Whatever you do good devs are a limited resource, and all that is made to try to walk around the problem worsen it:
- outsourcing ? => You have to compensate in supervision and you lose in quality. (Indians are not bad coders, but there is something called the Babel tower effect that creates a lot of signal perturbation/costs)
- agile? => Trying to cut on correctness and detailed specifications to ship value faster result in insecure useless softwares. Ofc a startup owner does not care of the sustainability of his product because he will cash out a lot of $$ before the problem will happen. But what about the customers and the economy relying on it?
- Web as an UI because web dev is less expensive than GUI devs/shipping? GUI devs then where making atrocious bugs because they were clueless on asynchronuous coding (reentrant code) and money related data still needs to be transactional (transactional is a property that is exclusive of distributed). Devs that understand this class of problems are still few, and Web dev is causing even more problems.
- The Cloud? It has non linear costing! If you x2 your customers you cannot predict your pricing unless you make fat margins, and swap KPEX and slowly linear OPEX for strongly growing non linear OPEX is kind of totally mathematically irrational (except for the one doing fat margins).
- Containers? In 1999 the problem of the GUI was already the dependency Hell. Well, now instead of solving the satisfiability of dependencies (NP complete problem) in one closed system you do it on a set of M containers that still requires internal KSAT solving (yes instead of solving one KSAT, you solve N KSAT coupled to M KSAT). (so we created the DevOps and more security holes!)
When automation can replace people, it means the industry does not requires skilled people. That is not the case.
Can't you see there is a trivial contradiction in the thesis of this article?
Seriously this insanity never ends? IT industry is just bullshiting the rest of the economy to sustain its totally insane model and paying our daily wages.
I would be happy of this waste of money (I am a still a coder) if only people were not starving in the streets and our economies were not suffering and thus creating instabilities all around the world. I long for the internet 2.0 bubble to explode soon so that we can get back to an economy that profits to everyone not only the IT crowd.