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Comment by trescenzi | Hacker News Reader

It is clickbait, assuming you don’t know the distinction between a developer and a programmer. If you do it’s actually a pretty solid title. I’d argue it’s worth a read because the main point is very good.

I think the core distinction is important and gets at what LLMs are and are not good at. LLMs are good at translating clear specifications into common programming languages. That is what a programmer, by the BLS’ definition, does. The hard part of being a software dev never has been writing the code.

They are claiming that the act of programming is in the process of being replaced. That seems somewhat likely. However they aren’t saying that overall tech industry jobs nor even software dev jobs are decreasing.

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The problem is that I don't think this distinction actually exists outside the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The obvious hypothesis to me, which the source article doesn't seem to consider, is that this statistic isn't measuring anything other than a change in fashionable job titles.

This is literally the first time that I hear someone making any difference between “programmer” and “developer”. Hell I don’t even think I’ve ever heard a difference with “software engineer”, apart from countries where engineer is a protected title

If you don't work in the government sector than that makes sense

I work in government and my position has been reclassified from computer programmer to software developer and software engineer over the past 20 years. Same workload and skillset. We're even supporting some of that same software written 20 years ago.

If we assume programmer and software developer are the same job and there's been a 22% drop in programmers without a corresponding increase in devs, then it still seems like a net job loss?

A net job loss, but a much smaller one. The source article includes a graph of "Employment in the computer and data-processing services industry", showing a perceptible but quite small dip which could be correlated with either widespread GenAI or the 2022 bear market.

Absolutely, and this is the story. Not what they seem to have wrote about...

I’ve been asked multiple times in interviews what I think the difference between a dev/engineer and a programmer is. As a hiring manager I’ve also had people ask me the question as a way to get at role expectations. These were all at smaller companies though and on the East Coast so it might be a small vs big company thing? But it’s definitively not just a BLS understanding of job roles.

I do agree with your hypothesis though. The article doesn’t even account for the software engineer title either.

> LLMs are good at translating clear specifications into common programming languages. That is what a programmer, by the BLS’ definition, does.

IT guy here. Can confirm.

Not even a decade ago, stitching together disparate systems would have entailed identifying and designing the thing we wanted to accomplish, establishing requirements, and relying on an internal coder/programmer to get it done. Today, with Powershell, Python, YAML, REST APIs, webhooks, declarative infrastructure, etc, programmers were already infrequently utilized if they existed within an organization at all; with LLMs, they’re just not needed, provided your Admins/Engies are competent enough not to test in production and can identify when they’re being lied to by a chatbot.

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