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I'm of two minds on this one. Part of me agrees completely with what you say. Further tools will exist that automate a lot of what the code-monkey does. The level of work done by a lot of us will be push-button, or "plug these couple of things together". On the other hand, in 1998 as a nerdy guy getting out of high school, with minimal html, javascript and programming experience, and running linux on a pentium pro I faced a big choice. I went to the local ISP to pick up a "real modem" (vs a winmodem) to connect my awesome unix box to the internet. The guy there asked why I wanted these modems vs going to circuit city for some amazing sale they were having for a faster winmodem. When I told him I was running linux I was offered a $40K/yr job on the spot - just for getting linux installed on a computer and understanding the basics (quote "we can teach you anything else you need to know, you got the spark"). I was 18, and that was a HUGE deal. Anyway this wasn't uncommon, at the time wired was running stories about "HTML factories" where people were making pages and pages by hand all the time. Minimal programming skills got you a job. Some of this was just normal boom-time labor shortage. There were lots of stories about how after the crash these guys would never work again. Some aspect of this was true, but some of it was bunk. The 2000 version of this story would be "sure you can do html, and you can do CGI, and you understand http headers and can whip up a server, but we need people who understand SQL and how to work with record objects and how to do live updates to a system, stuff you need a real degree for. It's 2005 not 2000" So basically I am suggesting that while Rails may be a non-skill (like HTML has become) and maybe good REST APIs will be auto generated, and some Backbone.js future version or successor will do most of our tricky js stuff, there will likely be good toolkits that allow people to plug together data-mining and data-management without needing super deep algorithmic understanding, we are already seeing the emergence of such tools. So the other part of me disagrees, the code-monkey will be needed, just that they will be putting together different bits than they are today. |
It seems to me the Hiring Manager in the story was fishing for a jack-of-all-trades kind of applicant. The interviewee was obviously a web developer, but the position to be filled was a data analytics job.
What difference does it make if Rails/PHP/Node.js/Backbone/etc become commodity jobs? In order to get the raw data that requires complex and high speed algorithms to parse in to useable data, you'll still need a website, built by a rails/backbone code monkey and a Photoshop designer and with the help of a decent DBA, at the very least. The data position, if it ever comes to it, will just be another job type that a well rounded development team will need to fill, not a replacement for everyone else on the team.