The premise that we are on the verge of some breakthroughs in software development that will significantly reduce the need for engineers is really weak, and is something people have been saying for decades (see the failed fifth generation of programming languages from the 1980s for an example).
In my experience, software engineering is endless, complicated decision making about how something should work and how to make changes without breaking something else rather than the nuts and bolts of programming. It’s all about figuring out what users want and how to give it to them in a way that is feasible.
The idea that we will have some abstraction that will someday (in the foreseeable future) save us from all of this difficult work sounds very far fetched to me, and I can’t imagine how that would work.
Even the example of hosting complexity being replaced by cloud companies seems kind of silly to me. Maybe that’s saving very small companies a sizable fraction of their engineering resources, but I really doubt it for medium or larger companies.
The cloud saves us from some complexity, but it doesn’t just magically design and run a backend for your application. You still need people who understand things like docker, kubernetes, endless different database options, sharding, indexing, failover, backup, message queues, etc. Even if the pieces are now more integrated and easier to put together, the task of figuring out how the pieces will interact and what pieces you even need is still outrageously complicated.
In my experience, software engineering is endless, complicated decision making about how something should work and how to make changes without breaking something else rather than the nuts and bolts of programming. It’s all about figuring out what users want and how to give it to them in a way that is feasible.
The idea that we will have some abstraction that will someday (in the foreseeable future) save us from all of this difficult work sounds very far fetched to me, and I can’t imagine how that would work.
Even the example of hosting complexity being replaced by cloud companies seems kind of silly to me. Maybe that’s saving very small companies a sizable fraction of their engineering resources, but I really doubt it for medium or larger companies.
The cloud saves us from some complexity, but it doesn’t just magically design and run a backend for your application. You still need people who understand things like docker, kubernetes, endless different database options, sharding, indexing, failover, backup, message queues, etc. Even if the pieces are now more integrated and easier to put together, the task of figuring out how the pieces will interact and what pieces you even need is still outrageously complicated.