10 Tech Trends Shaping 2024

Moving towards the end of 2024, let me take one more second to say congratulations: if you're still in tech, that means you survived another wild year of massive layoffs, dodged drafts into conflicts, and are still one step ahead of the AI your boss is secretly hoping might be the one to replace you.?

Health of the Tech Job Market

At the very start of 2023, so-called "Magnificent Seven" giants in tech, among them Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, let thousands of people go. That was almost a rush of talent hitting the job market hard, down 60% according to TrueUp.io. To junior devs, finally, the dream seemed nightmarish. It was only in 2021 that people managed two full-time remote jobs; now, in 2022—however, the managers are cracking the whip for remote work, and that competitiveness in the job market is through the roof.

Nonetheless, there is a ray of optimism for 2025. Openings for jobs are increasing and major IT companies are gradually lifting their hiring bans. That is, of course, a long way off where the job market used to be, but cautious optimism now can see that brighter days may lie ahead—depending upon the global economic situation.

The Economic Landscape: High Interest Rates and Uncertainty

This is something like a thorn in the flesh for technology startups. The rates have indeed beefed up the cost of money for companies, and as a consequence, this hits their capacity of growing faster and employing people at an aggressive clip. As recently as last week, Spotify announced its third round of layoffs this year, cutting 1,500 jobs due to the increased cost of capital. This has also brought the real estate market to a complete stop with few transactions occurring, as there's no one willing to pay an 8% mortgage.

The auto sector has not been left behind either. Tesla, once considered an appreciating asset, has had its prices fall through the floor. It kind of came as a rude shock to those who thought that their Tesla would somehow pull a magic trick and appreciate in value. The ease with which money was being made had taken the tech world up to unsustainable highs. This new economic reality is forcing it to go cold turkey.

Global Conflicts and the Military-Industrial Complex

How can we mention 2024 and avoid the elephant in the room: the world conflicts? The world is rent, with tensions between multitudes of regions of the globe. However, instead of choosing camps, let's take a moment to reflect on the companies that these conflicts are a boon for. With giants like Lockheed Martin and Boeing fronted, the military-industrial complex has no chance of coming to an end very soon. This is rather cynical to say, actually, but the fact remains that these defense contractors are allied with tech, and so long as wars are going to exist, the need for the products from these companies will exist, for sure.

?The Return of Crypto

2023 was the triumphant return of the cryptocurrencies. Early in 2022, Bitcoin was trading just under $16,000. What to watch for is the magic number: $69,000—if Bitcoin hits that, it will bring in a FOMO tidal wave along with another round of Ponzi schemes.

Augmented and Virtual Reality: Apple Vision Pro

The real dilemma concerning the Apple innovation track record is whether people love it or hate it. Although many of the Apple aficionados will no doubt camp outside the stores just to get a hold of one, it isn't really poised for the mainstream. People may just not be ready or willing to shell out that much money just to go even further away from reality. This could well turn out to be the sort of niche product that—great for some, but not for everyone.

The Shift in Hardware: Microsoft and ARM-Based Chips

In hardware, it surprised most in the last half of 2023, coming straight out with an announcement of making its own chips, which included Maya for AI and Cobalt for cloud computing. While AWS is designing ARM-based chips, these are better than the good older x86 chips we are all used to. This might just be a game-changing move, wherein we could end up with most pieces of personal computing hardware running under ARM chips, rather than on the usual X86 architecture.

GTA 6 Trailer and the Future of Gaming Revolution

In a lot of ways, gaming still appears to be the only driving force behind great technological innovation. For example, the GTA 6 trailer release showed an astounding level of anticipation from fans all over the world, waiting for what may potentially be the most anticipated video game in history. The game was being developed in something called the Rockstar proprietary RAGE game engine, but good news for those outside the walls of Rockstar: technologies like Unity and Unreal Engine just go on and keep pushing the boundaries to set probable innovation in game development.

Unity still very much formed part of the arsenal developers had at their disposal, notwithstanding the beat down that platform took in 2023 over highly controversial pricing changes. On the other end, Unreal Engine launched Version 5.3, housing purely new features such as a procedural content generation framework and a very close-to-photorealism material system. These tools will continue to develop further, and 2025 will unleash even more immersive experiences in the gaming industry at large.

Web Development: Evolution

With visual editors, IDEs, and AI-driven tools like Visual Copilot, creating web applications is going to be easy. Nowadays, more focus is on enhancing the developer experience inside the existing one rather than on creating a new one. This would further drastically cut down the time it takes to get projects live on the web and, thus, enable more people to work on web development.

Future of Mobile Development

Even mobile development is experiencing a change. People do not really like to download lots of new applications, creating some kind of barrier for application developers. Now, low-code tools come into play, allowing developers to build for a number of platforms with almost nothing in coding for iOS and Android. The history is evident from the time when applications have become easier and lighter, and only one code runs on both iOS and Android.

Intermediate Level Languages: Rust, Zig, and Mojo

When things get closer to the hardware, languages like Rust come into their own. Rust is now being used in the Linux kernel itself, and other languages like Zig and Mojo are gaining more attention. One of those is Mojo, a superset of Python that proceeds on the same ease of use at a high level and offers low-level performance, particularly in the field of AI and Machine Learning. Those are going to be relatively important languages in the future for systems programming on a very low level.

AI: The Elephant in the Room

Finally, we can't avoid the elephant in the room—artificial intelligence. ChatGPT feels like it's been around for a year, although it's actually more. That could be in everything from stock trading to cyber defense, and its influence can only continue to grow in 2024. Generative AI by itself, like Stable Diffusion's text-to-video model, is running incredibly fast. By the end of 2024, we could very well be creating full-length, high-quality feature films from a simple text prompt.

While it does bring along with it such rapid development, it also makes way for a number of challenges. Questions about whether utopia shall be attained when work, with the dawn of artificial general intelligence, becomes something totally obsolete, or it shall bring horrors beyond our imaginations, remain in the very face of human existence at the moment. In any case, the future of technology is both exciting and terrifying.

Conclusion

This year of 2024 will be another fulcrum of rapid change in technology. This coming year will display that, because of job market swings and economic uncertainties, it is a time of challenge and opportunity—AI innovations and hardware leading the way on pioneering developments. Keeping abreast, adaptable, and positioned for the new realities of the tech industry is what is going to get one through. Anyway, congratulations—you've hacked your way this far, and it's another year in the simulation.