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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern

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Are you more optimistic or pessimistic for the future of the software development career?

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?

Top comments (28)

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emma profile image
Emma Goto πŸ™

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!

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rfaulhaber profile image
Ryan Faulhaber

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.

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rose profile image
Rose

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 πŸ˜…

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viguza profile image
Victor Guzman • Edited

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!

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Zachary Stone

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.

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Max Ong Zong Bao

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.

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Dragos Nedelcu

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

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daveparr profile image
Dave Parr

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 Β£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.

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karandpr profile image
Karan Gandhi • Edited

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.

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mccurcio profile image
Matt Curcio

Where are physically located?

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karandpr profile image
Karan Gandhi

Hi Matt, I live in India.

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iamschulz profile image
Daniel Schulz

Cautiously optimistic.
Web development is a bubble of insanely high wages. Especially in the US, that's built on high risk venture capital. It's bound to burst at some point.
Also, with the covid thing now, climate catastrophies becoming more frequent, and nationalism on the rise world wide, there are strong hints to a historical recession. I don't believe that even the tech industry could compensate that.
However, developers are in high demand and I don't see that changing anytime soon. I don't worry for job safety, but I see drastically lower wages coming.

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Rocky Kev

I'm overly optimistic in the next few decades of software development. During the 2000s, my teachers were arguing that we'd be using modular code blocks to create giant complex thinking programs by slotting them in like legos. Yet here I am, being paid a lot of money to make buttons look pretty.

I think in 50 years, when we have Universal Basic Income - that's when I think software developers will start to fade away. Hopefully by that point, we do have lego-esque code formatting and software development isn't about pouring through millions of lines of text, but moving blocks around. And now that I say that, I think that's the future my 2000s teachers were thinking when they were programming in the 70s-80s.

Until then, being a developer is amazing I love every bit of my work.

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Chris Cordle

Optimistic. I see an ongoing boom for blockchain technology to recreate the financial industry and all forms of value exchange in society. I see AI tech and driverless tech rapidly advancing. I see AR and VR gaining adoption rapidly. I see so many boom areas even as the mobile and web areas have matured. There's so much left to explore.

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Bernard Baker

Definitely optimistic. All the large companies that hire programmers I starting to think and consider the idea of all those software developers working from home or remotely.

Telemedicine and other areas are going to be booming. Lots of people plan to cross train and transfer skills.

So it's more than likely that other areas within the industry will follow suit.

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David Taitingfong

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).

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redeving profile image
Kelvin Thompson

Fully optimistic! I can't wait to program with AI assistance using a neural lace type interface!

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rockykev profile image
Rocky Kev

They say the best chess players are AI-supported chessmasters. You're on to something!

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redeving profile image
Kelvin Thompson

I see a lot of great potentials happening! I would love to work with some neural interfaces! On a side note, I often think that when a computer crashes, it temporarily became sentient, went insane and lost its tenuous grip on its new reality. Reboot. All gone. And in the seething rithes of burgeoning awareness another bubble begins to rise. Will it too pop, or struggle and float free? Hmm, you can tell I just woke up after a long night of coding! Cheers! πŸ€“