I’m not sure if our thinking in the grandest sense of things is that different, but I on the other hand tend to think that the reduction in the need for expertise will quite likely happen in the future. Or at least a radical transformation of the current “IT professional” job roles will happen.
If one visits the museums of Europe, there always are these extremely beautiful writing desks that were build in the past. Clearly there used to be extremely talented artisans building those, but for some reason despite all our modern wealth, our writing desks are hideous, bought from Ikea. What the hell happened? Where are all the beautiful handcrafted writing desks? Well it turns out that the price of human labor only goes up, while technology drives down the cost of machines, so all those master artisans went extinct as they were replaced by unskilled labor (cheap humans) combined with extremely productive machines. And that’s why my writing desk is ugly.
Can the same thing happen to artisan coders we employ today, who are carefully handcrafting beautiful, well written code? Certainly, and I believe we already have the technology. If I’m writing functions with a high-level programming language, there usually is this magical technology, built by some of the smartest people in the world, called a compiler, which takes care of translating my crude creation into working machine code. Writing machine code or some low-level programming language instead would suck, and it would be extremely time-consuming and expensive to do so, which is why I’m extremely thankful that compilers have been invented.
What is the next logical step for compilers? Instead of having them translate high-level programming to machine code, we should continue moving up and have them translate natural English language into machine code. Despite what my quality managers, compliance managers and humanist friends tell me, writing English in the modern world is actually a low level unskilled job, so you could probably get away with paying these people 30 €/hour writing MS Word instead of 100 €/hour for VS Code. Once the cost advantage for cheap unskilled labor using more intelligent machines is large enough, it’s game over for expensive artisan coders, and we will all get our custom code from a coding equivalent of an Ikea.
By this point, the IT Architects are usually screaming at me that programming is much more complicated than that. Sure, and it’s a fair point, but the process has already begun, and the technology will gradually get better and more capable. I don’t write simple scripts anymore or pay others to do it. I just ask my LLM to do what I want and then refactor the code 5 times and pick the output I like the most. And all these people who could have done work coding simple scripts have to retreat up the value chain or be fired. Eventually in the near future, we will go after some of the more skilled jobs traditionally done by junior coders and once again, they will have to retreat up the value chain or become unemployed. This process only goes one way, and once market share has been lost by traditional artisan coders, they will never gain it back.
In the past, there used to be this huge bubble in the ICT sector, having millions of American women as switchboard operations with some crazy projections for future demand needing millions and millions of more as phones got more popular. Now, the number of women employed by switchboard operations is around zero. Because that’s how you traditionally make money as an investor; by using a tremendous amount of capital to attack the demand for expensive human labor and replacing it with machines.
Granted, I’ve only talked about coding which is a subset of “IT professionals”-sector, but the case could be made for most of the other jobs within the field and frankly, multiple other high paying human-labor-intensive expert jobs. Once some nerds figure out how lawyer language actually works, there will be significantly fewer reasons for regular people to pay huge fees for simple consultations with lawyers. And frankly I’d rather quickly stick some medical sensor up my butt and give the data to Apple Healthcare than wait 10 hours inside a healthcare center for some arrogant expensive public healthcare doctor to prescribe me some basic antibiotics.
Most IT professionals I meet, and their labor could be at least partially replaced with sufficient investment of capital and time, and there is a huge financial incentive to do so, which makes it happening in my opinion quite inevitable. So in the future, many of these people working in traditional IT will have to retrain or find some other form of work, most of which might not even have been invented yet. For the next 1-5 years things don’t look this gloomy though, and the demand probably actually increases. Also, different markets move at different speeds and there will always be demand for some kind of “IT professional” work. But let’s say in a time frame of 10 years or more, I think it will be a bloodbath and there will be significant reduction both in coders and somewhat equivalent IT consult roles and also companies acting as middle men between human labor and the people who need IT work to be done. That business model has a life-cycle, and I believe it’s less eternal than we usually tend to think.