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The thing that is different is the ridiculously high demand for developers since the 1990s, minus downturns like the dot com bust. Developers can job hop and g
by ThrowawayR2 2y ago
The thing that is different is the ridiculously high demand for developers since the 1990s, minus downturns like the dot com bust. Developers can job hop and get perks because software is still in the process of eating the world.
But no boom lasts forever. In other creative fields or games development, where supply far exceeds demand, the situation is much less favorable for workers and that's eventually where the software industry is going to be as well.
- necovek 2y agoI am not so sure that's true. Almost anything that gets created today involves some software, and infrequently some new software, in the pipeline. Do remember that there is a whole bunch of software that needs to be created for our household appliances, any electronic device (those tiny little SoCs that control a sensor or voltage or whatever), or tools used to make anything else. We are also in the midst of a push to get everything "digitized", including our entire homes, cars, buses, libraries, movie catalogs, music libraries, battery charging, communication infrastructure etc. And everyone keeps a computer or two or three (phone, smartwatch, tablet, fitness trackers) on them at almost all times — all these need software to do something useful. Basically, I think software developers are going to remain in need as long as we rely on computers. And just like farming has never gotten obsoleted because we continue to need food (though increasing the brute force of the tools we have has allowed us to rely on fewer farmers), we'll continue to need new software (it's still an open question if there are tools like Copilot that will enable us to achieve similar efficiency improvement and rely on fewer software developers, but my guess is no).