Plus Ca Change

Well I don't see that this is going to kill off either development or product consultancy due to the rules of reusability.

When something is sufficiently capable as to be widely useful it requires complex configuration to work exactly how you want it to (hence product consultancy).

When a group of things are sufficiently simple to be understandable then a number of them must be integrated to do anything of value (hence bespoke development).

There are advantages and disadvantages to either approach so neither is likely to be universally applicable and so the train rumbles on.

Just like all other forms of engineering

We won't software engineers in the same way we don't need structural engineers, mechanical engineers, etc, etc, because all the big problems have been solved... right?

How on earth do these pointless committees even get off the ground, let alone find anyone to publish its ramblings?

What if "the cloud" is just a fad?

Basically a "cloud" is a very similar environment to a mainframe batch operation of years gone by. You submitted your "job", something, somewhere did something with it and produced your results. The person who initiated all this had little or no control (JCL notwithstanding) over the process.

While this sort of set-up provided a solution, like the cloud, it wasn't very flexible and like the cloud, the person who wanted the work done would often want a little more control - or assurance - over the nuts'n'bolts of the process.

As a consequence, it's easy to see that the huge datacentres that house "cloud" service providers these days are analogous to the manframe operations of yore. It also follows that in the IT world, nothing lasts forever - so what we see as a cloud-based solution today will be seen as a cloud-based problem, tomorrow.

So if we're looking forwards 10 years, sure; there WILL be cloud operations, but there will also be other ways to do thing. Ways that haven't yet been invented (just like cloud computing didn't happen in 2002). What they will be is difficult to say, but if the cycle keeps spinning round, I'd guess that the users would be emerging from the remains of cloud-based architectures and wanting their own systems to run their own applications in their own way.

There's No Silver Bullet

[John Harris] said:

“The accessibility of platforms means that software development is no longer such a specialist activity.”

I dunno what he means by "accessibility", but Fred Brooks pretty much shot the "silver bullet" theory of software development several decades ago, but I guess this idiot subscribes to the theory that anything learned more than a few years ago doesn't apply to him and his brand of snake oil.

Software development is "hard" in the same way that differential equations are hard. That is, if you have a particular mindset and enough training then actually they aren't, but very few people have that combination so in practice it remains a specialist activity.

Introductions

"Consultant - meet Jack Shitt"

"Jack Shitt - meet consultant"

There we are.. consultants definitely know jack shit.

@Pft

"Oh My" - do people really use that phrase any more? Even in America? I've seen it several times recently in Reg comments. I'm sure the last time I heard it anywhere else was Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz.

Hazaah! A report of quality.

It must have come from Kensington. Kensington? The Royal Borough? Up top?

I smell overpriced researchers justifying their position.

I remember when assembler died, and my project manager saying. Coding is so fast now, we will need less of you lot.

Badah! Mr Babbage says no. Report is bollocks.

Where do they think these services people hook together will come from?

There's going to be change, and *maybe* that change will disrupt monolithic software providers. But developers? Someone has to create, maintain and extend the components being discussed that people would access via APIs. Heck, someone has to design the APIs themselves, let alone implement them. Developers and designers will have a place doing just those things.

And I think the claims that "the world" wil be writing tomorrow's software is a bit overblown. The vast majority of people don't want to fiddle with APIs, and use of even highly graphical tools for creating programs has never really taken off.

I don't see the change as all that, personally.

old news

This story comes alomg every few years, normally along the lines of drag and drop software, mashup systems etc... will take over the world and BAs/FAs will develop everything, devs will all be out of a job. 15 years ago when I started I was told this, then it was VB and now its SaS.

SW will just move to a higher level

EEs have been trying to work themselves out of a job for 100 years, by coming up with every faster, more integrated parts. But each improvement increases the utility of the products, so EEs just move to the next higher level f integration. Once it was plugging tubes or transistors together to make a flip-flop. Now it's wiring several million flip-flops (in the form of a CPU chip) together with another several billion flip-flops (in the form of memory chips).

Similarly, in my early days it took a fair amount of work to do simple arithmetic in Assembler. Now I work almost exclusively with scripting/dynamic languages with JIT compilation in a distributed environment. In my SW QA workshop we explored the truism that a 'good' programmer produces about the same number of lines of working, tested, QA'd code per day regardless of the level of language - from machine code, Assembler, C, Perl/Python/PHP/Javascript/whatever, to SQL, to whatever comes next. We just manipulate ever larger, more integrated objects. Software is essentially the structured management of complexity, and complexity is a scale-free measure. So maybe by 2022 we'll be writing self-modifying programs that interact with robots working in the asteroids, but the complexity and the constant environmental change that requires new code will still be there. (Actually by then I'll undoubtedly be sailing my boat into the sunset by then - but there will be others.)