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Spooky23

We do. 80% of the tasks that I did as an engineer in 1999 are fully automated today.

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Interesting. Almost nothing I've done as a programmer since 1985 seems automated today.

What do you mean by "fully automated" ?

No? You had valgrind to find memory bugs in 1985?

I would not consider that "full automated", but YMMV.

Same. It's fair to say our tooling today is far superior, but "fully automated" implies virtually zero input from humans beyond the initial configuration.

Being a bunch of engineers on HN, I get it, but that’s needlessly pedantic. My first real job was a systems and tools programmer working on scaled database systems.

Literally every aspect of that job is fully automated.

Where I work today 20+ years later, we have 1/3 of the people doing like 100x the amount of work by several measures. Little teams of developers can just crank out work.

You call it pedantry, I call it "field of work". I've managed to avoid working on apps built around databases for my entire career, instead focusing initially on operating systems, device drivers and OS-level tools; then later on software for pro-audio/music creation workflows. Literally no aspect of this work is "fully automated".

Yes, the productivity of modern day "stored-in-the-DB/presented-in-the-browser" project teams can be astounding. But that's only one type of software.

Debug heap libraries existed in 1895.

ORMs didn't go mainstream until Hibernate in 2001 or so? Before that, everyone was writing custom SQL and DB access by hand.

I implemented "an ORM" at amazon in 1994. None of the code outside of the library used SQL, everything pushed and pulled C++ objects.

I worked at a place a long time ago upgrading legacy software from the 80s. I helped them update their build process from file shares, copy/pasting and manual building to Git, Jenkins and automated builds/tests/packaging. I know it's not automated code, but it certainly saved us a lot of time with about 50 assemblies. I'm sure some companies were ahead of the curve when it comes to stuff like that, but this was a really small company. Modern CI/CD software is great and saved us lots of time.

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