It seems this claim has been made forever. COBOL was supposed to make programmers unnecessary. So were rules engines. And code generators and an endless list of other technologies.

I agree that Gerstenzang is premature. But it'll happen eventually. If it doesn't happen by making programming easy it will happen by flooding the industry with enough competent programmers to have the same effect (depressed wages, high unemployment, etc). See: non-software engineering occupations (excepting doctors, who have managed to turn the risks inherent in their profession into a legally mandated union).

Human-equivalent AI has always been 30 years out . . . 20 years if you don't know the field. :-)

Demand for engineers is increasing much more rapidly than non-software engineering occupations. Soon every company will need an software engineer of some sort.

That.

Of course there's an underlying BS premise that "in that wonderful future humanity would be freed from the burden of non-essential programming work, and would move on to higher level problem solving" -- but in real life they could not care less if humanity actually moves forward or just rich companies have to pay less while millions suffer and fall from middle class.

I cannot believe that this post by Sam Gerstanzang, a partner, speaks for a16z. I certainly hope it doesn't get much traction internally and there have been a few internal notes explaining to him the number of ways he is wrong.

What I don't understand is how someone who is so obviously wrong about the software craft and isn't even coherent within a short blog post can be a partner at one of the best VC firms. I sincerely hope he's there because of nepotism.

Great programmers move up the chain as well. If your skills are not being valued by your company as it is setup in a way that it needs only average engineers, you can move on and create your own company now.

If you are a great engineer, then you are a walking capital by yourself.

If somebody with an idea, and no skills, hires you, then it probably needs at least 300-500k (even for a smallish prototype) to make it happen. If you are a full stack engineer, and pair up with a buddy, you can make it happen, with a lot less. If you are a great engineer, you are the capital!

Programming talent and skills do not translated into business talent and skills. And vice versa. It does not even translate into an idea doable by just two guys that can sell well and is not easily doable by other two guys. How many such products does exist?

> If you are a great engineer, you are the capital!

It only seems that way because engineering is currently the most capital-heavy part of bringing a softwarebusiness to market. Once that ceases to be the case (which may take a while, but it's the future SG was gushing about) then as long as there is a single scarce or mutually-exclusive commodity necessary for success its price will ratchet upwards until it is out of reach for most engineers (after risk-adjustment).

Pertinent example: the implosion of the indie app dev market that's been all over HN this past week.

But once the Engineering component has been hammered down as much as server costs were in the previous generation ('Sun pizza boxes with Oracle' turned into AWS on OSS), what's the next largest expense line?

If the next most expensive thing is the marketing spend, so that the company gets the required exposure in overcrowded app stores (for example), then the VCs are painting themselves into a Hollywood hit role - at best.

Troubleshooting and problem-solving are specific skills that can be completely unrelated to software, even tricky software.

It's great when both problem-solving and outstanding engineering exist within the same individual, in some positions even essential.

Realistically, problem-solving is the more uncommon natural ability of the two. If it were not, there would be a lot less problems with software by now.

It seems to me that with crowd-funding and big data, the people who have jobs picking winning companies out from a lineup will be obsolete before the engineers building the crowd-funding and big data platforms will be.

> the people who have jobs picking winning companies

Remember, capital has TWO strategies for earning money:

1. Investing in new ideas, hoping they yield a positive ROI

2. Collecting dividends on ideas that have already panned out

#1 might conceivably be replaced by algorithms, but I doubt it (has HFT eaten Wall St?). #2 is inherent in our economic system and will never become obsolete.

What's wrong with a future where some software devs can be tossed aside? We have been excited to disrupt all other areas of labor. Disruption is good, it means progress, right?

Alternatively, a creator can now build a product with fewer people and doesn't need to raise capital. This trend is extremely empowering of labor.

In theory, yes. In practice, most people aren't entrepreneurs. Try convincing someone living in the Bay Area to walk from their 200K/yr plus stock units from FB/Google/etc. and you'll find out the reality: what really separates capital from labor is risk tolerance.

Labor = show up, do your job, get paid. Capital = put money at risk without any guarantee of getting anything back, let alone earning a profit. Capital makes the rules because half of America is two paychecks away from bankruptcy (I read this somewhere credible) and can't/won't take any risk.

Actually it makes labor redundunt.

People talk as if everyone can become a creator, which it ain't so (partly because of the personal skills needed, partly because there's no economy where "everybody is a creator" -- for the same reason why not everybody can be a millionaire at the same time (money loses it's value then). Any large scale economy needs few sellers/creators and many buyers).

So what this trend does, it empower a few programmers/creators (ok, more than the past few large capital owners), and makes all the other programmers redundant or devalued.

The history of every mature industry on planet Earth says otherwise.