession. If anything, pre-2023 most programmers considered their job as one of the hardest ones to automate.
> I started to become interested in programming around late 90s and I don't remember anyone floating the idea that OOP, libraries or IDEs will make programming obsolete as a profession.
The version of this hype that I remember from circa 2004 was UML[1] was going to make most programming automated. You'd have an architect that would draw out your problem's architecture in a GUI[2], press a button to automate all the code to build that architecture, and have a programmer fill in a couple dozen lines of business logic. Boom, program done by two or three people in a couple weeks, let's all go home. It uh, didn't work out that way.
You can read a lot more about all this by following the various links to concepts & products from Rational's Wikipedia page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Software . It wasn't badly intentioned, but it was a bit of a phase that the industry went through that ultimately didn't work out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UML
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Component-based-Software-...
[delayed]
There was definitely a widely held belief in the late 90s, early 00s that programming was commoditized to the point that it would be fully offshored to the lowest cost of labor. This happened in some areas and failed. It still happens now and then. But I remember hearing some of that based on OO and libraries making it so unskilled people could just put together legos.
I remember that. I studied CS in that period and some professors were convinced that software development was going to become an unskilled job, analogous to bricklaying, and that our goal as future CS graduates should be to become managers, just like someone that studies a university degree about making buildings is intended to become an architect and not a bricklayer.
I never believed it, though (if I had, I would probably have switched degrees, as I hate management). And while the belief was common, my impression is that it was only so among people who didn't code much. The details on how it would happen were always highly handwavy and people defending that view had a tendency to ignore any software beyond standard CRUD apps.
In contrast, if I had to choose a degree right now, I'd probably avoid CS (or at most study it out of passion, like one could study English philology or something, but without much hope of it being a safe choice for my career). I think the prospects for programmers in the LLM era look much scarier, and the threats look much more real, than they ever did in that period.
It's a bit too generalizing that it failed and happens "now and then", offshoring is a multi-billion industry employing millions of people.
And the "unskilled people putting together legos" is also very much a thing in the form of low/no-code platforms, from my own circles there's Mendix and Tibco, arguably SAP, and probably a heap more. Arguably (my favorite word atm) it's also still true in most software development because outside of coding business logic, most heavy lifting is done by the language's SDK and 3rd party libraries.
It's an idea that surfaces every few years - back in 1981 I can remember reading about "The Last One" - named because it was supposed to be the last computer program that would ever need to be written:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)
Yeah, I can confirm, before LLMs I definitely thought coding would be the last thing to go.
> before LLMs I definitely thought coding would be the last thing to go.
While LLMs do still struggle to produce high quality code as a function of prompt quality and available training data, many human software developers are surprised at the speed at which LLMs (software) can generate software.
I wonder to what extent this surprise is because people tend to think very deeply when writing software and assume thinking and "reasoning" are what produce quality software. What if the experience of "thinking" and "reasoning" are epiphenomena of the physical statistical models present in the connections of our brains?
This is an unsolved and ancient philosophical (essentially the problem of duality) of whether consciousness and free will affect the physical world. If we live in a materialist universe where matter and the laws of physics are unaffected by consciousness then "thinking", "reasoning", and "free will" are purely subjective. In such a view, subjective experience attends material changes in the world but does not affect the material world.
Software developers surprised by the capabilities of software (LLMs) to write software might not be so surprised if they understood consciousness as an epiphenomenon of materiality. Just as words do not cause diaphragms to compress lungs to move air past vocal cords and propagate air vibrations, perhaps the thoughts that attend action (including the production of words) are not the motive force of those actions.
Ahh - so many gems!
"The dream of the widespread, ubiquitous internet came true, and there were very few fatalities. Some businesses died, but it was more glacial than volcanic in time scale. When ubiquitous online services became commonplace it just felt mundane. It didn’t feel forced. It was the opposite of the dot com boom just five years later: the internet is here and we’re here to build a solid business within it in contrast with we should put this solid business on the internet somehow, because it’s coming."
Yes. And it continues on.
I was, for a long time, scared of my future due to the low/no-code, automation, LLMs, outsourcing, etc. Until, at some point, I realised something simple - the risk factor for my job is not determined by how good new tools are, but only by how lazy people are about learning and adopting them. And here history gives another lesson - we never learn, eternal cycle of mistakes will continue.
