..And it was ever thus

I remeber being on a training course back in 1984 learning COBOL being told (by the trainer !) that we were the last generation of programmers and that after a couple of years our Role would be to assist end-users in building their own systems .... however the 4GL has come and gone , programmers still program DBAs and sysadmins still administer ...

That is not to say that technology has not eliminated some roles - I don't think there are many (if any ) punch operators or Tape librarians out there and the computer operator has evolved away from being just a "tape monkey" into more of an ops support role but as the French say -- Plus ca change