What programming sub-disciplines seem to be trending up in terms of career options?

Which types of roles are gaining momentum in our field? What are the jobs that seem to be the most in demand and will continue to grow?

You don't have to know for sure, but I'd love to hear any thoughts.

Comments

[HS]

None.

Too much hype about everything like FP - older than OO but too much hype about it just lately and people that give you the job still do not care if it's fully FP or not, even so they only care that you can do some FP in mostly OO language.

ML and AI getting a lot of hype (also existed before just getting now a lot of attention) but also a lot of problems. Data collection being in it's way because everything is free while we process your data. Now people started to complain about it but not many are willing to pay for services. It's great to have it but main part where I think it's getting fastest research are these tech giants that process your data.

And finally blockchain, crypto currency and digital banking. So much fuss before, and now you decide what's left. Is it changing future? Not really blockchain could later on but it was mostly used for cryptocurrency which, lets be real, are a bit down lately. Digital banking, sounds good, expect to see some problems with data collection, and security (maybe to pessimistic for this one).

So what now? Do we actually have anything new that we need or just pull out old stuff that wasn't so popular before? More examples: gamification in schools by using tech - mostly web based games, new languages, new frameworks...

Btw some companies are now leaving behind technologies and sub-disciplines out of job posts and mainly focus on how you behave as they don't need another dev that thinks he's Linus by just being rude. Now let's think about that.

[Casey Brooks]

Web performance optimization. People's attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, while the work required of servers is getting harder and longer. Having good caching strategies, small assets, and fast servers is more important now than ever for SEO and positive user engagement, and having people dedicated to building fast, reliable web experiences is really important. This is a large reason why static site generators have really started to explode over the past couple of years.

[Jaime Rios]

VR/AR. Specially for the web.

[Peter Benjamin (they/them)]

Depends on how you classify programming sub-disciplines, but demands also follows trends in technology:

• DevOps: this is perhaps the biggest and fastest growing programming sub-discipline, especially to manage things like (cross-)cloud infrastructure, CICD pipelines, container orchestrators ...etc

• Machine Learning: perhaps the second fastest growing programming sub-discipline, because data by itself is useless. You need Data Scientist/Engineers to make sense of this data.

• Application Security: I may be biased on this one, but many organizations are realizing that they not only need to invest in Information Security teams, but also attract Application Security Engineers that have strong mastery of both verticals (software development and information security).

[Tata Ganesh]

Testing
I think, with more number of people vying for jobs in the field of Data Science ( And other closely related fields such as Machine Learning ), the number of people who specialize in testing has reduced. Thus, there is ( according to me ) a huge demand for testers / QA engineers.
Also, I feel that testing does not get as much limelight as the other fields do. A lot of times, any role in testing is viewed as a role that is not very challenging. As more emphasis is being given on TDD, and more programmers are being advised to use it, more people need to be made aware of the importance of testers ( and testing ) in a tech team.

[Garrett]

Company I work for deals with many different physical products that need tons of testing. The testing and QA teams truly do work very hard to accomplish their work. Although I am technically part of that team, I work as an engineer developing automated solutions for testing, and the amount we can automate is very limited compared to things that can be done manually. There really should be no stigma against testers; they're an essential part of the development lifecycle for both software and hardware.

[Lasse Schultebraucks]

As already mentioned: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science, Blockchain, DevOps.

[Robert Newton]

Devops...

Specifically, asking for devops engineers without knowing exactly what they are asking.

[Mark Gorelik]

Bioinformatics! or more broadly speaking being able to merge computation and noncomputational disciplines - especially in chemistry, biology, and physics.

[Adrian B.G.]

ML/AI & Big Data Engineer
Blockchain - Contract (ethereum&others) developer
DevOps specialization in Cloud
More C++ switch to Rust, the others to Golang :))