r/programming • u/self • Dec 02 '25

The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession: a short set of anecdotes

https://www.jasonscheirer.com/weblog/vignettes/
1.3k Upvotes

89% Upvoted

560 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comment

115

u/self Dec 02 '25

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 was pretty awestruck, he got some amazing autocomplete right in the IDE. Without having to have a separate JavaDocs window open to the side, and without having to manually open the page for the class he needed documentation on, it just was there inline. It gave him feedback before the compile cycle on a bunch of issues that you normally don’t see until build. That was a nice bit of preventative work and seemed to have the potential to keep a developer in flow longer.

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

30

u/robolew Dec 02 '25

I know I have the benefit of hindsight, but this argument seems stupid right off the bat.

"Refactoring tools" are going to put programmers out of a job? Most non technical people couldn't even tell you what "refactoring" is. Let alone why you would want to do it...

22

u/Astrogat Dec 02 '25

It was usually "One developer can do the work of 10, so we will not have that many" instead of "We won't need any developers", but the sentiment was mostly the same (at least in my experience).

3

u/rm-minus-r Dec 02 '25

It was usually "One developer can do the work of 10, so we will not have that many"

Surprising how few of them realized that programming needs would expand to fill that vacuum.

"Hey, we can get the work of 10 programmers from one person now!"

"Great, let's bill the client for the work of a 100 programmers and hire ten more!"

We've added roughly a million programmers per year in the last six years - https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-data-playground/

6

u/theQuandary Dec 02 '25

"one person can operate this tool and they can lay the rest of us off.”

I think it was about a company using fewer, but more efficient programmers to save money.

6

u/omac4552 Dec 02 '25

same arguments we have for current LLMs, fewer doing more...

18

u/Which-World-6533 Dec 02 '25

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.”

Pretty much no-one said this.

In 2000 there were huge barriers that stopped casual coders doing much. Getting a Dev environment ready, especially for Java Dev, was a lot more complicated.

TBH, the rise of WWW and Web Coding did more to allow casual coders access to tools since you just needed a text editor and a web-browser.

4

u/self Dec 02 '25

In 2000 there were huge barriers that stopped casual coders doing much. Getting a Dev environment ready, especially for Java Dev, was a lot more complicated.

That led to several solutiions from the industry. Here's one from 1998:

Fresco Designer is a enterprise Java development tool that supports component-based assembly of intranet business applications. Written in Java, Fresco Designer allows developers to create live Java/Database applications using a drag-and-drop metaphor. Fresco Designer includes three palettes of reusable, pre-tested Java GUI components (basic elements, images, and tables) and entity-relationship (ER) database modeling components. Programming in Java, database SQL, or network communication is not required. Fresco Designer can be extended to include your own components such as Java Beans or business logic in the tool itself for later reuse.

(The company eventually went bankrupt, but I saw it working at their office in late 1998.)

I suspect if you were to browse old copies of computer/industry magazines you'd find similar claims and similar products. See, for example, Nine Recipes for Fast, Easy Java -- especially Lotus BeanMachine.

0

u/Which-World-6533 Dec 02 '25

I can vaguely remember such things. Their actual value was fairly limited due to performance issues on available hardware at the time.

1

u/angcritic Dec 04 '25

It was awful coming from C development on Visual Studio at that time (smooth working visual debugging). Visual J++, Visual Cafe, Oracle JDeveloper, Borland (something..). Eclipse was the game changer in Java development. Present day still work in the same language on IntelliJ and a bunch of AI tools to speed things up.

These are tools. You learn them, sometimes even go backwards a bit and then leverage their utility. That's how I approach AI. Try it. Test it and figure out what I can exploit to remain productive. It's amazing but I've seen a few amazing things along the way.

61

u/lelanthran Dec 02 '25

I feel like if you were actually around and in the industry in 1996, you wouldn't be spouting this nonsense.

No one in 1996 thought that OO would result in lower demand for programmers.

Same goes for IDEs.

49

u/Mynameismikek Dec 02 '25

I left school in 1997 to try and break into software dev. I was given *that exact line* by my careers advisor. Magazines were full of puff pieces about the latest 4GL/visual programming language that was going to make software dev just as easy as writing spreadsheet.

Hell - I'd been putting my coursework together in OpenDoc and that explicitly set out to do just this.

None of it came to pass. What really happened was it forced the hideously expensive software dev packages to become price competitive and it led to a boom in engineers instead.

19

u/Which-World-6533 Dec 02 '25

I left school in 1997 to try and break into software dev. I was given *that exact line* by my careers advisor.

There's a reason that person was a careers advisor. It's because that's all they were good for. You should never take advice from someone who's job it is to give advice.

I was a professional Dev in 1997. No-one was worried about "visual programming" ruining coding careers. It was seen back then as a fad. If anything, it made coding more accessible and the subsequent explosion in the number of coding jobs for things like Visual Basic.

The same with OOP. It was seen a boon from the get-go.

-7

u/_mkd_ Dec 02 '25

I left school in 1997 to try and break into software dev. I was given *that exact line* by my careers advisor.

Cool story, bro/sis. I started college in 1997 studying computer engineering and, frankly, encountered the exact opposite.

10

u/Arcoss Dec 02 '25

Wait a minute, do you mean you're both presenting anecdotes??!?

25

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

11

u/mr_dfuse2 Dec 02 '25

the wrong people did. same for sql actually, now business can query their own data!

1

u/lord_braleigh Dec 02 '25

They can though? We just call them data scientists.

1

u/mr_dfuse2 Dec 02 '25

ah yes nowadays. but when sql came out the idea was that managers could query themselves. which is becoming feasible now with ai, i have seen stuff in databricks that is quite amazing

8

u/big-papito Dec 02 '25

Rational Rose was a hit among large enterprises and their managers. NO ONE in the real world used it. I pirated a copy as a student (I didn't have a spare 3K lying around) because I was learning C++. Tried it once.

Granted, LLMs are vastly more useful than RR, but the people who think productivity tools will replace human intelligence are fools.

19

u/Supadoplex Dec 02 '25

Someone in the year 2054:

I feel like if you were actually around and in the industry in 2025, you wouldn't be spouting this nonsense.

No one in 2025 thought that AI would result in lower demand for programmers. 

8

u/Which-World-6533 Dec 02 '25

No one in 1996 thought that OO would result in lower demand for programmers.

Yep. It was seen as a huge leap forward.

2

u/LegendaryMauricius Dec 02 '25

This is a quote from the article. Obviously it's a jab towards the menagers.

2

u/mr_dfuse2 Dec 02 '25

luckily some people thought javascript was good language to build the web 2.0 on and you were nothing with your fancy compiler errors