Will programmers become redundant? 8

[Ladyhawk]

-- The "Industry" thread with a better subject.

A friend of mine told me that he reckoned in 10 years time there won't be a need for programmers because there will be templates that any joe bloggs can use to create the application that they want.

Do other people think this?

Ladyhawk.
** ASP/VB/Java Programmer **

 

[dwarfthrower]

The notion that any sort of application development environment could produce code to solve 100% of business issues would mean that the developers of such an application have taken into consideration every business rule and variation upon variation of business rules / other constraints that may or may not arise in the course of developing an application.

Pretty absurd really, it might be possible to develop an application builder that could conceivably build applications to resolve perhaps 10, 15% of programming issues (I think they call it Microsoft Excel) but an application that could write any application past, present and future is simply not realistic.

I liked the "Industry" title...

 

[Ladyhawk]

It may not necessarily be one application. The idea was (according to my friend) that Microsoft would go to all of the industries (for example engineering) and create templates for that industry. That industry could then use those templates and just "tweak" them as required. I know the whole idea is a bit absurd (my friend is not actually in the computing industry - obviously), but it did make me think. I can't see Microsoft destroying it's market of millions of programmers by creating templates which would reduce the number of people using their products.

I liked Industry better but it probably wasn't that descriptive.

Ladyhawk.
** ASP/VB/Java Programmer **

 

[dwarfthrower]

The idea of 'templates' is perfectly valid, not to mention already in existence in nearly everything we do from create a HTML page in Dreamweaver to building the outline of a C++ app using a UML modelling program. It's really the 'tweaking' that you mention that we already do and call 'programming'.

For example, say we set about building an activeX control for a web-site... we fire up VB, select the 'ActiveX OCX' project option and already 90% of our application is already written. Drag two text boxes, three labels and a button onto the form and another 9% is written.

Double click on the button and type:

label1.caption = text1.text * text2.text

and you have an application that, just 10 years ago would have elicited oohs and aahs from a crowd of serious programmers. My nine year-old cousin can do this with ease these days. However there is still a big market for VB programmers because it's the ability to fill in those blanks and make an application that is useful to someone that makes a programmer.

 

[CajunCenturion]

I repeat what was said in the Industry thread.

To a degree I think there is some truth in that assessment. We have commoditized simple programming in a lot of ways. However, there will still be complex problems and unique challenges that cannot be solved using a canned template. That's where the professionally trained software engineers will earn their pay, in the design and architecture of software solutions that do not fit any pre-defined templates.

Secondly, somebody will be needed to write and maintain the templates.

Good Luck
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As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein

 

[palbano]

>> in 10 years time there won't be a need for programmers

Yeah... i heard that one 10 years ago
>> (my friend is not actually in the computing industry - obviously),

The way things have gone the past 5 years... we have actually gone farther away from that then closer in some ways. Also keep in mind that the pace of the demands for new (different) software seems to stay well ahead of the industry.

In some specific application areas that could in fact become a reality to some degree. I really don't see in any broad scope though.

-pete

 

[Tarwn]

It already has become the case in some general areas, but of course we keep pushing the science/art/etc and what was once a specific now has 500 subcategories that each need a solution or piece of software.
Look at the past 8 years, web development alone has gone from a text-editor only environment to a WYSIWYG software emporium where the non-programmer can easily make a website. But there are even more web developers now then there were then as the perceived need for web exposure has grown and even the tools need a good developer using them in order to turn out good results. And then you have a lot of people that are still coding by hand, in a text editor.
The moment templates start approaching the efficiency of the results of coding by hand, the creation of templates itself will have a higher demand for coders.

In the end the templates have to come from somewhere and have to be kept up to date by someone, there are no magic gnomes to make them for you...they're to busy with the shoes

-Tarwn

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[CajunCenturion]

Tarwn - You make an interesting point that since the development of the WYSIWYG editors and wizards allowing non-programmers to develop their own sites, there has been an increase in the numbers of developers.

What I would be interesting in knowing, how many of the self-proclaimed web developers truly understand the web development process, or they simply proficient in using the tools provided to them? Or to phrase it another way, how many of these web-developers could develop the site in Notepad if they had to?

Good Luck
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As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein

 

[benlinkknilneb]

Either way, Cajun... there are more people making money off it now than there used to be... Personally, I probably wouldn't have a job if it weren't for RAD tools like VB/MSAccess...

I'm sure there are some web developers who don't even know what HTML stands for... but my guess is that the majority of them are like me: I could, if I had no other alternative, write my website in Notepad, but I just use the tools to keep me from having to remember all the html tags, etc.

Here's something interesting to think about... do you think programmers would actually write that kind of software? Isn't that sort of self-defeating?

 

[CajunCenturion]

I think the reason the programmers do write that kind of software is because it's software that sells and makes money in the short-term.

Is it self-defeating? Yes, in some ways it certainly is in that it has commodized a number of programming activities so they can be done by users instead of programmers, and is the crux behind this thread. But I do not think it will mean the end of software engineers.


