The Developer's Dystopian Future

This post really resonated with me. The fact is, there used to be less to know to be a "full stack" engineer, and the expectations for what "good front end design" means were much lower 7+ years ago. I sense a widening gap between the realms of front end and back end engineering/design. It used to be you could write a small PHP app and put it on a shared hosting account to serve your small user base and people (stakeholders/users/peers) were mostly happy with that. Now, if you're not "infinitely scalable" plus doing TDD/BDD plus Continuous Integration or even Continuous Delivery right away, that's considered lacking. This does create opportunities for those of us who've been able to grow with the field and truly understand "how computers work", but I imagine it's frustrating for those who are trying to get into the field now or even just trying to broaden their skillset such as from front-end engineering to devops and system engineering/architecture.

You remind me of myself at 17. Your post tells me you have both the capacity and the appetite to learn, which is the foundation of success in this field. Keep chaining one body of knowledge to the next.

Relax. Technology is part of a means to create value. Having skilled leaders is more important in value creation at scale than skilled engineers.

Projects fail because obvious risks are ignored - finding the integrity to fix those will maximise your value to anyone far more than learning AngularJS

This is not to say code should be ignored, but that code is software literacy - and soon "everyone" will be literate and the supply/demand curve will balance back out, but with a new higher baseline for entry.

I relate to this quite strongly. Whether you like it or not, a software career forces you into being a generalist eventually. Technology changes dramatically every few years - unable to improve what we have, we do entire revolutions to make incremental progress, and in the process, we make everybody's skills stale. The only things that survive are the principles that are common to everything. There's nothing you can do about that. And once you end up a generalist it is very hard to be appreciated for your wide breadth of general skills. People want the best person for exactly the job they are about to do, very few take a long view, very few even have the luxury to do that.

From another perspective, we are in unknown territory here. Us 40+ developers are at the vanguard of a generation of software people who have no trail blazed before them to tell us where our careers should go. There simply isn't a widespread professional software industry of 50+ and 60+ years old for us to look at and say "that will be me in 10 years". We were largely the first generation for whom software was a major industry. I take comfort from this because in all likelihood it will work out better than our worst fears would have us imagine. It is as much the lack of example and uncertainty as the reality that makes us feel insecure.

Be and keep worried, but don't let your angst control you!

The post describes a peripheral vision of progress, but no relation. It doesn't matter shit what new software, libraries and technologies are out there. What matters is that you have your own goals and advance in that! The rest doesn't matter, don't worry about others, you cannot help anybody, if you cannot help yourself.

I always tell me friends who don't know anything about computer science that my job is to make everyone else's job obsolete. After convincing them how their career might one day be replaced by software, robots and algorithms, I explain how they don't need to be alone with that fear. Of course I know how this makes me look like either a freak, an asshole or both. But the important part about the discussion is to communicate what really is going to happen. It happens, but the progress advances as slow as the growth of a tree. One day, it will be large, it will be a forest and then there will be no way to ignore it anymore. This is why it matters to open someones eyes. Of course only those who you deem worth, most people still won't listen and let time pass.

So yes, I share the same fear. Our destiny and true job is to make ourselves obsolete. Creating Software that can create machines, products and manage people, schedules and ressources. Creating Software that can create better versions of it's own or even create other Software to fulfill it's goals. This sounds like a big stretch, but we're talking about a time-span of 20 to 30 years.

We write code that will one day replace the need for us as a regular' work-force, but not as an actor in the process. The Future won't stop there, it'll instead create new markets and jobs where we proceed as architects using our creativity and intelligence, until our machines create hardware that surpasses the constraints on the software, which were set by us.

This will require us to allocate new resources for energy, either beyond earth using SpaceX like programs, the invention of a replicator (using quantum teleportation and molecular re-organization) or light to mass converters.