Hi, this is a question that popped into my mind when i saw an article about some AWS engineer talking about ai assistants taking over the job of programmers, this reminded me that it’s not the first time that something like this was said.

My software engineering teacher once told me that a few years ago people believed graphical tools like enterprise architect would make it so that a single engineer could just draw a pretty UML diagram and generate 90% of the project without touching any code,
And further back COBOL was supposed to replace programmers by letting accountants write their own programs.

Now i’m curious, were there many other technologies that were supposedly going to replace programmers that you remember?

i hope someone that’s been around much more than me knows something more or has some funny stories to share

    • leisesprecher@feddit.org
      13·
      3 months ago

      And DBAs. I’m currently working on a project where I said from the very start, I can set up this DB in k8s and I can get it to work decently, but I have neither the knowledge nor the time to get it right. Please give me someone who knows how this works.

      No, don’t worry, it’ll be fine, we don’t need that, this kuverneles thing I keep hearing about handles that!!!

      Six months of hard contact with the enemy on production later:

      Well, we’re currently looking for someone who actually knows how DBs work, because we have one of those issues that would cost a proper DBA 5min and me 5 months.

      • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
        7·
        3 months ago

        I feel like there is a lost art of DBAs, where in their mystical knowledge rests how to make perfect cheap and scalable databases, and business cast them away because “Why not pay Google twice that amount?”