I think we're going to see more and more work being done in the cloud on dedicated SaaS platforms, even if your work is technical. The idea that most businesses

I think we're going to see more and more work being done in the cloud on dedicated SaaS platforms, even if your work is technical. The idea that most businesses will be running and maintaining a complex network of powerful VMs isn't realistic. Once this shift starts, the hardware you're working on starts to become irrelevant and replaceable. Examples: Github recently announced Codespaces (https://github.com/features/codespaces https://github.com/features/codespaces) which will allow developers to write and test code in a cloud IDE with repo dependencies preinstalled. This will replace local development in VSCode, Atom, etc. Bigquery and Snowflake both allow direct querying of the database in a cloud UI. Tools like Redash (https://redash.io/ https://redash.io/) allow analysts to do the same, but across multiple databases. This will replace SQLWorkbench, DataGrip, etc. Data scientists can use tools like Mode (https://mode.com/ https://mode.com/) or DataBricks (https://databricks.com/ https://databricks.com/) to run exploratory notebooks and dashboards in the cloud. This will replace running local Jupyter notebooks. Data teams can use tools like Shipyard (https://www.shipyardapp.com https://www.shipyardapp.com) to orchestrate complex workflows and automate any scripts in the cloud. This will replace Cron, Windows Task Scheduler, Airflow, etc.