Bob Munck
Bob Munck
Nov 2 · 1 min read

Web development is going to cease to be a major source of employment over the next 5–10 years; template-based companies like Wix have already significantly reduced demand by allowing customers with no knowledge of programming to construct their own sites. There are now tens of millions of web sites that have never been touched by a coder. Those companies can use the income from those customers to fund the development of new templates supporting new kinds of sites. Eventually, the emergence of demand for a new kind of site will be handled by the creation of a single new template by a development team and then no more coding will be needed. Web development will be limited to a very few experts at template development. It’s also likely that AI techniques will be incorporated in the templates and in template development, further reducing the number of human developers needed.

Specialties come and go in the computer biz. I started out in the 1960s as an operating system developer, worked on OSs for IBM mainframes, DEC minicomputers, Navy computers, telephone systems, robots, and various other things. I went to conferences and technical meetings where there were several hundred guys like me (yes, almost entirely guys). Now there are maybe a couple of dozen people doing that kind of work. Fortunately, I was able to move into other specialties like secure systems and web development (in 1993), retired before they petered out. If you possibly can, get a CS degree; it’ll give you the breadth of knowledge you need to adapt in this rapidly changing field.

    Bob Munck

    Written by

    Bob Munck

    Old Techie, retired. Physics, App. Math, Computer Science. R&D for DARPA, Unisys, MITRE, NRL. Taught at Brown, VA Tech, Trondheim.