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Comment by redthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

I'm constantly reminded that we, as programmers, have excellent opportunities in both fields: we can both shoot for the stars in a startup, and have a comfortable fallback in enterprise. I can't think of many other professions with this great a degree of both opportunity and security.

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For now, that is.

The robots came for the content creators last decade. They're coming for the educators now. They will come for programmers, too, eventually.

We are the ones making the robots, though.

The sense of solidarity between the robot makers and the lower ranks of the profession might not be a strong as you might like.

So who will make the machines to disrupt the robots?

Makers are always going to be at the top of the chain.

The guy that can negotiate a huge robot sales contract and use that to do a leveraged buyout that puts him in the CEO chair is at the top of the chain. (what a lovely reddit style chain of comments ; -)

The higher ranks of the profession are still the bearers of all the keys. We will probably go all Luddite and smash the tools before this happens.

Speak for yourself. I have no intention of preventing the robot revolution.

Until you are replaced with a very small shell script...

Until the robots make the robots.

You ever tried to use cmake without it shitting the bed in some way? We're a ways off.

We're there now.

How many people lay out CPU circuits at Intel any more? Computer (using a CPU) does that.

How many people physically make chips at a foundry? "Robots" do that.

There are a lot of tasks in designing and building computers that can only be done with computers these days. Sure, someone runs them, and someone does some significant level of design, but the final designs and products are no longer possible without the very products that those efforts produce.

Lather, rinse, accelerate.

I agree with both of your examples, but the post being responded to involved the replacement of programmers. Until we can come up with a conveniently numeric way of specifying, analyzing, and solving computational problems in the general case, I don't think I need to fear being replaced.

Now, a lot of modern webdev, on the other hand...

nextBigThing = WebBizFactory.createNewSite(ecommerceSingelton.getInstance().createNewMerchantAccount(), socialMediaFlywheel.getInstance().createSocialAdaptor(SocialAdapter.TWITTER), AWS.getInstance().getKVStoreFlavorOfWeek());

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