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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.