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question, When were programmers supposed to be obsolete? (poliverso.org)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi, this is a question that popped into my mind when i saw an article about some AWS engineer talking about ai assistants taking over the job of programmers, this reminded me that it's not the first time that something like this was said.

My software engineering teacher once told me that a few years ago people believed graphical tools like enterprise architect would make it so that a single engineer could just draw a pretty UML diagram and generate 90% of the project without touching any code,
And further back COBOL was supposed to replace programmers by letting accountants write their own programs.

Now i'm curious, were there many other technologies that were supposedly going to replace programmers that you remember?

i hope someone that's been around much more than me knows something more or has some funny stories to share

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (2 children)

DevOps was a lie pushed on devs to make them become sysadmins, unfortunately.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

And DBAs. I'm currently working on a project where I said from the very start, I can set up this DB in k8s and I can get it to work decently, but I have neither the knowledge nor the time to get it right. Please give me someone who knows how this works.

No, don't worry, it'll be fine, we don't need that, this kuverneles thing I keep hearing about handles that!!!

Six months of hard contact with the enemy on production later:

Well, we're currently looking for someone who actually knows how DBs work, because we have one of those issues that would cost a proper DBA 5min and me 5 months.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

I feel like there is a lost art of DBAs, where in their mystical knowledge rests how to make perfect cheap and scalable databases, and business cast them away because "Why not pay Google twice that amount?"

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

It was a fancy lie about their spare time, but especially in dotcom, there IS no spare time to learn architecture.

What I've seen of dev AND ops is that their knowledge is focused well on their own things. And when it comes to the other half of devops they just want the shortest path back to doing their thing. This has caused absolute princess devs to be nearly screaming about the hassle of security and change control and infrastructure and proper code deployment and testing and ... Well, a lot of things.

It doesn't pay to have people learning to half-ass dev because ops is your thing. You need advocacy on both sides of that line, still.