Yep. I believe programming as we know it is a dying thing. And, because that, I decided to change my career direction.

Okay, Let Me Explain

In my opinion, programming as we know it (as in typing and coding everything from scratch) is in decline. Did you hear about WIX? Squarespace? Shopify? Codebots? I’m talking about all those tools that help normal people, startups and business owners to create their sites and small apps.

No-code, automation and AI tools are here to stay and programmers will need to find a way to stay current. With the development of these technologies, tasks that were once done manually can now be automated, only leaving space for the best experts out there.

This, mixed with an ever-increasing number of professionals in the sector has led to a harder-to-access market, where individuals must continuously upskill themselves to remain employable. This has also led to deepening even more the development of tools and frameworks that make programming more accessible to those without a programming background.

Let’s face it, programming used to be for “us”, for nerds and people who really liked it. This industry is now very popular and many people from other industries are making the switch. Why is that? Many of those making the move are in for the money and don’t really love what they do. So “it’s just another job”. And this makes the problem worse.

This will lead to job losses in the programming sector, for sure. But there is something called the lump of labour fallacy that explains whytechnology doesn’t shrink the amount of work, but moves work up the stack. Think on how the hammer didn’t reduce the work, it replaced huts with houses, and houses created plumbing, wiring, insulation, drainage, fire codes. Each solved problem spawned an entire new layer of problems that didn’t exist before, each of those became a job… and everything repeated ad infinitum.

So the jobs will shift towards more specialized and creative tasks. But, again, not everyone will be up for it.

Honestly, we programmers are our own enemies in a way. We love to automate everything, and automation never ends.

So, I Changed My Career Direction

With all the above in mind, don’t panic! I believe this change in paradigm won’t happen overnight. Remember, the underlying problem is that hard programming skills are becoming less necessary at the same time that we see more people becoming a programmer.

Both elements combined will just lead to said change of paradigm and I personally decided to stop my programmer career now and focus on something else. Hopefully I’ll be ready for whenever shit hits the fan. We live in a bubble where there is apparently infinite money and tech companies are hiring above their real needs.

What I’m Focused On

I faced 2 options to continue my career:

• One option was to keep programming (and becoming a very good one)
• The other option was to specialize in another topic in the same industry

As I always enjoyed infrastructure, the decision was easy and clear. It doesn’t matter if the code will be written by bots, it will still need to run on a machine.

Building the foundations where the code runs was the obvious option for me.

I believe the decline of programming as we know it is positive and will lead to a more efficient industry, where programmers can focus on what they do best: solving problems