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Software developers are already marginalized by tech. Across the board, we get better and better at developing software. As a software developer, the job has
by throwaway13337 11y ago
Software developers are already marginalized by tech.
Across the board, we get better and better at developing software.
As a software developer, the job has changed from being good at writing software to being good at putting lego pieces together.
It takes less people now to build: a simple video game, a SaaS web app, a mobile app - the common things we get paid to do.
And because of SaaS proliferation, there need not be as much custom internal software. This used to be a huge chuck of the work for devs.
Devops, too, removes need for as many 'it guys'.
The need for more software continues to outpace the trend of needing less developers to create it. For how long will that be the case?
- justinhj 11y agoI've been a software developer working on video games for 20 years and as simple things become easy we find more difficult things to do. When game machines solved the problem of moving lots of 2d sprites around we wanted to make 3D games. When flat shaded 3D moved to hardware we wanted texture mapping. Now even a mobile phone game will have people writing pixel and vertex shaders. Then there's mmo technology where we have to build and run servers for millions of players with no downtime. In my industry at least team sizes have only ever gone up as has complexity.
- throwaway13337 11y agoRight - I should have been clearer when I wrote 'more software' which, to me, means more complex software. So our needs change over time towards better and better software but there might be a ceiling to software needs for the majority of applications.