"The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession" ... is greatly exaggerated.

Could be the title of the piece.

I agree: throughout my own career as a programmer (I prefer the more blue-collar sounding term—it better fits my skill set) I have also seen large changes in the industry that certainly made waves, did not capsize the profession.

At the same time, the profession I retired from was by no means the profession I entered into in the '90s. I confess I liked the older profession better.

Isn't this a bit revisionist? I started to become interested in programming around late 90s and I don't remember anyone floating the idea that OOP, libraries or IDEs will make programming obsolete as a profession. If anything, pre-2023 most programmers considered their job as one of the hardest ones to automate.

The title is “The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession", why was this changed? Not really fair to the author.

The reports about our death were greatly exaggerated.

Ahh - so many gems!

"The dream of the widespread, ubiquitous internet came true, and there were very few fatalities. Some businesses died, but it was more glacial than volcanic in time scale. When ubiquitous online services became commonplace it just felt mundane. It didn’t feel forced. It was the opposite of the dot com boom just five years later: the internet is here and we’re here to build a solid business within it in contrast with we should put this solid business on the internet somehow, because it’s coming."

Yes. And it continues on.

Forgive me but a lot of the examples seem like strawman.

> The dream of “multimedia” became commonplace and everyone just accepted it as normal. I’m not aware of any industries that collapsed dramatically due to multimedia.

But "multimedia" was never purported to be something that would lead to collapse of any segment of the industry, much less industries. If anything, the multimedia hype was purported to increase IT work which it did for some years.

> 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.”

I've a hard time believing this. Literally nobody I've met was ever mistaken that IntelliJ would mean the doom of software engineering work. It's a great IDE and all IDE including IntelliJ required engineers to write code with them. Nobody was foolish enough to really think one engineer or one manager or one salesperson can "operate" IntelliJ and generate all the code to meet business requirements.

> And then he showed me the killer feature “that’s going to get us all out of a job:” the refactoring tools.

I'll bet there was no such "coworker". No sane person would think "refactoring" could mean "magically understand business requirements and write code"? All of this sounds like strawman setup so that the author could go on to making their next point like the bit where he challenged his "coworker" and asked if refactoring tools can write new code.

Don't get me wrong. The rest of the post is on money though. I just think the post would do better without these fake stories to set up strawmans only to take them down. Feels a bit forced!

I was, for a long time, scared of my future due to the low/no-code, automation, LLMs, outsourcing, etc. Until, at some point, I realised something simple - the risk factor for my job is not determined by how good new tools are, but only by how lazy people are about learning and adopting them. And here history gives another lesson - we never learn, eternal cycle of mistakes will continue.

Just to react to the "i automated myself out of a Job" part: happened to me at my first job, as we automated more and more our deployment, we could take more and more clients, and I ended up spending 90% of my time fixing routing issues, onboarding clients, integrating their ETLs or inhouse software, or fixing their "chmod -R 777 /" and other mistakes. Which wasn't an issue when it was 30%, or even 50% of my job to be clear, but became extremely boring and soulcrushing at the end.

I'm still happy i automated stuff, that was the interesting part of the job,

The ongoing issue is the maintenance.

This can't be solved without fully trusting the LLM period.

Just don't autopilot on important code you want to own. That's good start.

I still love programming. Even more so after trying out llm coding in some projects.

One day "real programmers" will be gold.