In 2012, I read Marc Anderseen’s “Software is eating the world” New York Times editorial. Today, it’s happening at an even faster pace. Software is not only disrupting enterprise productivity or communication systems, where software was traditionally applied and sold, but disrupting every single industry and trade.
Uber and Amazon played a big role in this as they proved that tech companies can not only move bits but also move people and goods. They proved that the business model for tech companies could not only be selling licenses but also selling services at scale.
Not quite convinced?
Check out the warning (Silicon Valley is coming) from JP Morgan’s CEO in a letter to shareholders about disruption and competition from technology companies or check out some of the companies that YC invested in lately, companies related to banking, agriculture, energy, etc…
What does this mean for software engineers?
Talent and Culture
Today, good software engineers if they get their timing right and are good at interviewing, might end up with simultaneous and competing offers from Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple. Tomorrow, it will be these companies+ Goldman Sachs (Finance), Swedish Hospital (Health Care), PG (Consumer Goods) and many more. They also always have the option to start their companies or consultancy services.
All of this will make work culture more friendly and flexible than ever.
Great engineering managers will understand this trend and relentlessly work on retaining their engineers. Bad ones, especially at big software firms, won’t and will think it’s business as usual where finding great talent is taken for granted. They will cause great harm for themselves, their team and their company.
Policies
Governments, the good ones at least, will work on attracting and encouraging engineers to live in their countries. In the US, I predict that the limit on H1B will be removed. It used to be Bill Gates and Silicon Valley who used to lobby congress to remove this limit, now it will be every corporation in America.
It will be interesting to see whether the travel ban and a Trump administration will make the US a less attractive place to work and live or whether these policies will be reversed.
Cost and Innovation
Software engineers and payroll will get bigger and bigger on the expense line items.
Seed and Series A rounds will largely go into bankrolling engineering payroll instead of other expenditures like online marketing.
Disrupting and simplifying software development will start happening at a faster pace mostly driven by market needs. It’s still in the early stage but Backend as a Service and AWS Lambda will become more prominent. I predict a lot of innovations in developer productivity and disruptions in software development.
I also expect the number of students graduating with a Computer Science degree to increase and tech cities adjacent to Silicon Valley (e.g. Seattle or Austin) to boom.
Lastly, I am not quite convinced companies will allow more and more remote development. It looks like there are two trends in here, one that allows and advertise it on their career pages and one that still believes that every employee has to be at a walking distance from the CEO.