I saw a post on Oslo about making us obsolete. I just happened to listen to the latest Deep Fried Episode with Brian Noyes. They were talking about SharePoint and Windows Workflow and how the "dream" of Windows Workflow is to let mere Business Analyst Drag and Drop their way to a functioning service. I am a newbie dotnet developer, and afraid that by the time I get to Consulting "Level" my skills would be obsolete. Should I abandon learning basic skills and just learn how to work with Frameworks and Packaged applications such as SAP, SharePoint, BizTalk. Am I wasting time trying to learn Expression Trees and Func of T's?
+4
A:
People have been talking about doing away with programming and making application creation as easy as dragging and dropping logic and stuff for a long time. Yet applications today require more programming time than ever before because customers are always expecting the next level of quality. Computer Science is probably the fastest growing industry outside government and I think you'll be safe investing in a good quality CS education.
tster
2009-09-25 01:25:26
Oh yes. Remember 4GL - "fourth generation languages" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4GL) - that were supposed to make programming as a dedicated profession obsolete? SQL was one of those - it was designed by committee to be immediately usable by a random John Doe from the street... ha! This thing is the last one you should worry about when you think of your job security.
Pavel Minaev
2009-09-25 01:56:45
I'm not sure you can call government an industry. Isn't the whole point of industry to produce something useful? :-)
paxdiablo
2009-09-25 02:53:04
@Pax, sometimes the point of an industry is to serve itself and make jobs for hacks.
tster
2009-09-25 03:40:23
+2
A:
Time spend learning is never wasted. I'd be highly sceptical of software predictions if I were you. So many things that were supposed to be available by 1990 are still nowhere near solved.
The world will always need good programmers, and DotNET seems to be a massive (and growing) market.
David Rutten
2009-09-25 01:27:23
A:
You can the the programming out of vision, but not the vision out of programming.
kenny
2009-09-25 01:27:29
+2
A:
Nah, someone has to write SharePoint and Windows Workflow in the first place, right? It's not going to be business analysts.
lod3n
2009-09-25 01:30:56
A:
You must know and well understand the basics if you even think about to be a good developer or even consultant.
But I would not see "Expression Trees and Funcs of T's" as basics. They are very advanced features of C# which can be very useful in some cases, but they are not very often needed in "normal programming".
As for Frameworks - you should know the basics of common tools and frameworks around, but you don't have to learn to work with all of them - until you have to.
And most important: Learning new things is never wasted time.
codymanix
2009-09-25 01:35:56
i spend ALL MY free time either reading, experimenting with new stuff, reading blogs, listening to podcasts. I hope it pays down the road :)
2009-09-25 02:23:58
@codemnky, it should. At a bare minimum, you'll be the best educated sociopath in town :-)
paxdiablo
2009-09-25 03:21:51
+3
A:
Back in the early days of the personal computer revolution, some bright spark came up with a program called "The Last One". At that point, it was said that there would soon be no more use for programmers since any business person and their dog would soon be able to write their own applications without programming.
Then they released "The Last One", version 2, and we all got a good chuckle, knowing that our jobs were still safe.
There are plenty of tools around that let non-tech types "program" (I tremble sometimes when I think of all the Excel spreadsheets being used to run businesses). They'll never match what can be achieved with a real understanding of what goes on under the covers.
paxdiablo
2009-09-25 01:38:22