"Is this the end of the software development career?"

Recently I read a post on Medium that was quite interesting, saying that the “Golden Age of programming” was coming to an end. That, just like everything else, whoever today knows how to write code and understands the nuances of the digital world will be just another person tomorrow. The same way it happened in the past with reading and writing.

First, what would the Golden Age of programming be?

The golden age#

If you told any person in the mid-1600s that in a few hundred years we would have social networks where everyone in the world would post written content, you would probably be labeled a heretic or crazy.

This is because, like all skills in the world, any type of new science starts as specialized knowledge, coming from a need of few people and researched by few people. Later, this knowledge brought by experts is deepened and abstracted by other experts so that newer, simpler concepts use this foundation without the people using them even knowing where they came from.

A classic example. You, a programmer, have you ever written or even read a line of code in Assembly? Fortran? The few people who have done that are people who are very enthusiastic about the digital world or had, even a fleeting, contact with these technologies. This is because today, the common developer doesn’t need to know that MOV ax, cs is an essential instruction of a modern processor.

And this is considered the Golden Age of programming. The era we are living in now. Where knowing how to code, understanding code, “computers”, the digital is something beyond the capacity of most people in the world. This is because, to learn these abilities, you would need to deviate from the “common” path of a standard school. So much so that computer science courses are considered extracurricular.

As Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly media, which every developer should have seen, cited in this same article:

“I think the golden age of the last two decades where you can become a programmer and you will have a job is kind of at the end… Programming today is more like knowing how to read and write. You simply need to know it.”

But will, with the increased demand for developers, knowing how to program stop being a differentiator and become a requirement? Not just for whoever is a developer, but for everyone in the world?

And will, with this, the number of people who would know how to program in the future be so high that demand wouldn’t keep up? Then we would be at the same time helping the development area while killing what makes us valuable? Would this be the end of the technology career as we know it?

The virality of science#

This is not the first time we see a new specialty emerging with this boom. In the past, people thought exactly the same thing about scientists. There was even a promise that science would be knowledge for everyone, which clearly didn’t happen. Today we see people using infinite technologies based on natural sciences without understanding how they work.

The same applies to the “art of programming”. Many people are using computers and know absolutely nothing about how they work. And that’s completely normal. Today you and I use Waze, which is a GPS, and none of us know deeply about general relativity, probably not even the creators of Waze.

What I’m trying to say is that, for us to make programming plausible for everyone so that people begin to understand the machines around them, we need to stop pushing away people who want to learn. The development area, like literally any other area, is super toxic if we take some points of view.

But we cannot let the toxicity of some people affect the experience of all the other people who want to enter the area and become programmers. Something that surprised me quite a bit is being the advancement of companies like Microsoft in no-code platforms.

As we talked about in the first paragraph, people who are more versed and specialized in the software area can abstract more complex concepts into simpler concepts in order to create a foundation for other people to code too. In Satya Nadella’s speech at Microsoft Ignite, the company presented a very interesting proposal for the future of Power Platform.

For those who have never heard of it, Power Platform is a no-code solution, that is, you don’t need to know how to program to create automation in generic tasks. Among them we have several tools like Power BI, which allows better data visualization for those working with BI.

The idea that, in the future, the dissemination of programming comes not through a more “pure” form of code, but through platforms developed by companies seems interesting, since we maintain the need for specialized people, and we still seek to reduce the gap that exists between people who know how to program and those who don’t.

The Seesaw of Specialization#

For those thinking your job might end in the next five years, a long time ago, in 2016, I wrote what would become my first published article. In this article I address this exact topic. And see, even though it’s four years old, I’m still citing it here, because it is still relevant!

At a certain point in this article I comment on the differentiation between generalist and specialist developers. While the supply of jobs will indeed get smaller for people at the entry level, other offers for more advanced developers will continue to exist.

This happens because of the seesaw effect. This is an effect quite observed in all types of labor markets. When we have a certain new technology, we don’t have many people who stand out in it, therefore the market leans toward the specialists area. But, the moment this technology becomes more common, and these people will be replaced by generalists, cheaper but more shallow in the subject. And then the seesaw leans to the other side in a perpetual movement.

The technology area will not end, much less the development career. What will change a lot is the amount of skill necessary to stay in the labor market. Today, we can talk about distributed applications as if it were advanced science. In ten years this could be as common as a form.

The future market will not be short of developers, but rather of developers with the necessary skill. Today we have infinite introductory courses on various subjects, but these courses don’t go far beyond the basics and many people don’t have the notion that they need to be studying constantly to stay in the market. Therefore, these people will form the foundation of the career in the future, where there is already and there will be even more competition for little demand.

We need to invest in continuous knowledge, which perpetuates knowledge from basic to advanced, or at least intermediate, so that all of us can be present in the labor market in the future, because it will be more demanding. Remember, today’s science is common tomorrow.

The future of the technology market#

My sincere opinion is that, besides technology, the future reserves a special opportunity for those who stand out in an area that has existed for roughly 10 thousand years. Interpersonal relationships.

Currently we are so focused on the technical part of our work that we don’t have time to focus on people and what they represent to us. As I always say in every talk I’ve given on the subject:

We write code, created by people, for people. We are not coding for machines, but for other people.

Something that many people seem to forget today. In the future this will be very important, because beyond technical knowledge it’s very important that we know how to deal with each other.

Besides, the technique tends to be abstracted to something simpler. Today we have intellisense, we have IDEs, we have several tools that people 30 years ago didn’t have. Currently it is much easier to develop quality software and much more complex than it was 30 years ago.

So, as this article I read a while ago also says. If we choose to call “golden age” the age that has the least possible friction for learning something new and showing it to the world, then we are in the greatest golden age possible.

It was never as easy to create software as it is today. But we have to be careful, because the future is not leaning toward those who don’t intend to keep up with the trends. From what we’ve seen today, the future belongs to those people who will be constantly evolving and seeking to understand not just their own areas, but also the areas around them.

Conclusion#

I hope you enjoyed this article. It was a more personal attempt to show my vision of the technology market for the future based on other visions I had seen in the past.

I believe we still have a lot to show and the technology area is only beginning its journey!