> The problem is they did it with only a few (16?) "great engineers". That's the premise of the article -- our world today might need 100,000 great engineers to solve great problems. Tomorrow 1000 might be enough.
The premise of the article seems to be that we no longer need great engineers at all. Or that they only need to work at infrastructure companies (not application companies like WhatsApp). The very example he chose shows that's empirically untrue.
The fact that a small team of amazing engineers can accomplish huge things (given some ops support) is not new. The original Macintosh team was also tiny.
There's no evidence that we will ever stop needing great engineers, particularly as more and more applications require huge scale while maintaining agility.
>The premise of the article seems to be that we no longer need great engineers at all.
Well, not really, because somebody will have to build all those elaborate abstraction layers people will use.
The core idea is that we'll need much fewer great engineers -- which is another way of saying we won't need "great engineers" at all. Read "not need them at all" liberally (very few), not literally (nobody).
After all if job demand goes from 1,000,000 people to 1000 people (arbitrary numbers), it's like it's the end of that job, even if technically people are still employed (there are after all horse cabbies and film lab technicians and letterpress printers employed still today).
This is absurd. How many people where creating their own languages 20 years ago? Everyone and their grand ma is building new languages on top of javascript. The expertise level of software engineers is going up! 20 years ago, how many people could build a VM from the ground up? Have you visited github lately? Sure, an average engineer can do much more today, and the reason is because of these great engineers, and they are not fewer by any means.
>How many people where creating their own languages 20 years ago?
20 years ago? Far less. That means writing a language is getting more commoditized -- and we work in a higher, easier, level of abstraction. That's what TFA says about other spheres of development and deployment too.
>Sure, an average engineer can do much more today, and the reason is because of these great engineers, and they are not fewer by any means.
Neither I, nor the article, said there are fewer great engineers. Only that fewer great engineers are (and fewer still will be) needed. Both as a percentage of all great engineers, and in absolute numbers.
I can't substantiate it, but there were in fact a lot of languages being created through the 60's to 90's. One could argue the language implementors of old were quiet daring, push boundaries much more than today (see APL and ICON as examples). sed and awk arose in an era of language explosion, make, sql, the list goes on.
> Well, not really, because somebody will have to build all those elaborate abstraction layers people will use.
It's almost as though you completely ignored my next sentence, which clarified that great engineers continue to be valued outside of abstraction/infrastructure companies.
Well, I don't find it valid to be frank. They might be valued, but they are valued less and less, and will be valued even less in the future.
An enterprise that used to need 100 engineers, with the cloud, SaaS, PaaS etc, can even today make do with 1/5 of that. Is there any trend showing companies needing MORE software engineers?
I would say yes. More and more stuff is getting done by computer. The majority of IT staff are still building / maintaining in house applications as far as I am aware, not building teh next Facebook / Whatsapp / etc.
The premise of the article seems to be that we no longer need great engineers at all. Or that they only need to work at infrastructure companies (not application companies like WhatsApp). The very example he chose shows that's empirically untrue.
The fact that a small team of amazing engineers can accomplish huge things (given some ops support) is not new. The original Macintosh team was also tiny.
There's no evidence that we will ever stop needing great engineers, particularly as more and more applications require huge scale while maintaining agility.