Ask HN: Could savvy business analysts replace programmers?
During my time at these corporations, I saw 3 hierarchies of work:<p>1. backend service - APIs&#x2F;talking to databases, message queues, or caches&#x2F;talking to other APIs&#x2F;doing light data transformation<p>1. UI - giving the user tables of data&#x2F;links to other tables of data&#x2F;giving the user basic CRUD operations around data through backend services<p>1. batch jobs - hourly&#x2F;nightly&#x2F;weekly jobs that perform basic logic over some form of input and generate some type of output&#x2F;response (lines from a file, database rows, messages from a queue)<p>I&#x27;m obviously playing devil&#x27;s advocate when I pose this question (along with oversimplifying the entire nature of technical programming work).<p>If a &quot;savvy Excel&quot; worker or your average technical documentation writer was given a specific plain English format (kind of like a programming language) to follow that compiled to a deployed service (REST endpoint), batch job, or UI page, how far would this get at replacing the bottom 30-50% of programmers? On top of that, what would be stopping this English-to-deployed-code from replacing say, the top 85% of programmers?<p>I think I&#x27;m focusing too heavily on the web development industry (this obviously wouldn&#x27;t work for something that needs to be performance optimized like a game engine), but I also don&#x27;t know if that&#x27;s a bad thing. The web development industry is probably large enough to be solely focused on for the point of this hypothesis.<p>I&#x27;m sure this has been tried before but I don&#x27;t know what terms to search for to research.<p>I do also think that once a &quot;business analyst&quot; understands how systems work (pass certain types of request parameters into a function that does filter&#x2F;map&#x2F;reduce&#x2F;calls other functions&#x2F;loads other data, returns a specific response format), they are pretty much a programmer at that point, right? Maybe the overlap of &quot;people who write technical requirements for corporate software deals&quot; and &quot;people who understand code flow&quot; is very small and I&#x27;m proposing something very dumb.<p>Curious to hear the thoughts of those smarter than me!