I really liked this article by John Naughton in The Guardian. Some may argue that the significance of DevOps, and deep programming skills in general, could diminish over time with the proliferation of low-code and no-code platforms. There is a rise in the role of business administrators building their own solutions in no-code tools.
However, that's still currently outpaced by continuing growth in demand for developers. Furthermore, the article argues that, if anything, the demand for the most highly-skilled developers is going to continue to grow. Naughton's reasoning is that the bloating of software (wonderfully described in Nathan Myhrvold's law) is allowed and even encouraged by ever-increasing processor power; but that may be halted in the not-too-distant future as we start to get to the limitations of physics and as Moore's law no longer applies (the rise of quantum computing notwithstanding). The end result: we're going to need more of the kind of highly skilled programmers that can write the most efficient code, and the infrastructure and toolsets to support them.
What also caught my eye was a Guardian Pick comment from "robCornelius" (emphasis below is mine}:
"This is a fantastic article. Programing != software engineering. Ever more bloated frameworks and languages just add more and more layers of complexity and abstraction to systems without adding any more functionality. I can't talk as I work as a front end developer so everything I do is probably about 500 layers away from something like the real nitty-gritty.
In addition 80% of my job is not writing code at all. It is what I like to call "meta-work". Filling in timesheets, JIRA tickets, writing stuff in wikis, going to meetings, conference calls, stand ups, "investigations" that go no where, team building (don't get me started), "knowledge sharing", doing stuff for things like the environmental steering group or the wellness steering group (hey I get paid the same) etc. etc. etc. I reckon I am actually productive, as in sitting down writing code, for 6 - 8 hours per week."
This is a common frustration that I hear a lot from developers, especially in large enterprises, and there's a huge opportunity for the IT teams that support getting developers' products into production to help those developers spend more of their time coding - which is, after all, the fun part!
This is close to my heart as I advocate for a product that makes developers and change managers more productive (ServiceNow DevOps); for example, we can eliminate the need for developers to be involved in ticketing (for change requests) by having the tickets created and approved automatically. It can also reduce the meeting time needed for things like compliance. There are many other examples where technology can be applied to the needs of the developer, especially technology which is more often focused on improving business processes like on-boarding personnel and self-service.
