There are a lot of changes affecting everyone these days, but we don't really know what the future holds. How are you thinking about the future?
Are you more optimistic or pessimistic for the future of the software development career?
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Top comments (26)
Optimistic for sure! I don't think we're at the stage yet where robots are going to take over our jobs, or where all apps are going to be created without code (and even then, someone's still going to have to write the code to generate those no-code apps).
I had been starting to wonder what it would be like to work remote, so the silver lining of this whole situation has been that I've been able to experience that without needing to switch jobs. I've been lucky during this time to stay employed so I am feeling very grateful for that, too!
Overall optimistic, online services are more important now than ever as many companies go remote and brick and mortar companies do more online sales in order to help their customers stay safe.
But I'm sure there will be some bumps along the way, the economy is in precarious waters.
As far as things like automated tools making devs obsolete - not too worried. The nature of a software developer's work may change over time as different tools are developed but I think there will always be a place for people to do development work. At least in my lifetime 😅
When I see stuff like AI making code based on a comment you give it, I feel pretty pessimistic about the future of development. But when I see that 99% of the time, the "fads" that people thought would kill off other technologies don't, I feel pretty optimistic.
I’m usually optimistic about it. And these difficult times just helped me reinforce that! I’m not sure if it’s the same for all the tech companies, but it seems to me that tech companies were little affected by all this.
Although, there are things that generates some uncertainty about what is going to happen related to developers, specially when you see stuff like AI writing (or helping write) code: youtu.be/fZSFNUT6iY8
But, still on the optimistic side, maybe this kind of AI things would become just tools to make our jobs easier and not to replace us!
Yes, I foresee there will tons of new jobs that will be supporting or another specialisation for developers. Similar to how the job of data scientist, developer advocate, chatbox developer & DevOps was created.
I don't mean to be the downer in this thread but overall pessimistic, at least in the scope of decades.
I think the near future has a lot of reasons to be optimistic, I think software development will be in high demand for quite a while, but I don't think this trend will continue in the long term. I don't think the breaking point will necessarily be the global pandemic or the recession that's in tow; I think it'll be loss of profitability. When big tech companies (or maybe even not so big tech companies?) and venture capital start to see their return on investment start to slow is when we'll start to see the really scary stuff happen. In a similar vein I also think companies like Fiverr and Upwork are ominous signs of the world to come.
Software is expensive and I expect there to be an overall trend to drive down the cost of making software (and we're already seeing that). The first big boon to saving profitability has been the so-called open source revolution. The next one, I suspect, will be the large-scale devaluing of developers themselves. What happens after that point though is anyone's guess.
Suuuper Optimistic :)
Every day I see new faces, new products, and new ideas.
Startups are becoming established players, established players become conglomerates.
And a new highly diverse crowd is getting into tech.
Looking forward to seeing what this new generation of software developers will build.
So yeah, exciting times ahead :)
Dragos
I think it depends on how you frame it and your personal situation:
I'm lucky enough to be in the UK, where we have a furlough system in place to support 80% of (most) peoples wages by government subsidies. I also am furloughed from a start up company building software to help run energy efficient buildings. That company has not taken the threshold for government start up support of £250,000 VC funding, and our initial contracts for our product we were hoping to close are now much more difficult to close as the clients (hospitality and local government) have had their profits slashed and their budgets reassigned respectivly.
So personally this is a great situation for me for personal development (working on learning django right now), but from a company based perspective it's a real blow.
Pessimistic . There is slowdown and we are looking at recession. I am looking at 6-18 months of no work and mentally prepared for the same. The only good thing is I get time to upskill.
Where are physically located?
Hi Matt, I live in India.
I'm optimistic in the sense that I know my career writing code will never cease so long as I don't want it to.
When I finished school in Dec 2019, I thought I had seen a lot of opportunity. Then I hit the work force and came across even more opportunity. To this day I'm learning about new technologies and while it is a bit inundating, it leaves me optimistic that I'll likely never be short of work (so long as I put in the effort to learn it at least lol).