More likely, you should be more concerned that doing your startup first and neglecting relationships means you will burn through your younger years (and younger looks) and won't be able to leverage them when it comes to finding a mate. Then, if your startup fails... oops, no leverage at all.
Agreed. Your major competitive advantage as a programmer is probably the ability to build tools.
If the problem calls for a particularly complex algorithm, or begins taking up too much time, that's when I make the tool as simple as possible and then leverage Mechanical Turk to get past the sticky bits.
Interesting point. But, I would guess the resulting wage deflation of opening up our markets completely (increasing labor supply) would outpace the deflation of medical expenses, and I doubt the latter would ever catch up completely. Therefore, those expensive government programs would have to be funded with much less tax revenue due to lower wages. I don't think that would fix the problem at all.
Wow, I had the exact same thought (ie. comparing hackers to Detroit auto workers) when I read the article. Though, I thought I was being profoundly pessimistic.
So, to add more pessimism (for fun)... we don't have the bargaining power that the UAW had, and I don't think we have any members of congress that will consider software professionals to be a serious constituency. So, without legislation, we would definitely spiral down faster as an industry.
CASE didn't cut it because business users, the REAL target customers for CASE, weren't savvy enough yet. Now, business users are just as likely to look at code as they are business requirements. I see this often in my work. So, the original idea of replacing unkempt engineers with smooth business people can probably move forward soon.
But, don't get me wrong, it won't be because business users are now savvy enough to take on hard-core programming. Rather it will be due to an active open-source community, who have been working to give business users big chunks of modular functionality that they can use like Duplo blocks to build the software solutions they need.
In the corporate world, the future role of software developers, to me, is seeming to tend towards a Business Analyst/Systems Engineering role-combination.
A device that sits on your car dash and takes high-def pictures of the road ahead (infrared for night-time), then runs some image matching software that will fire off warnings if deer or other objects are in your path, or are moving towards your path. An early-warning HUD, to prevent deer strikes.