Comment by echopom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echopom | Hacker News Reader

90% of developers jobs today can be automated.

The author is largely overstating the job of software development and confusing "software engineering" with "software development"

SE is indeed a creative process that requires a lot of thinking , conflicting point of view and a often a crazy amount of research in order to do anything ( Database System , CLI etc... )

But for the rest , I'm an enterprise architect in banking , 90% of the project I'm in charge consist of "gluing" service together or adding a "screen" in the front end that calls an apis...

Startups like Bubble|0] have proven you can create web / mobile apps / apis without code ,

the only reasons we are still relevant today is for three reasons :

- There is no proper FOSS standard ecosystem to create codeless APIS and Applications

- There is no standard in the industry for the business and application layers

- Enterprise have "legacy" that is much cheaper to maintain with humans ( Devs + Architects ) rather than automate by R&D to create those ecosystem ( Labor Capital Substitution )

There is dozens of papers on 4th industrial software revolution , which at the moment won't happen because the tooling is simply not there.

Definitely 4G Software ecosystem largely automate 90% of the blue collar coding of today.

[0] https://bubble.io/

I dont know. Im a dev in banking and I see what kind of job you have. Sadly, an enormous amount of our time is not spend in transcoding your vision into beautiful lines of code, but fixing all the wrong assumptions you had, talk to the actual users and iterate over the problems of your model until we fix it into something workable, maintain day to day changes in the universe that make your original idea further and further from the need.

People like you work in projects but us we dont just glue things together for your royal pleasure, we sadly have to actually fit a day to day need.

Nice rebuttal, even though you might be projecting a bit at the parent commenter :)

I used to be a consultant in this space, and I can confirm the existence of these completely different bubbles. Ironically one of the root causes is how badly banks want developers to be interchangeable commodities.

> the only reasons we are still relevant today is for three reasons

Then how we automate creation of the standards? Don’t get me wrong, but now we aren’t punching holes in cards. In the future, people probably won’t be doing a lot of things, which are now typical menial tasks too hard or cheap to automate. As long as an AI with capabilities of reasoning and abstract thought comparable to a human isn’t here, there always will be a layer of tasks that is impossible to automate for one reason or another. Then it was card punching, now it is gluing APIs together.

Automation is mostly useful when you have a very narrowly defined process/standard with little variation over time. Unfortunately, this also requires for the one requesting the automation to know exactly what they want to get at the end of the process. How would one automate creation of a tool fitted to the particular way some business is operating? Video game development? Fixing badly documented code? Granted, many parts of those processes can be, and probably already are, automated away. But there are almost always elements that require a higher level understanding of the whole context these projects exist in.

I would equate it more to a hairdresser having switched from using scissors solely to being able to use a hair clipper. Their work was partially automated by a machine, but the process still is overseen by a human being.

Enterprises do try all the time to replace devs with "no-code", or "config" solutions, automation, interop, or the flavor of the day.

Many times the initiative comes from architects such as yourself.

I've never seen it go well, almost like they don't really know what it takes to "glue two apps together", but I'm sure you'll do better! Good luck!

+1, this is my experience too.

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