Could be the title of the piece.

I agree: throughout my own career as a programmer (I prefer the more blue-collar sounding term—it better fits my skill set) I have also seen large changes in the industry that certainly made waves, did not capsize the profession.

At the same time, the profession I retired from was by no means the profession I entered into in the '90s. I confess I liked the older profession better.

Its not dead at all and it wont die either.

Why? chagpt, or figma or v0 can spin up a few pages of brochure site, even some blog posting level web apps, basic cruds you know. But I don't think it will replace full software engineering.

I work with a large codebase, thats almost 30 years old, multiple framework ( backbone, react, angular) and then java, python for backends. All from different phases and everything is stitched together to make it work, and have a well profit making business going on. There is no model or chatxyz that can dig throug all these connected apps and services and replace our engineering team. It helps us here and there- yeah a lot.

Yet one thing does seem different for anyone who just missed the dotcom crash, is that the roles available have fallen off a cliff while the numbers looking for roles seem to be up, at least in the UK. The UAE is even worse. I've spent 20 years hiding from recruiters and now they're all leaving me on read. Karma, maybe.

But then BASIC came along and really finished the job. Now _anybody_ could program, without needing all that specialized training. It was just a skill, not a job!

Jason has nailed it. If he were older, his list of vignettes might be longer, but the point would remain the same.

"The dream of the widespread, ubiquitous internet came true, and there were very few fatalities. Some businesses died, but it was more glacial than volcanic in time scale. When ubiquitous online services became commonplace it just felt mundane. It didn’t feel forced. It was the opposite of the dot com boom just five years later: the internet is here and we’re here to build a solid business within it in contrast with we should put this solid business on the internet somehow, because it’s coming."

Yes. And it continues on.

I'm still happy i automated stuff, that was the interesting part of the job,

Software Engineering isn’t a profession. Software Development is. Software development as a profession may wane and morph, due to advancements in technology and other creations.

I don’t know any engineer who has ever said “engineering is a dead end”. Because that’s an obviously nonsensical statement. So, engineering stands on its own for time immemorial.

And no - I’m not nitpicking over terminology. Learn engineering.

This kind of happened, and it was a good thing.

I believe the appropriate term is “happy path”, not “garden path”.

This can't be solved without fully trusting the LLM period.

Just don't autopilot on important code you want to own. That's good start.

All the stories listed seem interesting, but none of them seem all that relevant.

I feel like most people understand that this is a seismic shift in abstraction layer, but intelligent people will still be in demand to manage the machines at whatever level is currently highest. The motor car didn’t kill taxi drivers, unless those who drove a carriage refused to learn how to drive a motor car.

Perhaps I’m not expressing my point very well… but this feels like both an argument against something almost no one is saying seriously, and it uses examples that also aren’t that applicable to the current situation other than having the commonality that people have said before that software engineers will die out. Make me wonder… How many times did people think an invention would kill off a job incorrectly, until one day it actually did?

Intelligent and well educated people will always be in demand somewhere. Until we’re in some post money utopia, we’ll just have to roll with the punches. In the meantime, HN readers like ourselves will simultaneously upvote any article that says humans are super necessary down at lower levels of abstraction and are way better at coding than LLMs, whilst quietly also coding less and less by hand and crawling up that abstraction layer themselves. That’s just human nature.

FTFY

> The dream of “multimedia” became commonplace and everyone just accepted it as normal. I’m not aware of any industries that collapsed dramatically due to multimedia.

But "multimedia" was never purported to be something that would lead to collapse of any segment of the industry, much less industries. If anything, the multimedia hype was purported to increase IT work which it did for some years.

> In 2000 a coworker took me aside and showed me his brand-new copy of IntelliJ IDE. “It’s over for us,” he said, “this thing makes it so programmers aren’t strictly necessary, like one person can operate this tool and they can lay the rest of us off.”

I've a hard time believing this. Literally nobody I've met was ever mistaken that IntelliJ would mean the doom of software engineering work. It's a great IDE and all IDE including IntelliJ required engineers to write code with them. Nobody was foolish enough to really think one engineer or one manager or one salesperson can "operate" IntelliJ and generate all the code to meet business requirements.

> And then he showed me the killer feature “that’s going to get us all out of a job:” the refactoring tools.

I'll bet there was no such "coworker". No sane person would think "refactoring" could mean "magically understand business requirements and write code"? All of this sounds like strawman setup so that the author could go on to making their next point like the bit where he challenged his "coworker" and asked if refactoring tools can write new code.

Don't get me wrong. The rest of the post is on money though. I just think the post would do better without these fake stories to set up strawmans only to take them down. Feels a bit forced!