A little over a year ago, there was a news story making waves, originating with the Washington Post article More than a quarter of computer-programming jobs just vanished. What happened?.
A quarter of computer-programming jobs! That’s a lot of jobs! What happened, indeed? The article
posits a number of theories a theory (spoiler: it’s the AIs), and has some additional
discussion, some of which is decent. A few other media outlets picked it up, and it
was a splash story of the day, in line with all the narratives about AI eating our jobs.
This would be perfectly reasonable journalism if the headline were true. As a programmer, I knew that a quarter of computer-programming jobs had not, in fact, just vanished. The market was tight, but 25% in a year would’ve been extreme.
It turns out that the authors of this article also knew that their headline was false. They admit it in the article:
In the real world, “[software] developer” and “[computer] programmer” can seem almost interchangeable. But in the world of government statistics, where we have legal permanent residency, there’s a clear distinction.
In translation: the number of programming jobs didn’t actually go down—the number that went down was the number of jobs classified specifically as “programmer” (as opposed to “software developer”) by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Now, I’m a software developer, a software engineer, a computer programmer, and I don’t make a distinction between these labels. I think they’re synonyms. They have different connotations, different vibes, but with rare exceptions, I think they describe the same set of people.
And most people are with me on this. As the article concedes, in “the real world” these terms “can seem almost interchangeable,” which is to say that they are interchangeable. It’s not that this is an industry insider thing; as an industry insider, the whole distinction smells like a misbegotten offspring of the 1980s, when mainframe software developers did in fact divide up their duties this way between “engineers” and “analysts” and “programmers.”
In today’s world, however, the distinction is an anachronism, a BLS quirk. The BLS would have you believe there is maybe a little fuzziness between these roles, but actually this distinction has been dead for a while. It only exists in their mind, and maybe also a smattering of eccentrics who for some reason decide to think like the BLS—which is, it seems, what these Washington Post reporters have decided to do.
The problem is, when people read the headline saying “a quarter of computer-programming jobs just vanished,” they think the normal meaning of “computer programming” jobs—as they should. The technical BLS meaning of this term is so detached from the normal meaning as to make the headline outright false, not just misleading. “Clickbait,” as the kids say.
But it’s not just a clickbait-y headline. The rest of the article desperately wants to blame AI, but that only makes sense if BLS’s “programmer” designation is a coherent group of people, if you assume that this distinction that the BLS makes between “programmers” and “software developers” is, in some way, valid.
But unlike your feelings, this distinction is not valid: there is no real-world distinction between these pools of jobs and workers that the BLS is tapping into. As far as I can tell, programmers have just been shifting their identity, their self-description from “programmer” to “software developer.”
This is a much less sexy story—no good AI tie-in. And if you investigate further, you find that programming isn’t even shrinking as ia field: If we combine the two buckets that the BLS has for some reason separated, the total number of programmers has actually moderately increased.
Sigh. Washington Post’s “Department of Data” should do better.
Of course, all newspapers are guilty of this sort of thing. In 2045, I imagine, there will be an article from some newspaper with the headline “Where did all the white people go?” It won’t be because of any decline in the number of white people. It’ll just be because of a trend to self-identity, instead, as “European American.” And of course, that stupid article will likely be written by AI.