[benologist]

Programming is the next manual labor and like all the other manual labor that preceded it most people don't need to be deeply passionate about their role in the assembly line. Like current manual labor it will generally not be considered skilled work, even though it is now.

[polynomial]

This is a bold if not entirely surprising prediction. Would love to see some citations both supporting and countering.

[benologist]

When we talk about driverless cars replacing taxis we really mean programmers replacing taxi drivers in aggregate. The cars are a constant, if you're responsible for a fleet of them you are just a better taxi driver.

[sah2ed]

Such programmers will rely heavily on automated tools and will have to follow a clearly defined process because driverless cars will always involve human life. The cost of a simple misconfiguration is extremely high.

Besides, I fail to see how this can be considered manual labor or even the possibility of allowing average programmers to fill such positions.

[benologist]

We are the elite right now, our skillset is hard and the work we do is hard and we don't want to believe everyone can do it. Definitely not "average programmers" as you mention!

And maybe we have a little while longer to be the elite, but already children can build websites and applications so our days are numbered, soon everybody can know what we know and do what we do and as you mention, tools will be better as well and that empowers them to be closer to us too.

It takes a bunch of programmers to keep a fleet of servers running, vehicles will be maintained by programmers too, but it takes less programmers and less good programmers with every advance we make.

[mercer]

I think one of the nice things about programming, and one of the things that will ensure that programmers will always be in high demand, is that as tools improve, our desires and needs and aims adjust accordingly.

Just consider web development. There was a time you could make decent money with 'simple' HTML/CSS work. Clients were happy with that. Then you had to move to CMS-based sites, because people demanded the ability to add and edit content easily. Then you had to start offering plugins and more complex tools because everyone needed more than just a contact form to interact with their site visitors. And now everyone wants web apps, which are significantly more complex than simple websites.

I suspect that people who love programming and are good at it will keep moving up along the ladder of abstraction, and if anything there will be more and more need for experts at every rung of this ladder as companies get stuck with 'old' technology (for example, I could make a killing as a Drupal consultant).

[polynomial]

This going to make the determination of responsibility in the case of an accident much more complicated.

[Retra]

The concept of manual labor is not a proxy for "a person does it." The contrast to manual labor is social labor. Programming is almost entirely concerned with the mastery of language and communication.

There's almost nothing manual about it: you just dictate actions to others (people or machines.)

[benologist]

Manual labor is exactly "a person does it", with no assumptions made on the skills or ability required to do "it".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manual_labour

[Retra]

Then all work is manual labor and it's a meaningless term.

>manual work is physical work done by people, most especially in contrast to that done by machines, and also to that done by working animals.

Here, inconveniently, "physical" is left undefined. And in fact, it's being used to mean "non-linguistic/non-social."

[benologist]

It just means you are physically required to perform the operation - work that is automated is not physically done by anyone, and where it gets confusing is we both provide the automation yet are required to keep it running.

Heroku and other PaaS systems eliminate server administration and scaling for many companies. That same work is still fundamental and critical for organizations like Amazon. But it is really just an inefficiency we are learning how to automate completely, with manual labor in the interim.