Are IT developers the stupidest people on earth ?

[thunderlizard]

SQL. BASIC. Visual Basic. Rational. XAML. Business Objects. I have lost count of all the new technologies I have lived through that were intended to be so simple the end users could make their own software without needing developers, but ended up being more things for developers to do.

[woohoo]

WTF?

Thirdly I can't find an iOS developer, want to help me find one to test your theory?

Look if it shuts you up, I've got an ipod touch and xcode. Pretty sure I can knock something up. 1k per day and I can only work 2 days a week. What you moaning about?

[NotAllThere]

Fancy IBM JCL is...

... Rexx

Ah. VM on an Amdahl mainframe, Rexx... happy days.

SQL. BASIC. Visual Basic. Rational. XAML. Business Objects. I have lost count of all the new technologies I have lived through that were intended to be so simple the end users could make their own software without needing developers, but ended up being more things for developers to do.

Back in my REXX days, the applications development team had just introduced this amazing CASE tool that generated the COBOL for you. That was 27 years ago... still no sign developers will disappear.

As soon as you're working with something Turin complete, you'll be programming. The only difference between now and 30 years ago, is that what was high-level then is a mere component in a library now.

[Cirrus]

The Blight of Word Completion

.

As soon as you're working with something Turing complete, you'll be programming.

FTFY

[VectraMan]

The only difference between now and 30 years ago, is that what was high-level then is a mere component in a library now.

Though it often seems learning how to use something from a library is as much work as simply creating your own.

[NotAllThere]

.

As soon as you're working with something Turing complete, you'll be programming.

FTFY

Yeah - that's what I mean. Not that it must be shrouded in mystery...

[vetran]

FTFY

no he wants to race round in a little Fiat!

[NorthWestPerm2Contr]

SQL. BASIC. Visual Basic. Rational. XAML. Business Objects. I have lost count of all the new technologies I have lived through that were intended to be so simple the end users could make their own software without needing developers, but ended up being more things for developers to do.

Now Tableau & Power BI are meant to do the same thing

Sure you can do some powerful stuff with them but without a background in data you won't have a clue.

[northernladuk]

Sure you can do some powerful stuff with them but without a background in data you won't have a clue.

But can you make it scroll your name or some rude comment up the screen and disable the 'break' key?

[Cirrus]

I started in IT automating what people had previously been doing manually. The impact was huge. That was the early 70s and what had taken an entire department of maybe 10 -15 people all month suddenly was completed in a day. Even before I was in IT I remember doing overtime putting pricing information into a new system. All the previous jobs were made redundant.

Recently I was running projects to automate insurance bordereaux and call centre correspondence routing. The potential impact was much lower. And it was much, much harder to make progress. It's easy to automate simple tasks but a lot of what people actually do (even in ostensibly simple, repetitive tasks) is frighteningly variable, unpredictable and requires initiative, judgement, creativity, networking, risk assessment etc etc .

So automation is nothing new. It's really just hype. It's the old, old story: will the loss of existing jobs be compensated by the creation of new (less boring?) opportunities.

Who can say - but one fact is that since the 70s, income for the vast majority of people has stagnated. The rich have got vastly richer but the rest of us have been treading water at best. So you might guess that employment will still be available but the trend towards slowly declining wealth and tougher working conditions (except for the top 1%) will continue.