Is This the End of the Software Development Career?

I recently read a pretty interesting post on Medium that said the “Golden Age of programming” was coming to an end. That, like everything else, whoever knows how to write code today and understands the ins and outs of the digital world will just be another regular person tomorrow. The same thing happened in the past with reading and writing.

First, what would this Golden Age of programming even be?

The golden age#

If you told anyone back in the 1600s that a few hundred years from now we’d have social networks where every single person in the world would post written content, you’d probably get labeled a heretic or straight up crazy.

That’s because, like every skill in the world, any new science starts out as specialized knowledge, born from the needs of a few people and researched by a few people. Then, this knowledge brought by specialists gets deepened and abstracted by other specialists so that new, simpler concepts can build on that foundation, without the people using them ever having to know where they came from.

A classic example. Have you, developer, ever written or even read a line of Assembly? Fortran? The few people who have are either huge enthusiasts of the digital world or had some contact, even if brief, with these technologies. That’s because, today, the average developer doesn’t need to know that MOV ax, cs is an essential instruction on a modern processor.

And this is considered the Golden Age of programming. The age we’re living in right now. Where knowing how to code, understanding code, “computers”, the digital world, is something beyond the reach of most people in the world. Because to learn these skills, you’d need to step off the “normal” path of a standard school. So much so that computer courses are considered extracurricular.

As Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, whom every dev has surely seen, put it in that same article:

“I think the golden age of the last couple of decades, where you could become a programmer and you’d have a job, is kind of coming to an end… Programming today is more like knowing how to read and write. You just need to know it.”

But, will knowing how to program stop being a differentiator and become a requirement as demand for devs keeps rising? Not just for devs, but for everyone in the world?

And if that happens, will the number of people who know how to program in the future get so high that demand won’t keep up? Would we then be helping the development field while at the same time killing off what makes us valuable? Would that be the end of the tech career as we know it?

The virality of science#

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a new specialty pop up with this kind of boom. People used to think the exact same thing about scientists. There was even a promise that science would become knowledge for everyone, which clearly never happened. Today we see people using countless technologies based on natural sciences without understanding how they work.

The same goes for “the art of programming”. A lot of people are using computers and don’t know absolutely anything about how they work. And that’s completely normal. Today, you and I use Waze, which is a GPS, and neither of us knows much about general relativity. Probably not even Waze’s creators know that.

What I’m trying to say is that, for programming to become plausible for everyone, so that people start understanding the machines around them, we need to stop pushing away the people who want to learn. The development field, like literally any other field, is super toxic if you look at it from certain angles.

But we can’t let the toxicity of some people affect the experience of everyone else who wants to get into the field and become developers. Something that’s genuinely surprised me is how companies like Microsoft are pushing forward with no-code platforms.

As we said in the first paragraph, the people who are more well versed and specialized in the software field are able to abstract more complex concepts into simpler ones, laying a foundation for other people to be able to code too. In Satya Nadella’s speech at Microsoft Ignite, the company presented a really interesting proposal for the future of the Power Platform.

For anyone who’s never heard of it, Power Platform is a no-code solution, meaning you don’t need to know how to program to build automation for generic tasks. Among its tools is Power BI, which gives you better data visualization if you’re working with BI.

The idea that, in the future, the spread of programming will come not through a “purer” form of code but through platforms built by companies feels interesting. It keeps the need for specialized people around while still shrinking the gap between the people who know how to program and the ones who don’t.

The specialty seesaw#

For anyone thinking their job might disappear in the next five years: a long time ago, back in 2016, I wrote what would become my first published article. That article covers exactly this topic. And look, even though it’s four years old now, I’m still quoting it here, because it’s still relevant today!

At one point in that article I talk about the difference between generalist and specialist devs. While job openings will indeed shrink for people at the more entry level, other openings for more advanced developers will keep existing.

This happens because of the seesaw effect. It’s an effect you see across every kind of job market. When we get a new technology, not many people stand out in it, so the market tips toward specialists. But once that technology becomes more common, those people get replaced by generalists, cheaper but shallower on the subject. And then the seesaw tips the other way, in a perpetual motion.

The tech field isn’t going away, and neither is the development career. What will change a lot is how much skill you need to stay in the job market. Today, we might be talking about distributed applications like it’s advanced science. In ten years, that could be as common as a form.

The future market won’t be short on developers, it’ll be short on developers with the skills it needs. Today we have endless beginner courses on all sorts of topics, but these courses barely scratch the surface, and a lot of people don’t realize they need to keep studying constantly to stay in the market. So these people will form the base of the career in the future, where there’s already competition for little demand today, and there’ll be even more of it down the road.

We need to invest in continuous learning, one that carries knowledge from the basics all the way to advanced, or at least intermediate, so all of us can still be in the job market in the future, because it’s going to be more demanding. Remember, today’s science is common tomorrow.

The future of the tech market#

My honest opinion is that, beyond technology, the future holds a special opportunity for whoever stands out in a field that’s existed for about 10 thousand years. Interpersonal relationships.

We’re currently so focused on the technical side of our work that we don’t have time to focus on people and what they mean to us. Like I always say in every talk I’ve ever given on the subject:

We write code, made by people, for people. We’re not coding for machines, we’re coding for other people

Something a lot of people seem to forget these days. In the future this will matter enormously, because beyond technical knowledge, knowing how to deal with each other is just as important.

Besides that, technique tends to get abstracted into something simpler. Today we have intellisense, we have IDEs, we have all sorts of tools that people 30 years ago didn’t have. It’s now way easier to build quality software, and it’s way more complex than it was 30 years ago.

So, just like the article I read a while back also says: if we choose to call “golden age” the age with the least possible friction to learn something new and show it to the world, then we’re in the greatest golden age possible.

It’s never been easier to build software than it is today. But we have to be careful, because the future doesn’t tend to favor whoever doesn’t plan on keeping up with the trends. From what we’ve seen so far, the future belongs to the people who keep constantly evolving and trying to understand not just their own field, but the fields around them too.

Conclusion#

I hope you enjoyed this article. It was a more personal attempt to show my view of the future of the tech market, grounded in other views I’d already come across in the past.

I believe we still have a lot left to show, and that the tech field is only just starting its journey!