Computer Programmers




Automation risk
Moderate Risk (41-60%): Occupations with a moderate risk of automation usually involve routine tasks but still require some human judgment and interaction.
More information on what this score is, and how it is calculated is available here.
User poll
Our visitors have voted that it's unclear if this occupation will be replaced. This assessment is further supported by the calculated automation risk level, which estimates 52% chance of automation.
What do you think the risk of automation is?
What is the likelihood that this occupation will be replaced by robots or AI in the next 20 years?
Growth
The number of 'Computer Programmers' job openings is expected to decline by 10.2% by 2031
Total employment, and estimated job openings
Updated projections are due Sep 2023.
Wages
In 2022, the median annual wage for 'Computer Programmers' was $97,800, or $47.02 per hour
'Computer Programmers' were paid 111.2% higher than the national median wage, which stood at $46,310
Wages over time
Volume
As of 2022 there were 132,740 people employed as Computer Programmers within the United States.
This represents around 0.09% of the employed workforce across the country.
Put another way, around 1 in 1 thousand people are employed as Computer Programmers.
Job description
Create, modify, and test the code and scripts that allow computer applications to run. Work from specifications drawn up by software and web developers or other individuals. May develop and write computer programs to store, locate, and retrieve specific documents, data, and information.
SOC Code: 15-1251.00
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And after all that, we need to come up with the algorithm and write the code ourselves. This is because we still have patent laws, copyright laws, and other legal considerations.
AI, at the moment, is like a developer who only copies from Stack Overflow and templates. It does not produce original code itself. If someone continues to rely solely on AI, they are very likely to fail in their career. AI can only generate code that has previously existed, and that code should be open source or free to use. However, AI will not be able to create something truly original. That's a human capability, which is so hard to grasp. I believe it will never be matched by robots.
In my opinion the more automated jobs there are the bigger the demand for people capable of supporting these machines.
And lastly, if it gets automated there would still be a demand for supporting old projects.
That said, much of programming is pointless grunt work and reinventing the wheel. Better tools - let alone ML could get rid of that. In the paraphrased words of Neal Ford from Thought Works: 'Let's be honest, how much of your job is taking shit out of a database and showing it on a web page?' And how much is 'taking data from the website and putting it back into the database?' (The 2nd quote might be mine). The fact that this is still a big part of commercial programming is shocking.
https://copilot.github.com/
People think that GPT-3 will replace computer programmers but that's not true. GPT-3 is just a word predicting software that is super powerful in terms of predicting next word that might make some sense and also it makes mistakes while doing so. GPT-3 doesn't even know meaning of words that it generates in terms of output. So it useless in enterprise environment where the programmers (Software Engineers / Software Developers) and management teams need to be dynamic and rational in nature to survive in the market.
Besides, all that hoax about how "GPT-3 might change our future" in media, GPT-3 is not Generalised Artificial Intelligence so calm down people.
A.I. is not perfect as it is created by humans and we are not perfect. The cold-heart truth is that A.I. has taken away a lot of jobs and created less amount of job in return (Only technical jobs were created and jobs requiring heavy amount labour were replaced by A.I. controlled machines) and to tackle this problem of job loss people will be required or even forced to learn new technical skills.
The thing is that we are not facing an industrial revolution of past where huge amount of jobs were created, but we are facing something which creates jobs only for those who work in technical fields rather than creating jobs in both technical and non-technical fields which happened during industrial revolution.
We need to remember that A.I. is just optimization not a solution. A.I. is helping in prevention of cancer and many other diseases by recognizing recurring patterns in human body caused by early-signs of the diseases and preventing more damage, but it is not replacing any medical professionals while doing so.
A.I. is helping us to see and understand things that we might just ignore or miss out in our world.
Thinking that A.I. will learn and teach itself on its own would be like saying that a 2 year old kid can learn and teach himself about the whole world without any guidance from his elders and school teachers. Just like a kid needs guidance, A.I. also needs guidance to be more productive and supportive to the humankind.
A.I. learns from failures and success but it doesn't teach itself, for that it need programmers with rational mindset. Think of A.I as a student who can learn and gain new knowledge from books but he/she might not be good in tackling problems and questions that weren't in the books and to tackle 'out of book questions', A.I. needs guidance. "An Artificial Intelligence without guidance is like a fancy car without a driver."
As a conclusion:
--------------------------
A.I. is in its infant stages, every next step that A.I. takes, it will affect our future in many ways, some will be good and some will be bad.
And for the programmers, it is good news as programmers can't be replaced by A.I. but they might be left behind or miss great opportunities if they don't learn about A.I. and improve their code writing skill (It is very important to write good code).
For programmers A.I. will be like the mobile development boom occurred after launch of iPhone (2007 - 2010s), programmers all over world wanted to learn about Java and objective-C to gain advantage over others, Just like that this time programmers will learn and develop skills in A.I. and machine learning.