Good Luck
--------------
As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein

 

[BJCooperIT]

Certainly there is a push in that direction - look at Oracle Applications. Five years ago you hardly saw or heard about them, but now Monster's ads are roughly 90% Oracle Applications if you search for the keywords: Oracle forms.

I do not believe programmers will become redundant. I do think that there may be less new custom development and a shift towards customizing these so-called "drop-in" solutions. My career is morphing towards more backend projects to work with the data rather than GUI development.

[sup]Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance. ~George Bernard Shaw[/sup]
Consultant/Custom Forms & PL/SQL - Oracle 8.1.7 - Windows 2000
[sup]When posting code, please use TGML to help readability. Thanks![sup]

 

[Ladyhawk]

I guess another way to look at it is that users would also have to some skill to know what they want from the software or what they want the software to do. Programming is more than just bashing a keyboard to get some code out - even though even today some programmers think it is. It also involves interpreting what the users (actually) want/need. So users (read wannabe programmers) would need to become analysts as well as "programmers".

What would the project failure statistics say, I wonder, if at the moment they are saying 80% (or some such high number) of projects fail? Would the "users" finally have to come to terms with the fact that scope creep can have a large impact on the cost and time of the project?

Ladyhawk.
** ASP/VB/Java Programmer **

 

[dilettante]

The ability to whack out a web site in NotePad isn't much of a measure one way or the other. This isn't to say that knowing HTML and related things like CSS well enough to use them "naked" isn't important. But almost any fool can learn them well enough to get something working, these are readily accessible skills.

As with most programming and "authoring" (hate that word), things such as readability and sophistication are more important. By sophistication I do not mean cleverness (root word for kludge). But these also seem to be subjective and thus more difficult measures than "well, does it work?"

Ugly as it is, in many cases I'd prefer to look at the code of FrontPage-created web pages than the stuff some people produce. At least the FrontPage output is somewhat consistent once you get accustomed the the junk it spews to implement different things. Hard to say that about "Johnny NotePad's" sloppy hacked-up messes very often.

Most of what I see is cleanup/fixup work at customer sites. The web pages I see are usually constructed using Microsoft tools (including NotePad). Some of the ugliest stuff I see out there is ASP pages created using NotePad or Visual InterDev. The VID stuff usually makes no use of the RAD capabilities of the product, 'cause so many of these hacks have such poor knowledge of the product they just whang away at it in code view, and may as well be using NotePad. As a result they produce ASP applications that are messy, clunky, and typically have a lot of serious problems - not the least of which being scalability problems.

I see the ASP market as a microcosm of what is wrong in programming generally today. People self-study or take ASP 101 type courses, have a few successes getting their "hello world" class samples working, and are arrogant enough to think they know something. If they'd bothered to try getting much beyond that level they would find that intermediate courses often start by throwing out all the stuff taught in the 101 course. Why is it that students don't comprehend that to get early successes they are often taught simplistic approaches? With today's commercialized training, making the student "feel good" is often the most important goal - damn the value (topedoes).

Style and sophistication can only come through experience and literacy. How many programmers today are even exposed to "great code" and read it? How else are people supposed to pick up on useful coding paradigms, techniques, or algorithms for common (and not-so-common) purposes?

Oh well.

The state of application development today is quite odd. We have a lot of people with "home fixit" skills running around calling themselves plumbers or carpenters. Or microwave meal-heaters trying to sell themselves as cooks. This is where some of the backlash has come from, since an employer seems to have no way to judge the skills of an applicant until after eating more than a few soggy cardboard pizzas and bag after bag of the same old microwave popcorn. Then of course they blame "cooks" as a class of employee.

And so the answer of course is to stock up on more of these "microwave meal" applications.

Because no effort has been made to produce sufficient numbers of good cooks (or even recognise a good programmer) and gluttony is rampant (no shortage of application demand) there is a thriving market for these things. Variety and quality as measured by taste (features? slick-looking user interfaces?) may be improving, but what about nutritional value (providing what is needed)?

The result is that more and more employers are beginning to realize that any idiot can microwave a meal, and that fast food is cheap. On the rare occasion they need something special, they'll go out to a nice restaurant (outsource?).

So we end up with a lot of microwaving by unskilled employees, some burger-flippers (low-end "programmers&quot, and a few high-paid chefs (contract programmers). Little does the consumer realize that most of the "chefs" are now reduced to heating stuff out of cans and buckets from a food-service factory themselves. The skilled chefs go unappreciated because of the consumer's dulled palate, and the truly great ones are only available to the wealthy (major corporations) at outrages prices. Probably whipping up products for the majors' factories to churn out as more micro-meals or food-service buckets.

 

[Ladyhawk]

Very well said!

Ladyhawk.
** ASP/VB/Java Programmer **

 

[CajunCenturion]

I agree, well said.


Good Luck
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As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein

 

[KenCunningham]

And another Bravo. Do you want fries with that star? ;-)

 

[Tarwn]

Nicely put.

