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Comment by cheepin | Hacker News Reader

Interesting how they predict Programmers have a higher chance of automation than the other areas of engineering since programmers are the ones automating other things. I figure once programming is fully automated, pretty much everything else is automatable.

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I guess they are actually talking about the actual translation of precise requirements to code.

Most of the programmer in western countries handle a lot more than the coding of things. If your job contains even a tiny bit of analysis, the probability drop significantly. Computer system analyst has a 0.6% chance of being automated according to this. Software Developer is 4.2%.

> translation of precise requirements

I think code can be recursively defined as "the translation of precise requirements to code". Seems like it's word games and everyone just wants to name the "last automatable thing" after what their current role is

I'm having trouble imagining any sufficiently specific and unambiguous format for writing requirements that does not look like programming. Even something like SQL, which only needs to describe database queries, is still the domain of the programmer.

Diagrams, other visual and high level declarative programming are all readily grasped by non programmers. The full impact of their "program's" behaviour may not be. But since when has there never been a junior dev position who's work couldn't be made better by knowing more. The very notion of junior dev implies they have more to learn.

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