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Comment by johnnyjeans | Hacker News Reader

> That's simply a reality, just as weavers saw massive layoffs in the wake of the automated loom, or scribes lost work after the printing press, or human calculators became pointless after high-precision calculators became commonplace.

See, this is the kind of conception of a programmer I find completely befuddling. Programming isn't like those jobs at all. There's a reason people who are overly attached to code and see their job as "writing code" are pejoratively called "code monkeys." Did CAD kill the engineer? No. It didn't. The idea is ridiculous.

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> Programming isn't like those jobs at all

I'm sure you understand the analogy was about automation and reduction in workforce, and that each of these professions have both commonalities and differences. You should assume good faith and interpret comments on Hacker News in the best reasonable light.

> There's a reason people who are overly attached to code and see their job as "writing code" are pejoratively called "code monkeys."

Strange. My experience is that "code monkeys" don't give a crap about the quality of their code or its impact with regards to the product, which is why they remain programmers and don't move on to roles which incorporate management or product responsibilities. Actually, the people who are "overly attached to code" tend to be computer scientists who are deeply interested in computation and its expression.

> Did CAD kill the engineer? No. It didn't. The idea is ridiculous.

Of course not. It led to a reduction in draftsmen, as now draftsmen can work more quickly and engineers can take on work that used to be done by draftsmen. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics states[0]:

  Expected employment decreases will be driven by the use of computer-aided design (CAD) and building information modeling (BIM) technologies. These technologies increase drafter productivity and allow engineers and architects to perform many tasks that used to be done by drafters.

Similarly, the other professions I mentioned were absorbed into higher-level professions. It has been stated many times that the future focus of software engineers will be less about programming and more about product design and management.

I saw this a decade ago at the start of my professional career and from the start have been product and design focused, using code as a tool to get things done. That is not to say that I don't care deeply about computer science, I find coding and product development to each be incredibly creatively rewarding, and I find that a comprehensive understanding of each unlocks an entirely new way to see and act on the world.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/drafter...

My father in law was a draftsman. Lost his job when the defense industry contracted in the '90s. When he was looking for a new job everything required CAD which he had no experience in (he also had a learning disability, it made learning CAD hard).

He couldn't land a job that paid more than minimum wage after that.

Wow, that's a sad story. It really sucks to spend your life mastering a craft and suddenly find it obsolete and your best years behind you. My heart goes out to your father.

This is a phenomenon that seems to be experienced more and more frequently as the industrial revolution continues... The craft of drafting goes back to 2000 B.C.[0] and while techniques and requirements gradually changed over thousands of years, the digital revolution suddenly changed a ton of things all at once in drafting and many other crafts. This created a literacy gap many never recovered from.

I wonder if we'll see a similar split here with engineers and developers regarding agentic and LLM literacy.

[0] https://azon.com/2023/02/16/rare-historical-photos/

> Actually, the people who are "overly attached to code" tend to be computer scientists who are deeply interested in computation and its expression.

What academics are you rubbing shoulders with? Every single computer scientist I have ever met has projects where every increment in the major version goes like:

"I was really happy with my experimental kernel, but then I thought it might be nice to have hotpatching, so I abandoned the old codebase and started over from scratch."

The more novel and cutting edge the work you do is, the more harmful legacy code becomes.

I think we are operating under different interpretations of what "overly attached to code" means, leading to a misunderstanding about my comment.

In my case, I am referring to a deep appreciation of code itself, not any particular piece of code.

"I saw this a decade ago at the start of my professional career and from the start have been product and design focused"

I have similar view of the future as you do. But I'm just curious what the quoted text here means in practice. Did you go into product management instead of software engineer for example?

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