Yeap, those of you that still read this pathetic blog know of this pathological obsession of mine: I'm convinced that in the future we'll have too much people working in this industry doing too less to differentiate their work from one of our industry strongholds: automation.
As a result, I believe massive unemployment will hit our industry.
And yes, others have predicted the some in the past and failed. I won't. Why? Because I won't tell you when, just that it will happen :) Ok, I'm the Nostradamus of our industry, so what?
Here's another guy that suffers from the same paranoia:
Since early days of software development people struggled to build good systems. More and more people where thrown at the problem, making matters worse. But with the recent explosion of social web we've witnessed a new and interesting phenomenon: a handful of developers are now able to build systems that are used by millions of people. How can this be?
The secret is that as with any good endeavor it only takes a few good men (and/or women!). With a bit of discipline and a ton of passion, high quality engineers are able to put together systems of great complexity on their own.
Equipped with a modern programming language, great libraries, and agile methods, a couple of smart guys in the garage can get things done much better and faster than an army of mediocre developers.
Ok, his approach may be a little more self centered and elitist than my simplistic economical view. Nevertheless, the result will be the same.
My view is way more simple:
- Our effort is spent capturing, recapturing and rebuilding knowledge and the corresponding implementations of domains we don't know nothing about;
- We do it with near inexistent engineering practices;
- As we find it difficult to reuse, we tend to re-invent the wheel on each project;
- Our effort is spent on tasks software will easily take over, leaving too less time to handle... the business problem;
- Costumers are sympathetic with our constant failures, and periodically invite use to rewrite their systems from scratch - we even get to complain about the boring migration process! Ok, it's also about the constant hardware/software/software evolution. But remember:
- Hardware evolution will slow down one of this days. And when it the software will stop it's growth, which will stop hardware's pressure to grow, which...
Hopefully future organizations will need functional people to operate the applications they will create. Maybe that's the escape for many on our apocalyptical industry...
4 comments:
Maybe you're right!
Then again, maybe not!
Let's take a look at history.
Did that happened with auto industry or the construction industry?
I think you're right about the automation. But I also believe that the domain people don't want to spend time building systems. Is a Proctologist willing to spend his time around a computer building a system to index and analyse his patients?
It is a question of demand. And it will keep growing for the next years. Until 2080, at least.
I don't share your apocalyptical view :)
I think it's normal when an industry matures to go through this kinds of changes. Just like it happened with major industries in the past, I think what will happen is a shift from repetitive tasks to more knowledge based tasks (related to business), that are always in short demand. :)
I'd fear more for the offshores/outsorcers, because many of those will suffer (they'll compete with automation).
Ted Neward has some interesting thoughts related to offshoring, that I think apply to this situation:
Why programmers shouldn't fear offshoring
In the last comment, i meant not short demand but high demand (i.e, people that understand the business and technology are always on high demand, or there is short offer/suppy).
Hope you're right, guys. But frankly I wouldn't bet on it. Lets take your sample, the auto industry: isn't it true that cars today are assembled mostly by robots? Do you remember the auto industry lay outs? And what are most of us if not assemblers on yet to be industrialized product line?
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