I was fortunate enough to be asked to comment on a recent article in the Financial Times about software eating software, or software automation.  The article is behind the FT paywall for most of the US, so you may not be able to read it, but the gist of the article, written by Richard Newton, is that there’s a new wave of innovation coming our way as it pertains to programming.  One of the featured guests in the article was Dr. Guillaume Bouchard, who I wrote about in my last post.

Programmers Unite!

Anyway, the predictable outcry from all of the programmers who chimed in on the article was that there’s “no way to do what we do with computers.” Haven’t we been here before?  History has shown that when there is scarcity, innovation produces new solutions to address that scarcity. There are currently ~ 11 million programmers worldwide.  That’s 1 for every 700 or so of us. And yet we see that the very process of building software disrupts other industries where previous scarcities existed.

There’s no way to fill the demand for programmers fast enough. We can’t educate our way out of this shortage in enough time.  Code academies are not going to make a dent, and anecdotal evidence suggests that the product they’re producing can’t get it done in actual jobs. Maybe that will change over time, and I hope it does.

Either way, it’s a curious reaction to me that any programmer would feel threatened by further automation. Isn’t that what we live for, and strive for? We write code so that repetitive work is offloaded to more efficient machines and people can do higher value work.

Move Up the Value Chain

Instead of griping about how the man is now coming for YOUR job, it would seem a more logical reaction would be to embrace the coming changes and move up the value chain. There are still mountains of work building all of the systems and technology to make “regular people” more like programmers. That’s a huge domain to go explore and create in, rather than worrying about some of the menial, repetitive tasks going away. Don’t programmers hate those anyway?

To get an early glimpse of how this will begin to play out over the next couple of years, check out companies like Treeline.io and Dropsource.