Comment by godelski
6 days ago
> The argument I'm seeing most is that most of us SWEs will become obsolete
That is equivalent to "replacing domain experts", or at least was my intent. But language is ambiguous lol. I do think programmers are domain experts. There are also different kinds of domain experts but I very much doubt we'll get rid of SWEs.
Though my big concern right now is that we'll get rid of juniors and maybe even mid levels. There's definitely a push for that and incentives from an economic point of view. But it will be disastrous for the tech industry if this happens. It kills the pipeline. There can be no wizards without noobs. So we have a real life tragedy of the commons situation staring us in the face. I'm pretty sure we know what choices will be made, but I hope we can recognize that there's going to need to be cooperation to solve this least we all suffer.
I know I'm shooting myself in the wallet here, but I honestly don't think that SWE is an "essential" domain. To explain, as one who has taken relational data modeling classes, it's obvious to me that everything that can be spoken about can be treated as a "domain", but if you'll allow me the terminology, I think that some are "essential", and others are "accidental".
I believe that business analysis and computer science are essential domains, of (respectively) properly defining the logical/mathematical constraints of problems, and of understanding what it means to solve such problems. But software engineering is "accidental", in the sense that no one other than us in the industry actually cares about what we do, but rather only about their use-cases implemented; what we do is just implementation details.
I don't have a magic ball, but I wouldn't be surprised if in a century, (human) software engineering goes the way of the switchboard operator, elevator operator or knocker-upper.