tell the author to stop reading boingboing - it's rotting his brain.

Ok you have a stupid manager who buys into these technologies, decides to shift to them and drops you like a stone.

You get your notice, redundancy too if you are permanant and sit with feet up on desk reading the job adds while chaos begins to desend on the department.

6 months later while you are happy in your new and probably better paying position you get a call on your mobile from the old company - begging you to come back to help them fix the mess.

So, do you tell them where to shove it?

Or do you quote a £1500 a day consultancy rate? :)

Either option has its satisfactions!!

Non IT people mostly refuse to learn more than the absolute basics of IT and in my experience this is only getting worse....

as for making their own applications, like the rubbish that was produced when people were empowered to make their own home page (early days of HTML), or more recently making their myspace page..

No, there will ALWAYS be a need for developers, and although i hate to say it, designers too.

Web 2.0 is mostly hot air in my view. Another BS marketing term that is meaningless since there was never a 1.0 ... in fact it sounds like a movie featuring a balding Bruce Willis .. er 4.0 anyone.

I love this "If developers' jobs are under threat it is unlikely to be from a bagful of old technologies under a new name." You are so right, I'm always amazed when a new term/acronym comes to learn that someone got a new name for old technology or process and people are buying it? SaaS especially, isn't it how the whole thing started? Computers and development were expensive so few did it and sold the services. Now, I wonder have people figured out how to manage billing in SaaS, wholesale does not work in most cases. If you have SLA or whatever, test it. Run a workload, interactive or batch or both, see the bill and run the same six month later. Is your bill same? If not, sue them! Especially governments used to check that they were not billed just by chance and if they catch you, some great stories, you are in trouble. And the end users building applications? Remember when we gave the report writer access to users? Real chaos, system performance down to baskets and enough complains to kill any help desk, the IT departments in real panic mode because the business systems slowed to dead. Great article, unfortunately it seems that some have bought the hype and we will go through all the steps again.

People have been sounding the death-knell of the programmer since COBOL, at least.

While we've come a long way with programming languages, the type of thinking needed to be a good programmer hasn't changed substantially. Neither has the skill set of the good business person.

While there may be some that are good at both, the rest are good at either one or the other. The right tool for the right job, I say.

"While we've come a long way with programming languages, the type of thinking needed to be a good programmer hasn't changed substantially."

I agree. I have met a few people who have looked at a bit of code and said "I could do that it looks easy" But so few people can drop the human habit of making asumptions and jumps in logic. I think it will be a long time befor most people can get the head round how littraly computors "think". That and even though languages have got easyer, they are still not easy.

That there has to be someone to write/update/improve the applications that allow people to make their own applications.

Machinery may cost jobs in the manufacturing industry, but it creates jobs for people who make, maintain and improve those machines; not to mention write software for them.

"AJAX, not outsourcing, is the new enemy."

So, could we call this Outsourcing 2.0 ?

I probably wouldn't have a job if it weren't for business people building overly-complicated Excel workbooks that do things Bill never envisaged even with his most foresightful of eyes.

Roll on ten years time when business people can no longer maintain the hulking, tangled wikis, blogs and braindumps, all carefully intertwined with ludicrous AJAX calls. I can only begin to salivate at what the rates of a well-trained professional will be then!