(again)

Bitcoin has been declared dead somewhere north of four hundred times. Amateurs. The software developer has been getting buried since before the word “software” had a job description, and keeps showing up to work the next morning asking who moved the build.

Declared dead
Confirmed dead
Never
Status
Hiring
Scroll down to pay your respects ↓

  1. The compiler

    “A machine that writes its own machine code? Impossible. Also, it will put every programmer out of work.”

    Grace Hopper built the A-0 compiler and later recalled that nobody would touch it, because everyone knew computers could only do arithmetic. Both fears were wrong at once. It turned out that “programmer” had simply meant “the person who talks to the compiler,” and the compiler had just gotten easier to talk to.

    Survived

  2. FORTRAN

    “Automatic programming. The scientist writes the formula and skips the programmer entirely.”

    The scientists did skip the programmer. Then they became programmers. Please remember this pattern; it will repeat roughly seventeen more times on this page, each time with a bigger marketing budget.

    Survived

  3. COBOL

    “It reads like plain English, so managers will write the business software themselves.”

    Managers did not write the business software themselves. Sixty-seven years later the world’s banks are still looking for anyone who can read it, and the people who can are the only developers in history to retire on a consulting rate.

    Survived, billing hourly

  4. Fourth-generation languages

    “Application Development Without Programmers.”
    An actual book. A bestseller.

    End users would query their own data and build their own reports, and the programmer would fade into history like the elevator operator. End users did learn to query their own data. We called it SQL, then hired people to write it, then hired more people to explain why it was slow.

    Survived, learned SQL

  5. CASE tools

    “Draw the diagram. The code writes itself.”

    Computer-Aided Software Engineering promised that a sufficiently detailed diagram would generate the whole system. It generated some of the system. The rest of the system was the diagram, and the diagram was four hundred pages, and somebody had to maintain the diagram. That somebody had a programmer’s salary and a new title.

    Survived

  6. Visual Basic

    “Drag a button onto a form. Anyone can build a Windows app now.”

    Anyone did. Then anyone needed help with their Access database, which had become load-bearing for a regional airline. A new role was created in every office on earth: “the person who knows VB.” That person is still there. They have a pension now.

    Survived

  7. Dreamweaver & FrontPage

    “What you see is what you get. You will never type an angle bracket again.”

    What you got was forty nested tables, a font tag on every word, a spacer GIF named spacer_final_v2.gif and a developer hired to clean it up. That developer learned HTML by reading the mess. Half the people reading this learned HTML by reading the mess.

    Survived

  8. Flash

    “The web is a movie now. Designers won. Just draw it.”

    For about a decade this was true, and the entire internet was a loading bar with a skip-intro button. Then a phone said no, in an open letter, and the web went back to being made of text. Developers survived. Flash did not; it was pronounced dead on December 31, 2020, and this time it stuck.

    Survived. Flash didn’t.

  9. WordPress

    “The famous five-minute install. A website without a developer.”

    It now runs roughly forty percent of the web, and “WordPress developer” is one of the most common job titles on the planet. The five-minute install is followed by a five-year plugin situation, and the plugin situation has a Slack channel.

    Survived

  10. Offshoring

    “Why pay a Silicon Valley salary when the whole thing can be done overseas for a tenth of the price?”

    Parts of it could, and were, and a lot of excellent developers in Bangalore and Kraków and Buenos Aires are still doing it. The job didn’t disappear; it got a time zone. It also turned out that writing the spec clearly enough for someone else to build was most of the job, which is a sentence that will come back around in 2025.

    Survived, globally

  11. Site builders

    “Build a beautiful website. No coding required.”

    Marvel at the phrase “no coding required.” It appears on the homepage of every tool ever made, including compilers. No product has ever shipped with the honest label “some coding required,” which is the true state of every project since 1952. The site builders, meanwhile, are made of code, written by developers, who are hiring.

    Survived

  1. No-code & low-code

    “The citizen developer is here. Bubble, Airtable, Zapier, Webflow. The era of the programmer is over.”

    The citizen developer built a Zap. The Zap broke on a Tuesday. A developer was summoned to look at the Zap. Over the following years, the word “citizen” was quietly dropped from the job title, and the developer kept the Zap.

    Survived

  2. Chatbots

    “Bots are the new apps. You will simply text your bank.”

    You could not, in fact, simply text your bank. The bot understood nine phrases and “speak to a human” was not one of them. Keep this one in mind. It comes back in six years with a much bigger budget and a much better vocabulary.

    Survived

  3. Everyone should learn to code

    “Coding is the new literacy. Coal miners, retrain as developers.”

    The one stretch of modern history where nobody said dev was dead. Instead, every human being was told to become one, bootcamps charged fifteen thousand dollars for twelve weeks, and the dev was alive enough that people were upset about it. Enjoy this entry. It does not last.

    Alive. Suspiciously.

  4. GitHub Copilot

    “Your AI pair programmer. It writes the code for you.”

    It wrote the code. Developers checked the code. Checking the code took about as long as writing the code, but felt more relaxing. Developers reported being about fifty-five percent faster and about one hundred percent still employed.

    Survived

  5. ChatGPT

    “Software engineering is over. Learn to plumb.”

    Every “learn to code” meme from 2017 was reversed within a single weekend. Plumbers reported no measurable increase in applications from engineers. Engineers reported a measurable increase in meetings about AI, most of which were scheduled by someone who needed an engineer to build the AI thing.

    Survived

  6. Don’t learn to code

    “Nobody has to program anymore. The computer is the programmer.”
    A CEO, in a leather jacket, on a stage.

    Announced at a conference built by developers, streamed on infrastructure written by developers, to an audience of developers, who went home and wrote code. The same spring, the “first AI software engineer” was unveiled. Its first assignment was a developer’s job. Its second assignment was a developer.

    Survived

  7. Vibe coding

    “Just describe it. Forget the code even exists.”

    Extremely fun, right up to the exact moment somebody has to remember the code exists. That moment is called production. A new and highly paid role appeared almost immediately: the person who un-vibes the code. Remember 2004, when writing the spec clearly was most of the job? It still is. The spec is just in English now.

    Survived, so far

  8. Autonomous agents

    “This time it’s different.”

    It always is. Something is being announced as this page loads. For the record, this page is some HTML, a stylesheet, a few hundred lines of JavaScript and a WebGL graveyard. A developer built it, with an AI, which is definitely the end this time.

    Pending