It’s non existent. It’s weird how people were obsessed with coal miners losing their jobs, but right here in tech we literally saw a profession vanish. There is no ‘website developer’ anymore, not really. It just ... went away.
That group had to shift overnight (in relative terms) to app development. This might be more foreboding than people realize. Aside from those who need to write complex queries stitching big data together or generating reports, will we need a typical backend engineer ever again? How complex are schemas ever going to get that a UI can’t do it (and generate the corresponding api)?
It happened to the first version of the frontend developer and I think backend is next. Then frontend again at some point, and Data people have another thing coming when the backend folks need to find another job when theirs goes away.
If tech is going to replace industries, it’s going to start with replacing parts of itself first. We’ll be the first to know how this is going to go down.
I'm not a web developer, but at work I run a couple small app servers for internal tools.
They have business logic specific to our product, and owned by the company, so although I'm doing a lot of pointless "plug together HTML" work for my learning, I'm also doing stuff that, AFAICT, has to be original code written by me.
Did I manage to successfully duck out the entire web trend already? When I was a kid, the web barely worked. When I was in college, web apps were a strange novelty Google was working on. When I started my career as a developer, I heard murmurs that web was the only kind of developer left. 10 years on, I'm still working steady and still not a web / mobile dev. I learned a little TS and started using Rust for backends, and that's about it. I knew SQL from college. The web trend came and went and I only learned how HTTP works in the last 5 years. Doesn't seem like the hardest thing in the world.
Is it just a combo of luck and privilege that I missed it?
> If tech is going to replace industries, it’s going to start with replacing parts of itself first. We’ll be the first to know how this is going to go down.
Probably. At first it was funny - Software was a coal vein that just kept going deeper and deeper the more we dug, and high-level languages kept lowering the barriers to entry, making more programmers who each made more money.
Some day the vein's either got to run out, or widen so much that everyone is a programmer getting paid nothing. Since I have enough money to save, I'm hoping to retire before the sigmoid inflects fully.
I’d pay close attention to it. We don’t talk about the death of website development as a career because app development was available for everyone to transition to, so it mostly got ignored. But it happened, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. It’s a dirty little secret that if we honestly told new people switching to web dev ‘hey, yeah, just so you know, our jobs as we knew it kind of vanished once’, they’d think twice. The other dirty little secret is we almost sent all the work to India once. The new dirty little secret is there’s going to be apps like Airtable which will be another rug pull when Enterprise stops giving a shit about custom branding.
If businesses didn’t start moving their apps off Desktop and into the browser, what the hell were we all going to do? We’d have to goto the Java bootcamps, instead of the web app ones.
Pay attention because I don’t think business wants a fancy new UI and backend every few years (especially in the Enterprise space). I think we’re going to be done with this too.
They will one day just load all that crap into Airtable and standardize business tools industry wide.
Air tables is a sign of this gs to come but we are not there yet. Our head of sales wants to use an air tables like product but upper management will not yield, we need a real CMS. I think this sort of thinking will delay the adoption of such tools.
Yeah, not just devs, but armies of designers, product people, managers all distinguish themselves with minute product differentiation, a large majority of the industry runs on _not_ standardizing data and UI. There's more inertia here than just whenever the accountants notice the cost difference. You'll see people retry outsourcing before you see standardization if I'm understanding this conversation correctly
App Development is the next to go; there's already a handful of competitive tools that will build an App, complete with cloud services, without any need for writing code.
And yah, there's only so many ways to write CRUD, auth, profile, and presence; backend is already commodified as B2B products.
Try Appsmith, I'm a founder of it. Easy to build CRUD apps using pre-built UI components that talk to any database or API. Check out our repo here: https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith
The difference between web devs and coal miners is that coal miners were losing their jobs due to the government regulating them out of business, web devs were losing their jobs due to underlying changes in technology.
We have a precedent for dealing with government intervention in established industries which usually involves providing support to transition to other industries. Fisheries management is full of examples of government paying fishermen to fish less for example. Yet somehow coal miners became a target of derision by a certain branch of American politicians who gleefully cackled about regulating them out of work.
That group had to shift overnight (in relative terms) to app development. This might be more foreboding than people realize. Aside from those who need to write complex queries stitching big data together or generating reports, will we need a typical backend engineer ever again? How complex are schemas ever going to get that a UI can’t do it (and generate the corresponding api)?
It happened to the first version of the frontend developer and I think backend is next. Then frontend again at some point, and Data people have another thing coming when the backend folks need to find another job when theirs goes away.
If tech is going to replace industries, it’s going to start with replacing parts of itself first. We’ll be the first to know how this is going to go down.