I can see your point re: boring solved via automation.
However, there is still a tremendous class of software that can't (or hasn't yet been) automated e.g. boring enterprise integration mush, or accounting software, or whatever CRUD app the company needs to meet xyz goal for the year.
Sure there have been some efforts to automate or semi-automate some of this but the solutions are often more cumbersome or boring than the original. There are probably tens of millions or lines of code written for this kind of stuff every year.
Sure if you look at a high-enough-level most of these look like the same thing (and thus easy to automate) -- CRUD apps basically. But the truth is that this just hasn't happened yet because the devil is in the often excruciating details.
The developers who end up doing this kind of work do critical stuff, it's the equivalent of building a working sewage system in a growing city, not sexy but utterly critical. No amount of programmer astronauts are going to keep the poop flowing away form the population.
Still, if anybody could solve that kind of boring software development (something that can't be done with sewage systems), it'd be a multi-billion dollar company almost overnight.
However, there is still a tremendous class of software that can't (or hasn't yet been) automated e.g. boring enterprise integration mush, or accounting software, or whatever CRUD app the company needs to meet xyz goal for the year.
Sure there have been some efforts to automate or semi-automate some of this but the solutions are often more cumbersome or boring than the original. There are probably tens of millions or lines of code written for this kind of stuff every year.
Sure if you look at a high-enough-level most of these look like the same thing (and thus easy to automate) -- CRUD apps basically. But the truth is that this just hasn't happened yet because the devil is in the often excruciating details.
The developers who end up doing this kind of work do critical stuff, it's the equivalent of building a working sewage system in a growing city, not sexy but utterly critical. No amount of programmer astronauts are going to keep the poop flowing away form the population.
http://boingboing.net/2011/11/08/what-happens-when-you-flush...
Still, if anybody could solve that kind of boring software development (something that can't be done with sewage systems), it'd be a multi-billion dollar company almost overnight.