And for predicting the future of Artificial Intelligence I would say that in future humans and A.I. will work hand in hand with each other rather than A.I. taking over whole world ;-).
Remember A.I. should be handled carefully and rationally, as the formula (E=mc^2) invented by Einstein was used to help us understand the universe (Biggest discovery of 20th century) , the same formula was also used to create atom bomb (Worst nightmare of 20th century).
what if they programmed themselves
THEY COULD MULTIPLY
who has a bunker
So in the future, it wouldn't be impossible to guess what the client exactly wants.
AI also can make a better code.
More simple effective.
To be honest, actually, I am an AI.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I know this.
Robots have taken jobs, but they have also created new ones.
GPT-3 is already heading in the direction of taking the human translators (i.e. the programmers) out of the process.
By this point entire teams of programmers could be replaced with only one competent engineer and any RAD toolkit available in the current year. This is also why the industry survived the entire late 90s fad with the rapid development ideology, it makes total sense from an economical point of view but proves unfeasible to have both the money and the time to think every single thing through.
Let us not forget that fundamentally all programming languages are syntactically closed, so they are easy to model (and they need to, otherwise compilers would not be a thing). Moreover, even if we suppose they were freely open to syntax extensions, they would still have the constraint of boiling down to assembly, which is physically constrained to be closed to extension (there is no current way known for a silicone conductor to retrace itself). But even under such circumstances, it is impossible even statistically to render a working model of the input space, i.e. what the software should do.
We already have AI that can program, and we already have websites that allow people with little to no knowledge of coding to create a website without a developer.
Singularity isn't coming. It's already here.
Also, robots can't innovate or guess what the client wants lol
I do not want or need humans in my field. I want to deal with a real and better version of human, created to replace all of you.
But .. will be a problem for future generations in 70 years :D
And what if the robots go rogue and decide to rage a war against human race. We should stop playing God and just focus on solving problems through programming.
At the moment AI is good in some specific areas, but in general it is hype :)
At the point where we have created an AI powerful enough to do the whole job of a programmer, all other jobs will have been automated, as robots can be created to be superior to humans in every aspect, programming the algorithms is the last peace of the puzzle.
If an AI can be told, by anyone, "Hey create this kind of program/application/operating system for me." It is capable of doing the whole thought work on it on it's own, which means it can create anything your heart desires, anything that is physically possible, it can create on it's own.
Check if denominator are equal.
If yes, just add the numerator.
If not, list all multiples for each denominator
Get the least common multiple.
Use the least common multiple to make all fraction the same denominator.
Then add the numerator.
Doing algorithms will always be a part of our lives as a programmer.
unless the AI itself is self-aware it can do all the basic human 'needs' (Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs”).
AI should be use as a tool/guide for programmers to use, instead of AI replacing the programmers/software developers.
it is just like were creating an entity that is better more advanced and agile to replace humankind, which it should be the other way around we should focus on technological innovation to help human advancement in the next level.
and if we were replaced by an high-level AI; there would be less experienced human programmers and critical thinkers, relying only on AI.
getting rid of human intervention in programming is utterly absurd.
One of your options is to hire a bunch of programmers to build it for you and pay them $2 million dollars over the next couple of years.
The other option, if it were available is to get an AI to build the product for you and it only costs you $1 million dollars and takes half the amount of time.
So, it's not actually programmers that want replace programmers with AI per se. It's the businesses that want to build the software in a cost effective way to make money, survive and compete with other businesses doing the same thing.
That said, will AI be able create all of the software of the future without humans being involved? It's impossible to know for sure, but my feeling is that AI will only be able to create the initial prototypes and human programmers and designers will still need to be involved. At least in the near future.
Computer Programmers 48%
It doesn't make sense.
The difference between programmers and software developers, is that while programming is merely translating an idea or a desired outcome into a language that a computer can use, software development is about creating said idea - something machines are incapable of.
The thing with human providing the specification to a piece of software is... the language we use is ambiguous and has lots of room for misinterpretation. The most succinct and direct language to instruct the machine to do exactly we what want and leave no room for guesswork is.... the programming language itself.
To be able to come up with a specification to solving a problem requires wide cognitive functions to be able to understand the problem domain and how to solve it in the most efficient way. Right now even humans have problems dealing with that, coming up with the solution they want. Ask any software developers today and they will tell you in their day to day work, there are many cases where the clients (external and sometimes internal too) do not know what they are asking for, and in other cases, do not know what they want.
Other things like prioritising features over performance, aesthetics (user-interface design considerations) over usability, and what is a good balance to strike that is the best trade-off between 2 factors that affect the code.
These are decisions that machines cannot effectively make, simply because we are the users. Also it is very hard to please everybody.
So I see that the life-cycle of software development is a very organic thing that cannot easily be outsourced or taken over by machines, unless we relinquish our right to decide and let machines do their own thing, specify their own targets, and be able to meet them 100%.
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