Now, do we define these microwave meal-warmers as prgrammers? If not, then the number of prgrammers is probably a much lower number than quotes (of course) and that seems to indicate to me that at some point (like in many other areas) it will soon become a quality market rather than a quantity market. If thats the case then perhaps the education system will turn around and make a programmer's degree similar to a medical degree. 8 to 10 years of schooling without which you can't get a "programming" job. When you have finished your schooling perhaps you have to spend time as an intern vefoe moving up the ranks.

Concerning notepad and all the good and evil produced therein, some companies have gotten to the point where they will not hire you unless you know dreamweaver. They automatically look down on anyone that hand codes. Is this the direction we want to move? Should we continue to push RAD tools and IDE's because they allow quantity and speed?

I'm concerned because it doesn't look like the growth of the market is slowing any, and I fear that will only push companies more and more to demand quantity over quality.

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[CajunCenturion]

Not sure who "we" is. I'd be willing to give you good odds that the microwave meal-warmers consider themselves to be programmers and IT professionals, even though they probably couldn't sauté mushrooms in a saucepan if their life depended on it.

(I'll be we'll be in the kitchen with this analogy for a long time too, and the credit goes to dilettante)

I think the push for RAD development will continue in proportion to how quality, and not quantity, affects the bottom line. Continuing with this analogy – with IT being the cooks. You’ve got several different types of companies:

Companies that have their own cooks, with their only jobs to feed the other employees. These traditional internal IT departments will, I think, continue if not increase reliance on RAD tools because this IT department is only a support arm, and viewed only as an expense. Quality of software is not a big issue yet; just get it to work at a minimal cost. Whether or not quality becomes a factor will largely depend on how much long-term thinking occurs at the highest levels of corporate management. User satisfaction, maintenance costs, and the like may creep into the picture, but will only have an effect if management is thinking beyond the short term. The microwave food warmers, the brute force coders will probably always have a home in this environment.

Restaurants – These are consulting firms where they cook for those clients who buy their services. As they too run the gambit, from Fast Food (RAD short term code - burger and fries, and out the door) to Five-star restaurants, where food quality, presentation, service, and customer relationships are part of the product. Here you’re going to use chefs (software engineers) with perhaps some cook helpers (experience required) because quality matters. The software engineers will always have a home in this segment, and this will be a tough market for the self-taught fill-in-the-blank programmers to crack.

Food suppliers – These are your software product companies, providing meals on the shelf that only need to be warmed up to eat. This too runs the gambit from essentially fast-food providers to five-star suppliers, and the use RAD and product quality will parallel the target customers. Both chefs and cooks will be able to find jobs here.

The interesting role, evolving in the real world that’s hard to fit or define is the company that has nothing to do with food, but has a web presence. It’s that company that manufacturers widgets, but now finds they need to run a restaurant on the corner (their e-commerce enabled web-site). Right now, RAD tools in vogue because time is of the essence – get that presence out there. My personal opinion is that this will evolved, over time, into a two to three star restaurant situation because companies will realize that the corner restaurant, it’s quality, it’s service, will form that very important first impression. Right now, it’s get the site up and running and they’re using cooks, but this will turn into a restaurant, where putting a quality product on the table matters, and these companies are going to then start bringing in some chefs.

This will have the added benefit that employee morale will start to rise, because over in the employee break room, lunch just got a whole lot better.

Good Luck
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As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein

 

[benlinkknilneb]

Interesting viewpoint on education there, Tarwn... the problem I see with this (we may have discussed this in another thread) is that the people who run the school of cooking don't know much about food. In my experience, the majority of them were botanists (math profs) who automatically assumed they could be a chef. I *really* like the idea of internships/apprenticeships... right now I'm an entry-level programmer, but I'm basically the only programmer in the office. Our IT guys do more work with database/network administration... actually creating software to be used in the plant has kinda fallen to me. I wish I had an experienced programmer here to bounce ideas off of... these forums are really helpful, but they can only do so much.

 

[Tarwn]

Heh.

Perhaps we (ie, the global we) are still more in the beginning phase of some of these technologies (web, etc) than I originally thought. I can see your point of view that many places are still getting their corner restaurant up yet may have plans for bigger and better things down the road when resources become available (better cooks for hire or more time to allow the cooks to help plan the menu).

Perhaps part of the problem I have in seeing the picture here is that my own training as a cook took place during the rapid explosion of the field over the past ten years. That tends to give me less to compare against than those of you who have been behind the stove longer and seen several dinner rushes rather than the single one I have seen.

Perhaps we could even look at the current situation as a plateau, where the newness has started to wear off and people are now building up the resources to take the next step towards increasing quality. What worries me is that I think many places will add the extra dining room before training the cooks or revising the menu (method of operations and supplying service).

<aside>
I agree that the chefs to programmers bit will stick around for a while. It's the best analogy I have heard for the situation even if I do end up hungry after a few posts
</aside>

-Tarwn

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[sup]29 3K 10 3D 3L 3J 3K 10 32 35 10 3E 39 33 35 10 3K 3F 10 38 31 3M 35 10 36 3I 35 35 10 3K 39 3D 35 10 1Q 19[/sup]
Do you know how hot your computer is running at home? I do

http://www.tiernok.com/hscripts/systemp.asp