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I have to remind myself a lot of programmers these days have never seen a 'down' market, and get truly worried about the 'end of programmers'...

You have to be pretty long in the tooth now to remember .com crash, off-shoring, hell - even the 2008 stuff ended like 14 years ago.

Thats not even mentioning cobol, 4th GL langs, RAD, low-code, no-code and god know what else was supposed to put us all out of work.

This too shall pass... :-)

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In the business since the late ‘70s. Two crashes, two AI winters, offshoring scares, 4GLs… seen it all, never lived up to the hype. jobs come back because software needs expand like gas.

Even if AI takes over most new development in two years we have 50+ years of legacy code to work on.

A decade before my career started COBOL got hyped as an end-user programming language. Then SQL would let managers bypass programmers. Then spreadsheets. Did Visicalc and Excel kill off the jobs? All of those things just created more demand for programmers.

Software expands like gas and most offshore software shops don’t give a flying f about quality, pad their hours and oversell programmers to multiple clients.

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