Dear Reader,
recently I've been thinking about how automation influences our daily lives. In contrast to people working mundane or dangerous jobs being replaced by the machines is the ever growing demand for software developers in the world. This gives the impression software development is the high paying future proof career. Is it though? What are we really as software developers and why should we think we will not be the first ones to be deprecated by automation/ai in coming years...
assumptions:
1. a lot of software development jobs consist of translating business requirements to code, as opposed to smaller subset of jobs where computer science or other research is done
2. new code abstraction layers are consistently piled on top of how we communicate with the machines asm->c->python->js->frameworks->no-code
3. translation is a task that can be performed by AI achievable today, google translate, GPT-3..4..x...
I was wondering what is your opinion on life of software developers after some sort of "singularity" event, where requirements defined by humans can be translated to machine executable code for most business use cases.
Is this level of AI achievable in our life time, if so how close are we to this kind of event?
Maybe you have already seen smart/ai code translation employed at your work, could you share your opinion on how well this works?
Should I bail while I can and learn how to cut hair or make sausages?
I'll worry about job security the day that an AI can figure out what a product owner actually wants. Until then, I'm still the interface between then and whatever fancy AI or low-code/no-code solutions might be around for the last step.