The Year is 2033 and I'm a Software Engineer

It's my birthday, October 12, 2033. I woke up slowly as the smart lights and mattress reached morning brightness, while slowly massaging my body into a comfortable elevation. All of the AI assistants throughout the house sing me happy birthday and my robot servants coming sliding in to perform the awkward dance they designed for me. One breaks away to hand me my morning pills and spit water into my mouth, because you never get a birthday off from your nanobot nootropic capsules! My wife stands in the door laughing as our two dogs, senior now, desperately try to escape the robot dance squad to come over for their morning greeting. This is as far as I'm going to go in setting the scene, because if there's anything humans have been good at, it's bad futurism. In fact, we've been so bad at predicting the future, our previous predictions have become an art form - the muted colors of mid-century Popular Science magazine now a quirky collectible subculture all its own. In many ways, we have to accept we will simply be the creators of next century's retrofuturism, so that the next generations can use our silly ideas as backgrounds for their VR scenes or whatever. I don't know.

What I do know is that software engineering is changing. Sure, software engineering has always changed - I'm not aiming to assert any groundbreaking revelation here. But we can all agree there are a handful of unique forces at work, all contributing to a much more dramatic shift we probably didn't prepare for in the best ways. We did a lot of coding. We did a lot of hiring! We sent bus-loads of kids off to coding camp and let people quit their boring cubicle jobs in droves to join 10-18 week cohorts at coding bootcamps - and then we promised them 6-figure salaries, office slides, and Narnia snack fridges. The Dot Com thing was a distant memory, the VC money printers were brrrrr'ing, and we promised each other and ourselves that we'd always need engineers. We talked about the threat of AI as everyone else's problem, but not ours - because? In retrospect, we probably just didn't want to actually address the generative elephant in the room - we were worried about more distant ethical dilemmas with sentience and general intelligence, not about two brothers in Ohio slapping some planks together on chairs and discovering flight was simpler than nature all along, so to speak.

What does the next decade look like for software engineering? With companies downsizing without even noticing a huge impact on delivery, the VC wells tapped dry, the market flooded with talent supply and salaries falling to match - is AI, realistically, the only factor here? Of course not, let's look at the holistic picture. How many new businesses can kick off products with low- or no-code solutions? How many companies are finding less justification for custom development, no longer outgrowing ever-evolving platforms like Squarespace and Shopify? We're seeing the leading indicators, and your standard software engineer is much less valuable now than they were just 1-2 years ago, and certainly compared to a decade ago. As automation and intelligence does become more ubiquitous not just as a separate tool, but something integrated into and contextual to the full span of tools and platforms available, this isn't going to get any better. You're not going to see less LinkedIn posts from unemployed talent documenting the day, month, or number interview they're on without success, at least in any macro sense. You might have good months and seasons. You may have spicy quarters where you get more DMs from recruiters than friends asking for a referral. Overall, the trends are obvious.

When the year is 2033, and your smart lights, smart bed, singing assistants, dancing robots, and beloved pets wake you up from your technodreams, what is your day as a software engineer going to look like and how do we get ready for it? What advice can we give younger talent who may be motivated for the challenges that are certainly to come, in a market wildly unlike the one we entered out of college? Here are some of my thoughts:

1. Be an active member of the creator economy. This isn't just advice for engineering, but a vital thing to keep in mind regardless of what you do. Your brand and visibility - as a real estate agent, as a journalist, as a teacher, as a chef, as a dog walker - is only going to become more of the currency and value you offer to employers. It showcases that you're dynamic, that you're present and active in the digital communities which are relevant to business, and broadens the reach and impact of the company, category, product, etc. And as much of the "hard" labor of our jobs continues to become automated and streamlined, we'll ultimately just be left with who we are and who we are within the digital ecosystem itself. Our value is what we know, how we talk about it, and how well others listen to us and enjoy us talking about it. This also contributes to soft skills and communication, which are obviously core to your success profressionally.
2. Invest in deep learning in specific domains but also be a generalist when it comes to foundational skills. This may seem contradictory, but it isn't. Why? Focusing on niches and gaps between business and product goals, and what automation and other modern technologies bring, allows you to be invaluable in the success of leveraging those technologies effectively to fulfill those goals. However, the technology itself - even the stack - will usually not be the niche, gap, or your differentiator. Being a generalist allows you to apply the right tools in the right places, whereas your differentiators - e.g., your category-specific knowledge and effectiveness, or measurable experience - are what matters in practice. Being able to find your way around rapidly changing technologies is a given for good engineers, with the tools we have now and their trajectory. The economy depends on us standing in the middle of all of this chaos, holding true to fundamentals, being flexible and adaptable, and bringing something relevantly unique to getting an impactful product out on the other side - with high confidence, reliability, and predictability. Also important to this is being able to think big-picture: work on system design and architectural considerations, deeply embody and care about the purpose of what you're building and how what you're adding contributes to it, and always be human-focused: what does this do, why does it matter, and how do we collaborate on making it do that even better? No one cares if you know React, everyone knows React (exaggeration, for the sake of this argument).
3. Be interdisciplinary. This extends some points above, but whatever unique mix of experiences and knowledge you bring to the table are invaluable - at interesting intersections only human beings can still offer. Find subjects, activities, hobbies, and interests outside of engineering. This sounds obvious and isn't a new suggestion - the first advice many teenagers get in high school, when thinking about college, is to be, "well-rounded." Well, the more you know, the more you've touched, the more you've seen, and the more your wonderful brain has burned connections between, the more moments in business where you'll offer a perspective or idea that challenges some stale norm or solves a problem others couldn't. Combine fields, mix weird foods together and taste them, watch things you don't think you'll like. If nothing else, you'll have a lot to be thankful for in 2033 when your robots come in to dance for you for my birthday.
4. Explore emerging and engineering-adjacent career moves, like Developer Advocacy and prompt engineering. I may do a separate article on things like this, but just like in an industrial revolution, some new jobs will pop up in lieu of traditional ones becoming less enthralling or valuable to the market. Taking the idea of creator economy a step further, there are obviously a lot of folks now who make their entire living off of content - just talking about, teaching, forming community around, and entertaining the industry, rather than necessarily needing to contribute code at a job.

This is not at all exhaustive, but coding isn't enough for the future. Being a software engineer who, "likes new problems," and knows their way around JIRA in 2033 won't fly. Am I saying you need to be TikTok famous and grow a unicorn horn in order to make a living wage in tech this upcoming decade? Not explicitly, no, but we have to carry over the fundamentals we know into a completely new world, with completely new job descriptions, in completely different markets, competing against tools who are just as good as the average engineers on your team. If you have to get famous on TikTok and grow a unicorn horn to survive that, you better rally your robot dancers together and set up the tripod - things are going to just get more and more weird.

Anyway, these are the things you think about on your birthday in 2023, in the type of tech climate we are - with the broader global issues weighing on all of us, as well. Whether my predictions come true or not, I just hope I still get cake in 2033.