[轉載]2060年軟體工程師會像電報報務員那樣過時？

標籤：

在Medium熱榜上看到這篇文章，作者的背景在網上查不到太多資訊，但觀點很有意思。

文章大概意思是，19世紀電報的報務員和現在軟體工程師非常像，行業高速發展，需要一定技術（當時電報轉碼啥的還是挺複雜的）的報務員薪水很高、在大城市工作機會到處都是、可以自由遷移。甚至偉大的發明家愛迪生同學在偷了特斯拉的想法建立電力帝國（後來發展為現在還很牛的通用電氣）之前，也就是一個報務員。但是一旦電話發明，報務員們的好日子就完蛋了。1920年和1890年相比，報務員的工作崗位已經大大減少。

100年後，軟體工程師的情形非常相似。一方面，有很多工具讓人們不用編程也能開發。另一方面，開發軟體的軟體也逐漸成熟，至少能減少編程需求。

文中其實漏了另外幾個因素：

一是軟體需求總是有限的，隨著各行各業所必需的軟體都逐漸開發出來，長遠看剩下的工作的確是漸漸減少的。想想看，搜尋、電子商務、打車等等領域除了地位穩固的巨頭之後，其實大部分工作都是在維護而已。 
二是開源軟體使得代碼複用程度大大提高了。 
三是人工智慧的發展，開發軟體的軟體還是要靠這東西解決。想一下GitHub上的代碼多到一定程度，搞個智能系統對代碼和規則一通猛學，假以時日，難保不整出一個永不休息、極其高效的絕世編程高手啊（這個東東我覺得可以命名為Knuth）。

所有事物都有自己的生老病死，連宇宙都不例外，遑論其他，所以軟體工程師過時論是不可駁斥的真理。不過，2060年肯定是太樂觀了，也許2160年靠譜一點？

有兩個問題是值得大家都思考一下的，如果乾不成程式員，你覺得自己能去幹什嗎？幹程式員時候積累的什麼能力還是有用？

Comment：“很有意思的觀點，三十裡河東，三十裡河西。”

原文：

Software engineers will be obsolete by 2060

 

It’s a good time to be a software engineer. The industry is booming, demand for coders continues to grow, and salaries are at an all time high.

But how long will the party last?

Telegraph Operators of the 21st century

There are striking parallels between software engineers today and telegraph operators of the 19th century. By today’s standard, telegraph operators were technical lightweights: the bulk of the job consisted of receiving and transmitting messages sent over telegraph wires in Morse code, a monotonous albeit attention-heavy task. In contrast, contemporary software engineering generally involves a broad skill set that requires a deep understanding of complex systems and the ability to quickly master and re-master an accelerating parade of new software development frameworks.

However, during the mid 19th century, telegraph operators were well paid, well regarded, and considered quite technical relative to other mainstream professions. They had freedom to travel, and highly skilled operators flocked to large cities for the best jobs. As telegraphy took off and more and more cables were laid, the demand for telegraph operators skyrocketed. Standards for faster communication were developed, and operators had to keep up, memorizing increasingly efficient and complex systems of shorthand and communication protocols. Thomas Edison was a telegraph operator early in his career before settling into his true calling of stealing ideas from Nikola Tesla and empire-building. And unsurprisingly, as with contemporary software engineering, there were huge pay discrepancies between men and women.

Yet by the 20th century, the telephone had been invented, a technology that had the distinct advantage of not requiring an operator tasked with translation from code to natural language. By the 1920s, there were only a small fraction of the telegraph operators left compared to the 1890s.

The Downfall of Software Engineering

Fast forward a hundred years, and we seem to be in a similar situation with software engineers. While this profession is undeniably one of broader skill and intellectual ability than operating a telegraph, software engineers of today occupy a similar functional role to the telegraph operators of Edison’s era. The contemporary explosion of software parallels the 19th century rise of early networked communications. And just as the demand for telegraph operators scaled more or less linearly with the rise of the telegram, the demand for software engineers is currently scaling roughly linearly with the rise of software. Back then, every telegram had to be translated from Morse code to natural language by a human being. Today, every line of source code (sort of) has to be written by a human being.

To be sure, software is becoming more efficient, in that sophisticated frameworks have been developed so that fewer lines of source code have to be written, and advanced programming languages, compilers and interpreters have made the life of the programmer much easier than it had been in the 1980s or 1990s. But fundamentally, the process of writing software is still largely a human activity today.

That will change.

The current version of the profession is under pressure along two fronts. First, there are website-building tools like Weebly that allow anyone to build a website without writing software. Moreover, basic high level software engineering is getting more and more accessible, so that the delta between expressing clear ideas and being able to program is vanishing.

Second, on another front, software is getting better at facilitating the creation of software. While we are still a ways away from a fully automated piece of software that can write other pieces of software given some minimal, half-baked specification (i.e. do the job of a human software engineer), it is part way there. And more importantly, we do not need full artificial intelligence capabilities in order for role of the software engineer to shrink; instead, our software itself will just play a bigger and bigger role relative to humans in the creation of software. As an analogy, imagine semi-automated computer-assisted driving as a first step before fully self-driving cars.

While there will still be specialized software engineers and plenty of computer science-minded humans in the future, it seems inevitable given both of the above pressures that Software Engineering as a category will fade into historical obscurity as we approach the 22nd century.

But if you’re a software engineer (as I am), don’t despair?—?the critical thinking and technical skills will surely come in useful for future needs that arise. And if they don’t, well, keep some of that money saved up.

[轉載]2060年軟體工程師會像電報報務員那樣過時？