Is it possible that the marginal utility of software development diminishes over time? In a stagnant economy with stagnant analog technology, I think this is inevitably the case. It's natural for people to invest in the most productive areas first, so if things remain constant then the marginal value of software diminishes. I ask this because I'm curious for how sustainable the bull market for IT is.
On the consumer side of things, we've already gone from on average 1 hour a day online to twelve hours a day online over the course of fifteen years. This is an underrated point of the discussion, we're just running out of people we can turn into no life losers. It just seems like Youtube, TikTok, Facebook, etc are all fighting over an increasingly set pie. On the video game front, the library of past games is ever growing and you still have a bunch of people playing ancient shit like Star Craft. In the year 2000, you'd struggle to find anyone who would be playing a game made in the year 1990. Now, playing a game that's a decade old like Skyrim or even two decades like Age of Empires II is the norm.
I doubt we're ever going to see a bull market the size of the 2010s for software and IT again. The ability to software to proliferate an infinite amount of times is amazing, but it could also mean we as a society pick the most profitable fruit first and once certain things are sufficiently done, there's not much point in wasting the money to improve them further. I doubt there's going to be another goldmine like youtube again. To compare it to the oil industry, it's like if we used up all the highly profitable Saudi Crude and had to content ourselves with Canadian Tar sands.
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Just like we’ve been told about truck drivers, reliable AI is just a few months away. In fact, Tesla plans on having millions of their cars function as robotaxis by the end of 2019. With their new Semi deliveries starting in 2020, just about every legacy truck driver is going to be on unemployment and looking for a new job.
If you think for one second that the same AI technology won’t be applied to IT, well I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
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There will always be a place for verifiably good software engineers. If you're asking this question you probably aren't one.
I hear ditch-digging is in pretty high demand.
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I'm a hobbyist. I've never really ventured beyond fricking around with what I can make with C using the standard libraries. idk what goes on outside of my bubble.
Not really, hydraulic diggers do that work now.
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Aka useless for any real application. Get forklift certified, old man.
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There's still loads of tools waiting to be made that will increase productivity substantially. Look at AI art as herald.
Consumer robotics and widespread physical automation are hopefully going to be revolutionary and require a bunch of IT and capital.
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Anyone that has seen the state of software in any moderately sized company or larger will say with confidence that the job market as a whole is fine. There will always be jobs paying $100k+ for competent devs to work on shitty internal only software.
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I would argue that the programming market is already oversaturated to the point that you're getting paid less in many cases than you really deserve and you have to compete with people from other countries who don't have the same standard of living. Unless you really want to deal with tight deadlines and people screaming at you and being forced to constantly use Google to handle the documentation maze that most software is, I would argue that there are plenty of better careers especially if you're not programmatically inclined. We will never run out of a need for plumbers for example
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Exactly the same as the janitor bull market, since thats essentially what an IT worker is.
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minimum wage starting, get my own mop, u jelly?
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They made me bring my mop from home and split my sandwich with my coworker... ;_;
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Seeing as some companies STILL run on IBMs OS2 programmers aren't going anywhere. There's so much left to modernize. Plus they're cramming software into shit like toasters and fridges and HVAC units now, the amount of code needed is probably growing exponentially
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The future is contract artists
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Like any nodejs convention.
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Sooner than you think in terms of AI "replacing" codecels but still not soon. Self-driving cars will probably happen first*. You'll probably see the first forays into AI medicine before such as well.
*Will depend on regulatory speed tbh as well.
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I'm still not sold on AI replacing code monkeys. Seems like it will just make them more efficient.
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I mean that's how most automation starts. It increases current efficiencies and then creates its own. There'll still be codecels to oversee the bots but if the field reduces by 80% that's a replacement. But as I said such is "still not soon".
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It's still better to be an IT bull than an IT cuck
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