ChatGPT Isn't Coming for Your Coding Job

 

SOFTWARE ENGINEERS HAVE joined the ranks of copy editors, translators, and others who fear that they’re about to be replaced by generative AI. But it might be surprising to learn that coders have been under threat before. New technologies have long promised to “disrupt” engineering, and these innovations have always failed to get rid of the need for human software developers. If anything, they often made these workers that much more indispensable.

To understand where handwringing about the end of programmers comes from—and why it’s overblown—we need to look back at the evolution of coding and computing. Software was an afterthought for many early computing pioneers, who considered hardware and systems architecture the true intellectual pursuits within the field. To the computer scientist John Backus, for instance, calling coders “programmers” or “engineers” was akin to relabeling janitors “custodians,” an attempt at pretending that their menial work was more important than it was. What’s more, many early programmers were women, and sexist colleagues often saw their work as secretarial. But while programmers might have held a lowly position in the eyes of somebody like Backus, they were also indispensable—they saved people like him from having to bother with the routine business of programming, debugging, and testing.