Will Software Engineering Become a Commodity?—Part II
This is a follow up to my musings about Why it might be the time to start looking for a new profession if you are a software engineer? I wanted to clarify a few points I touched in that post.
First, the post was written as an open invitation for discussion and I’m glad that it got a few interesting comments in just a couple days. Thank you!
Second, I am enthusiastic about software engineering. I think it’s one of the best professions available to us in 2016. It can be creative, challenging and most of the times well rewarded monetarily. What else can you expect? I’m happy with my trade. At the same time, I am curious what awaits us in 25–35 years.
Moreover, I don’t disagree with some responses that programming will still exist but in a different form. I think one trend is that it becomes easier and more available to yesterday’s laypeople (for example grads of 3-month bootcamps).
It’s encouraging for people who enter the industry. I often tell to people struggling with finding a good job: You can do it too and you don’t have to spend years in colleges and universities like I did.
When teaching JavaScript and Node.js at Hack Reactor, one of the best dev bootcamps, I have seen many success stories when people changed their careers and lives for better by entering tech. It’s not fair to say that a 3-month school is inferior to a Computer Science degree. They teach different things.
Maybe programming for this category will be like using WYSIWIG editor or some other GUI environment. Think about how the majority of people in developed world can send emails, work in Office suites and use Facebook. Excel also has a programming language, can most of the current software engineering be like working in Excel?
In this case, most of the people will be able to program. I see a trend when more and more non-tech people (business analysts, designers, product managers) learn coding and become generalists. This is great.
I consider myself a generalist, and it helps me a lot in understanding customers, business and products I’m working on. Sadly, there’s a gap in the US when it comes to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education. We don’t produce enough. Luckily, some enterprising initiatives like MOOCs (Udacity, Coursera), dev bootcamps (Hack Reactor, Dev Bootcamp) and online courses (Lynda, Udemy) fill this gap in convenient and affordable way. This field tends to be more general, i.e., developers are expected to work on the full stack: front-end, back-end and dev ops.
On the other hand, there’s a trend where existing frameworks and libraries grow more complex and powerful — so there’s a need for mega-experts to develop them. That’s why it’s important to constantly experiment, learn and keep up with the latest advancement. Obviously the number of mega-experts will be smaller than the number of people who use products and services created by them.
In a more transparent and thus meritocratic environment of open source contributions, it becomes easier to master your craft and distinguish yourself: a lot of open-source contributors contribute to projects to learn and get experience. The beauty of this is that the barriers to entry are lower, because contributors often don’t need to ask permissions and there’s less bias and discrimination—if your code works, it’s okay, if not, then you need to fix it. There’s more and more specialization on this side of the tech.
In either way, tech has great opportunities at the moment. It helps economies, regular people (users) and one of the best profession to work in. Knowing what we know, tech and software engineering changes extremely fast, hence it’s paramount to learn and evolve along with this industry!
Finally, let’s keep the conversation going! It’s interesting to reason about where we are moving as an industry.
