"The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession" ... is greatly exaggerated.
Could be the title of the piece.
I agree: throughout my own career as a programmer (I prefer the more blue-collar sounding term—it better fits my skill set) I have also seen large changes in the industry that certainly made waves, did not capsize the profession.
At the same time, the profession I retired from was by no means the profession I entered into in the '90s. I confess I liked the older profession better.
Just to react to the "i automated myself out of a Job" part: happened to me at my first job, as we automated more and more our deployment, we could take more and more clients, and I ended up spending 90% of my time fixing routing issues, onboarding clients, integrating their ETLs or inhouse software, or fixing their "chmod -R 777 /" and other mistakes. Which wasn't an issue when it was 30%, or even 50% of my job to be clear, but became extremely boring and soulcrushing at the end.
I'm still happy i automated stuff, that was the interesting part of the job,
I was, for a long time, scared of my future due to the low/no-code, automation, LLMs, outsourcing, etc. Until, at some point, I realised something simple - the risk factor for my job is not determined by how good new tools are, but only by how lazy people are about learning and adopting them. And here history gives another lesson - we never learn, eternal cycle of mistakes will continue.
"The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession" ... is greatly exaggerated.
Could be the title of the piece.
I agree: throughout my own career as a programmer (I prefer the more blue-collar sounding term—it better fits my skill set) I have also seen large changes in the industry that certainly made waves, did not capsize the profession.
At the same time, the profession I retired from was by no means the profession I entered into in the '90s. I confess I liked the older profession better.
Just to react to the "i automated myself out of a Job" part: happened to me at my first job, as we automated more and more our deployment, we could take more and more clients, and I ended up spending 90% of my time fixing routing issues, onboarding clients, integrating their ETLs or inhouse software, or fixing their "chmod -R 777 /" and other mistakes. Which wasn't an issue when it was 30%, or even 50% of my job to be clear, but became extremely boring and soulcrushing at the end.
I'm still happy i automated stuff, that was the interesting part of the job,
I was, for a long time, scared of my future due to the low/no-code, automation, LLMs, outsourcing, etc. Until, at some point, I realised something simple - the risk factor for my job is not determined by how good new tools are, but only by how lazy people are about learning and adopting them. And here history gives another lesson - we never learn, eternal cycle of mistakes will continue.
I still love programming. Even more so after trying out llm coding in some projects.
One day "real programmers" will be gold.