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question, When were programmers supposed to be obsolete?

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

litchralee ,

I know this is c/programmerhumor but I’ll take a stab at the question. If I may broaden the question to include collectively the set of software engineers, programmers, and (from a mainframe era) operators – but will still use “programmers” for brevity – then we can find examples of all sorts of other roles being taken over by computers or subsumed as part of a different worker’s job description. So it shouldn’t really be surprising that the job of programmer would also be partially offloaded.

The classic example of computer-induced obsolescence is the job of typist, where a large organization would employ staff to operate typewriters to convert hand-written memos into typed documents. Helped by the availability of word processors – no, not the software but a standalone appliance – and then the personal computer, the expectation moved to where knowledge workers have to type their own documents.

If we look to some of the earliest analog computers, built to compute differential equations such as for weather and flow analysis, a small team of people would be needed to operate and interpret the results for the research staff. But nowadays, researchers are expected to crunch their own numbers, possibly aided by a statistics or data analyst expert, but they’re still working in R or Python, as opposed to a dedicated person or team that sets up the analysis program.

In that sense, the job of setting up tasks to run on a computer – that is, the old definition of “programming” the machine – has moved to the users. But alleviating the burden on programmers isn’t always going to be viewed as obsolescence. Otherwise, we’d say that tab-complete is making human-typing obsolete lol

leviticoh OP ,

@litchralee
Thank you!
i didn't expect serious answers here, but this was a nice read,

so the various jobs around computers were kind of obsoleted, but the job description just shifted and the title remained valid most of the times,

now i'm interested to see what we'll do 20 years from now rather than just being annoyed by the "don't learn ${X}, it's outdated" guys

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