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Comment by amasad | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with the author that it will be "no code." But I would also not dismiss how much more productive the cloud and better devtools has made developers. And as much as people, especially on HN, like to pick on bootcamp graduates, it's undeniable that you can get someone with no to little experience building complicated software in a matter of month.

What I think will happen to software engineering is that the middle will shrink. We'll see many more frontend and product engineers, and slightly more infra and systems programmer. I think the fullstack, middleware rails/django type engineering will all but disappear (most will move towards product).

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>it's undeniable that you can get someone with no to little experience building complicated software in a matter of month.

Yeah, and who do you think comes along and cleans up their mess, extends and maintains that software once your cowboy coders are gone?

We might be more productive, but only to a certain point. The complexity comes when people want to twist and bend the off the shelf solutions in ways they weren't designed for, and when systems become so large and complex that adding just one more feature takes a significant amount of time.

This is what differentiates your low cost bootcamp grads from highly paid software engineers. Experienced engineers aren't just building for today, but for the future.

I don't buy that fullstack devs are going anywhere. The real world is complex, the devil is in the details and the complexity of those details can't simply be chucked into an off-the-shelf solution and be expected to survive. We'll still have to have people that glue all the pieces together, we'll still have to name and compose things, to make modifications and optimisations, to maintain existing products, and we'll need people that push the boundaries of what's been done before and explore the new.

> Yeah, and who do you think comes along and cleans up their mess, extends and maintains that software once your cowboy coders are gone?

Sometimes someone with a CS or SE degree, sometimes someone who learned to program as a hobby while doing something completely irrelevant like Music, English, bar tending or high school and sometimes the cowboy coders themselves with more experience. There’s an enormous amount of theory in programming which is highly relevant to many, many people but you can be amazing at CS theory and write scientific code that’s garbage, uncommented spaghetti like the Imperial epidemiology model. At the other end you can have a great grasp of how to write clean, modular, well commented code and have no idea how you would start parsing a text file to extract all nouns or some other introductory undergraduate project for one of the infinitude of topics in CS.

> At the other end you can have a great grasp of how to write clean, modular, well commented code and have no idea how you would start parsing a text file to extract all nouns or some other introductory undergraduate project for one of the infinitude of topics in CS.

How difficult is that to read up on? I do a lot more of the former than the latter as that is what real life jobs entail (actually most of them involve fixing other peoples shitty code).

Ask the engineers grousing about whiteboarding algorithm interviews, or the companies assigning them.

> Yeah, and who do you think comes along and cleans up their mess, extends and maintains that software once your cowboy coders are gone?

It will be like excel spreadsheets: full of errors, moments of brilliance, utterly unmaintainable, yet used every day for mission critical services.

Running your own blog, or email server, has slowly shifted from requiring technical chops, to becoming passé.

Zapier, ifttt, n8n, etcetera allow one to do amazing automation that couldn’t easily be done ten years ago.

You can get people build things in a matter of months but definitely not complex things.

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