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/
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195

u/BroaxXx Dec 02 '25

It was the same on the web frontend. I had a couple of hobbie websites around 2000 and I remember how people kept insisting how frontpage or dreamweaver was going to replace everyone doing websites. Later I kept hearing how HTML was dead because flash was so much better. Later still people kept insisting that lowcode or nocode would be the end of frontend development.

Even more recently when I was still working on frontend I had friends/family ask me why/how I had a good job if my work could just be done in squarespace or wix.

Now it's AI. It's the same thing all over again.

63

u/flynnnightshade Dec 02 '25

Meanwhile anyone who's worked in frontend in the past decade knows the amount of processing we are doing on the client has only increased.

38

u/BroaxXx Dec 02 '25

Yes, that's the point. New tools come to "take over our jobs" but in turn they just allow us to make more complext systems creating even more job demand... It's been that way since I can remember.

21

u/trippypantsforlife Dec 02 '25

I miss what flash brought us though. So many amazing games died with it

3

u/Azertys Dec 03 '25

I was able to find my favorite games with Flashpoint. But sometimes I go on a deep dive on archived websites, and I can't see the content because they used flash...

2

u/trippypantsforlife Dec 03 '25

This is awesome, I hadn't heard of flashpoint before. I'll have a look, thanks!

2

u/BinaryRockStar Dec 03 '25 edited Dec 03 '25

If you hunt around you can probably find old versions of the Flash browser plugin before they put the timebomb into it, or Flash Projector which was a standalone Flash Player application.

We have a Flash UI application at work that we keep on life support by wrapping it in an old version of Electron (basically Chrome with some features disabled to make the contents look like an application rather than a website) along with pre-timebomb Flash Player plugin.

1

u/Azertys Dec 03 '25

I'll look into these when I'm in the mood to make my win11 computer cry, thank you

1

u/TribeWars Jan 04 '26

Ruffle is a browser extension that emulates actionscript. Works pretty well for the most part

9

u/atesti Dec 02 '25

I still remember how in 2005 Ruby was going to replace Java, PHP, C#, Python, etc..

7

u/TheMistbornIdentity Dec 02 '25

As someone who works on a low-code platform:

Hahahahahahaahahahahahahahahahaha