The outsourcing is the only real threat in your list. In the past, we have eliminated jobs in the primary (eg farming) and secondy (eg manufacturing) industries through automation and outsourcing with the goal of moving workers into higher level industries, including tertiary industries (eg software). If we are outsourcing tertiary industry jobs as well, what does that leave us?
The US outsources something like 300k jobs annually, with over half of these being IT jobs. Adding 10k IT jobs per month could change the employment numbers and economic outlook we've been seeing lately. It seems like we're in a race to the bottom. I do think AI will make things worse, economically at least, with the reduction in jobs. But this could be offset by policies promoting on-shore employment.
It leaves us nothing :)
Incredible comment. I live on biz side of insurance but use tech/automation skills all the time. My industry should have solved so many problems so many years ago.
But it didn't because of exactly what you said: "how lazy people are about learning and adopting them"
Except in other industries it is usually the lazier people who got the power to fix the things as they were like 30 years ago. While in IT they got washed out quickly.
The title is “The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession", why was this changed? Not really fair to the author.
I actually posted with that title. Not sure what happend.
@dang could perhaps help?
Just to react to the "i automated myself out of a Job" part: happened to me at my first job, as we automated more and more our deployment, we could take more and more clients, and I ended up spending 90% of my time fixing routing issues, onboarding clients, integrating their ETLs or inhouse software, or fixing their "chmod -R 777 /" and other mistakes. Which wasn't an issue when it was 30%, or even 50% of my job to be clear, but became extremely boring and soulcrushing at the end.
I'm still happy i automated stuff, that was the interesting part of the job,
The reports about our death were greatly exaggerated.
I still love programming. Even more so after trying out llm coding in some projects.
The ongoing issue is the maintenance.
This can't be solved without fully trusting the LLM period.
Just don't autopilot on important code you want to own. That's good start.
One day "real programmers" will be gold.
Once we understand demand set the price we'll understand why our "career" is dead. Thank me later.
I don't think the career is going anywhere unless the career just consists of typing. We need people who understand how computers work more than ever.
"We need people who understand how computers work more than ever."
In small numbers, yes. In current/large numbers, maybe not. Do college students need to understand language, grammar, or the subject to write B grade papers? No, they can just prompt an LLM to do it for them. Same thing for basic CRUD apps and websites. We will always need people who understand computers, but it seems likely that the proportion of the overall IT employees that need to know how it works will approach a horizontal asymptote.
Sure, they can do it for them - but the purpose of college is not to write papers. The papers are so that the students can demonstrate that they understand the subject and that they have "learned to learn". If an LLM writes it for them then they haven't proven anything other than that they can prompt an LLM. Which is great if your college degree is for "LLM prompting", but not much else.
I hope people that use LLMs to generate papers fail in other tests, else the value of a degree will be reduced to nothing - it's already suffering from a lot of "inflation" due to lowered standards and oversupply. (The lowered standards are because graduation rate became a metric and a target)
Exactly and arguably we will always - unless AGI
Forgive me but a lot of the examples seem like strawman.
> The dream of “multimedia” became commonplace and everyone just accepted it as normal. I’m not aware of any industries that collapsed dramatically due to multimedia.
But "multimedia" was never purported to be something that would lead to collapse of any segment of the industry, much less industries. If anything, the multimedia hype was purported to increase IT work which it did for some years.
> In 2000 a coworker took me aside and showed me his brand-new copy of IntelliJ IDE. “It’s over for us,” he said, “this thing makes it so programmers aren’t strictly necessary, like one person can operate this tool and they can lay the rest of us off.”
I've a hard time believing this. Literally nobody I've met was ever mistaken that IntelliJ would mean the doom of software engineering work. It's a great IDE and all IDE including IntelliJ required engineers to write code with them. Nobody was foolish enough to really think one engineer or one manager or one salesperson can "operate" IntelliJ and generate all the code to meet business requirements.
> And then he showed me the killer feature “that’s going to get us all out of a job:” the refactoring tools.
I'll bet there was no such "coworker". No sane person would think "refactoring" could mean "magically understand business requirements and write code"? All of this sounds like strawman setup so that the author could go on to making their next point like the bit where he challenged his "coworker" and asked if refactoring tools can write new code.
Don't get me wrong. The rest of the post is on money though. I just think the post would do better without these fake stories to set up strawmans only to take them down. Feels a bit forced!