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Ask HN: Will tech be saturated in 10 years?

by dizzydiz on 7/28/19, 5:32 PM with 44 comments

• by codingslave on 7/28/19, 9:39 PM

  Technology has been and and is increasingly so following a bimodal income distribution. There are two distinct groups.

  1.) The people who work for FAANG corporations or high profile startups, a few places in finance. In depth knowledge of computer science required to get these jobs.

  2.) People who are writing UIs, data flows, python apis, etc. Run of the mill software development.

  The income for these two groups looks like this:

  The top 5% (maybe less) in technology are making really good money, 250-1M. This is the group 1, FAANG group.

  The second group:

  The lower 95% are generally stuck between 75k and 175k. They are seeing increasing competition from Europe, China, and boot camps here in the USA.

  So to answer your question, if you take writing software very seriously, and can out compete most engineers, its an amazing career and will only get better. If you are a middling programmer, youre better off doing something else.

• by trykondev on 7/29/19, 12:57 AM

  As time goes on and more people enter the industry, I wonder if tech as a whole will come to mirror the video game industry more closely. In video games, it does seem like the oversupply of programmers & their desire to work in the industry no matter what causes lower wages and longer hours for employees relative to the rest of the tech world. And in the independent video game development scene (which might be more analogous to startups), the number of financially unsuccessful games is growing massively as more and more people try to get involved. It seems to be at the point where you need to go into that space assuming it will be unprofitable.

  I guess it depends on the talent distribution of the influx of new aspiring engineers -- after all, in some contexts it doesn't matter if 2-3x more people are lining up to willingly do your job if they don't have the skillset to actually replace you. But it could be unfortunate for the jobs that don't have the luxury of being protected by high barriers to entry.

• by octosphere on 7/28/19, 6:20 PM

  It's already saturated IMHO. Hackernews is an obvious example of it. There is more tooling than you can shake a stick at, but the real question is who is going to leverage all these tools and curate them so that they pick the right ones, and most importantly, leverage them at the right time? I say the right time, because tools come and go, depending on how many people are using it. Some tools simply stay because they have a loyal userbase/customer-base, others vanish because they are under utilized. I doubt there will be higher funding requirements since these days we have nearly infinite leverage, and leverage without permission. It's now permissionless to invest, use tooling, train people, etc

• by pojzon on 7/28/19, 9:59 PM

  I'll cyte my brother who is a Phd currently teaching in top 5 Technical University in my country:

  - "Listen, your year was pretty stupid, but you did manage"

  - "Now, students are so bad they cannot even do a simple diff.."

  I'm not afraid about the future. We are lacking here 50 000 software developers and this number will only grow because less and less finish studies or represent a decent skill level either way.

• by paulddraper on 7/28/19, 7:36 PM

  Don't underestimate the compounding effect of innovation.

  Uber would have been a giant flop just one decade previous.

  Everyone having a internet-connected smartphone was a requirement for that business to succeed.

• by acesubido on 7/29/19, 7:35 AM

  In 10 years? I guess, not. Maybe 20 or 30? The world will have a different set of problems 10 years from now. A different set of verticals, regulations to work with. A different amount of platforms or hardware (quantum computers, more accessible VR/AR).

  Take for example the current situation with agri-tech (vertical), it's pretty boring because it doesn't pay as much as putting different colored boxes in web pages for advertisers. With that vertical, you also have to take in localization for a region. Agri-tech vertical is nowhere near "tech-saturated" in other parts of the world. Random thought: it wouldn't be far-fetched to say agri-tech would pay a ton more if global warming went crazier in 10-20 years.

  In 10 years, we can get better tooling, but if regional regulations/laws hamper new tech, we'll see tech-startups develop for that specific region. Things like data privacy laws in other countries would lessen usage of public clouds and more in-house data centers. Trade-wars also spawn events like Github/Google blocking developers based in other countries, etc. So you'll see more startups taking advantage of that by developing localized tooling leveraging regulations and laws.

  Take for example, Alibaba. 10 years ago (~2009), you wouldn't know about that company unless you're from China. Now they're the Amazon/Google for a closed-economy of more than a billion people, more than twice the population of US. Grab, Paytm, Line are just getting started. So we'll probably saturate in 20-30 years? We might see more or less of these companies though, depending on the different set of problems/laws we'll see in 10 years.

• by closeparen on 7/28/19, 9:07 PM

  It’s hard to imagine that the market for devs who have fluency, understanding, wisdom, and depth, who can quickly and reliably deliver value against challenging problems, could ever be saturated.

  People calling themselves software engineers, absolutely. People who can pass today’s interviews, doubtful but maybe. People who are actually good, who can get mental hooks into what is going on and use their tools fluently to address it, probably not.

• by whb07 on 7/28/19, 6:46 PM

  assuming it’s a fixed pie, which clearly it isn’t. If you simply walk around you’ll notice basic things that could and should be automated in some way that shows it’s yet to reach the limit.

• by macando on 7/29/19, 12:07 PM

  There are more rich clubs than great football players. There are more new apartments than great electricians. There are more great projects than great programmers.

  If you want to be payed well you need to be great as competition is stiffer than ever. Times when it was possible to create a site in Dreamweaver and sell it for $50k are long gone.

  The speed of progress is not slowing down. Everybody is talking about the next recession yet somehow Softbank is about to pump another 100B into the system. India outsourcing their dev work to Philippines, Africa on the rise. AI/VR redefining marketing and entertainment industry. New 2.5T climate change market. We haven't even started to use tech to solve the really difficult problems of the civilization yet.

  Don't want to participate in this chaos? Choose a quiet IT sector like security or software maintenance.

• by situational87 on 7/28/19, 9:51 PM

  Your question sort of misses the bigger problem: if you're a developer over a certain age (35? 40?) you're completely unemployable in many areas. If you expect to hang on for 10 years you are also expected to move up to management, otherwise employers assume there is something wrong with you and you will never get interviews.

  Then you get the elites and the children of the elites who assume that everyone who didn't make a billion dollars by the time they turned 30 has some defect with them. These people will never hire old developers either.

  It's a horrible attitude, but very pervasive in tech. Expect to move on from development by some point, figure out what else you want to do after that and start reading more books.

• by chillacy on 7/28/19, 8:36 PM

  I'm navigating my career as if the answer will be 'Yes'. It's hard to predict on a 10 year horizon. If a recession hits it might feel similar too: fewer opportunities but the same number of applicants.

• by javierluraschi on 7/29/19, 5:45 AM

  I don't think tech will ever be saturated. Now, if we are asking if the tech of today will be saturated in 10 years, I would say it's possible, maybe even likely. We used to have fax machines and type writers, which got saturated and gone. A more interesting question might be, what technology will be relevant in 10 years?

  To add some color, I rewatched Richie Rich today which shows that 20 years ago, we thought that having a digital assistant that can locate in real-time someone was something that only a fictional billionaire could have -- we have that in our pockets today.

• by spo81rty on 7/29/19, 2:13 AM

  Part of me wonders if software engineering becomes more and more like manufacturing jobs. The jobs move overseas to whatever country has the cheapest and most talented workforce. Be it India, China, Philippines, Eastern Europe, Africa, etc.

  There are people willing to do software development for $3-$10 an hour all over the world.