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Comment by codeshaman | Hacker News Reader

I'm afraid this is a glimpse into the not so distant future where software developers are next in line after taxi and truck drivers - uncertain if their skills will be required in a decade from now.

That is compound by the millions of youngsters who grew up with computers, have unlimited access to unlimited teaching materials and are entering the workforce each year..

The demand for software may be growing (although that should peak at some point too), but that doesn't necessarily mean that the demand for programmers will follow the same trend.

Quite the opposite it seems...

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> I'm afraid this is a glimpse into the not so distant future. And that puts software developers next in line after taxi and truck drivers - uncertain if their skills will be required in a decade from now.

I'm fairly sure that programmers will be employable for the foreseeable future but in a way this is fair play, we - the programmers - did this to an immense number of people it would seem that we ourselves should not be immune to becoming superfluous as well at some point. After all programmer is not some kind of protected status, if it's ok for programmers to automate away whole segments of the job market why should programmers expect that their jobs could never be automated away? If anything we should be more aware of such risks having been in the drivers seat on this one for the last 50 years.

More automation more of the time! The world needs to focus on how we collectively become more efficient while working less / relaxing more.

Having said that, I think automation of software development has a long way to go before it's particularly effective. Though it's certainly going to be an interesting space to watch. It's somehow weird to imagine a future in which we disrupt ourselves.

All those working on AI are effectively working very hard to put themselves out of business, it's a funny version of poetic justice.

Many of them are very aware of this.

This is the webpage's introduction of one of those people:

"Since age 15 or so, Prof. Jürgen Schmidhuber's goal has been to build a self-improving Artificial Intelligence (AI) smarter than himself, then retire" ( http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/ )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series

> The world needs to focus on how we collectively become more efficient while working less / relaxing more.

The world doesn't reward working less. More automation might lead to lower average work hours, but the reduction comes from people losing their jobs and not finding new ones.

So, yes, you get to work less, but you almost might go bankrupt, lose your house and car, and be reliant on government welfare, if you're "lucky" enough to live in country with a decent safety net.

Need to change the reward structures.

I don't think Max Weber ever fathomed a world where human labor was unnecessary and inefficient.

Work is not rewarding if you can never have it.

Still waiting for the new treatise.

I think he was saying that automating all the things is good, but we need to rethink the economic system that we currently have. Imagine the logical extreme of our current trajectory: a world in which robots/computers do everything that humans currently do. 100% automation, 0% employment.

This should be a good thing, giving humans unprecedented leisure time and producing a huge cultural boom. The problem is that in the current economic system 0% employment means the world would be impoverished, except for the few that owned the robot/computer production systems.

More automation means lower prices for everyone and less hours to work.

It's easier to accept it when you have yours.

I'm afraid this is a glimpse into the not so distant future where software developers are next in line after taxi and truck drivers

As a reasonably experienced developer I am 100% convinced that I can manage an outsourced software project and get more value out of a freelancer than someone who isn't a developer.

One needs to move up the ladder to architecture, customer management, ....

That is my feeling with the current offshoring practices.

The way to stay in business in software development in any given country is to move into roles that cannot be easily offshored.

There will always be a country where development costs are cheaper, when the software devs in a country start to level up their earnings, companies will move to the next one.

What is "architecture"?

Depends who you ask, as there are different types of "Architects", under "Solution Architect", "Business Architect", "Technical Architect",...

For me, I only care about the technical part of it, meaning:

- Translating requirements into technical specifications

- Designing the application modules and their relationships

- Selecting the languages, libraries and frameworks allowed in the project

- Full stack technical documentation

- Designing and implementation of the continuous deployment infrastructure

- Having an overall picture how all modules come together

- Taking part in the development team as senior coder

Those were just a few examples. Of course, the roles one takes are very dependent on team size and type of customer.

However not all architects are made alike. Meaning while I consider critical that one has a foot in both worlds, architecture and coding, in many enterprise companies that isn't the case.

Moreover usually descriptions like "Solution Architect" and "Business Architect" tend to be alias to roles like "Product Owner" or "Project Manager".

> I'm afraid this is a glimpse into the not so distant future where software developers are next in line after taxi and truck drivers - uncertain if their skills will be required in a decade from now.

That might be true, but I don't see how this article supports that hypothesis. There are still real programmers behind the apps that Gigster:

> The company finds top-notch freelance developers, designers, and project managers with pedigrees from MIT, CalTech, Google, and Stripe, and only accepts 5% of applicants.

Looks like they are mostly automating the estimating and scheduling process.

I think it's a leap to go from automated scheduled to automated programming, especially in the next decade.

> The company finds top-notch freelance developers, designers, and project managers with pedigrees from MIT, CalTech, Google, and Stripe, and only accepts 5% of applicants.

The AI engine makes a price quote and comes up with the production schedule. Those are two things I'd gladly hand off to AI. Quality engineers will still be in demand.

It would be great if I could get it to write the specs and docs as well.

And put together a marketing campaign and handle sales, that would be really handy.

Automation is constantly eating the need for human labor, but every time that happens, the entrepreneurship barrier to entry is reduced.

We spent the last 50 years working to making the biggest barrier to entry for entrepreneurship (wrangling labor) irrelevant.

Time was, you needed a factory and a labor force. For the last 10 years, you needed a laptop and coding skills. Soon, you won't even need that.

I'm guessing the "AI" is mostly just marketing bs. They're just trying a different consultancy model and have been given 10 mill.

I'm guessing too.. Still, there is undisputed progress being made in the field of rapid software development and dev tools and AI ... While not there yet, if the progress continues at the same pace, we will be there within a decade.

Could you share any examples ?

First of all there is tooling - lots of smarter and smarter editors, IDEs, mockup creators, programming languages and environments, graphical editors and so on..

Then there's github and software which is built out of 'dependencies' and the programmer only needs to write the glue code between the various components developed and maintained by others.

And then there are the advances in AI - like natural language comprehension, voice recognition, search, vision and so on.

Put the three together and you'll be able to explain what you want created in natural language, while using your fingers to "sculpt" the generated user interface if necessary.

Still not there yet, but it seem quite possible in the not so distant future.

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