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The need for competent IT will only increase, especially in the US. There are so many systems that need upgrades and improvements that it is scary. Some may say

The need for competent IT will only increase, especially in the US. There are so many systems that need upgrades and improvements that it is scary. Some may say that AI will do this, but by the time AI is capable of doing this then all labor of any kind is deprecated as a concept and we'll have transitioned to a different type of economic system anyway. So don't be afraid, there's a lot of work coming. There are hundreds of billions of lines of code that haven't been meaningfully upgraded or maintained and those systems are still profitable and useful and cool to work on. Even though there may be economic downturns when it's harder to find work, and I was affected by this in the last two years so I understand what it's like, the long term trend until labor is irrelevant is that we'll always need IT and software engineers and software developers. The good ones will continue to earn a really great wage because it's difficult to become a really good one and a lot of other shops will want your great devs. It does not matter where you're located on earth - if you're great, a better shop will take you.

loa_in_ 3y ago
> There are so many systems that need upgrades and improvements that it is scary > There are hundreds of billions of lines of code that haven't been meaningfully upgraded or maintained and those systems are still profitable and useful and cool to work on Will putting additional effort and in turn paid man hours increase the profit margin?
- wait_a_minute 3y ago
  Absolutely. Maintaining and modernizing code means making use of the newest capabilities so your systems are more efficient, thereby reducing their costs. Newer tech also has many more capabilities which means older products can become new again, which would lead to more sales. It also reduces the bus factor since you will be able to find many more experienced people to intervene in your system if it experiences significant issues. I recently worked on a platform that still used Silverlight well after its deprecation. They needed to deprecate and then extricate that dependency. For a very long time, people would pursue features over this maintenance task since the maintenance wouldn't have increased revenue. However, eventually the very old dependency slowed down their ability to produce features that customers want and presented a security risk as well. These certainly will reduce profit margin...so a lot of the time, tech investment will be about not losing the profit margin that already exists, and biding time until new capabilities become available to add new features and decrease system costs.

loa_in_ 3y ago

> There are so many systems that need upgrades and improvements that it is scary > There are hundreds of billions of lines of code that haven't been meaningfully upgraded or maintained and those systems are still profitable and useful and cool to work on Will putting additional effort and in turn paid man hours increase the profit margin?

wait_a_minute 3y ago
Absolutely. Maintaining and modernizing code means making use of the newest capabilities so your systems are more efficient, thereby reducing their costs. Newer tech also has many more capabilities which means older products can become new again, which would lead to more sales. It also reduces the bus factor since you will be able to find many more experienced people to intervene in your system if it experiences significant issues. I recently worked on a platform that still used Silverlight well after its deprecation. They needed to deprecate and then extricate that dependency. For a very long time, people would pursue features over this maintenance task since the maintenance wouldn't have increased revenue. However, eventually the very old dependency slowed down their ability to produce features that customers want and presented a security risk as well. These certainly will reduce profit margin...so a lot of the time, tech investment will be about not losing the profit margin that already exists, and biding time until new capabilities become available to add new features and decrease system costs.