
Ask HN: Will tech be saturated in 10 years? - dizzydiz
Will better tooling (think WebFlow or Google’s AI as a service) and more accessible training lead to:<p>- more devs -&gt; lower wages for employees and;<p>- more startups -&gt; higher funding requirements<p>for new entrepreneurs?
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codingslave
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.

~~~
glhaynes
_If you are a middling programmer, youre better off doing something else._

There are a massive amount of people that would absolutely _love_ to be "stuck
between 75k and 175k."

~~~
ikeyany
There is an implicit belief by many people that you're a failure if you're not
trying to get super rich in life.

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trykondev
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.

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octosphere
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

~~~
krageon
> It's already saturated

Given that basically every company I've seen the hiring process of has a lot
of trouble attracting programmers of even average competence I have trouble
believing this is true.

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pojzon
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.

~~~
amitsaroj002
I'm one I'm those

------
paulddraper
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.

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acesubido
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.

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closeparen
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.

~~~
davidjnelson
> 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.

Wildly amusing that these two things are mutually exclusive. There's a clear
difference between an expert engineer/architect and an expert computer
scientist.

------
whb07
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.

------
macando
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.

~~~
laxk
I would't say that security is a quite sector. Just google IT security
innovation and you will see a lot of movements.

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situational87
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.

~~~
codernyc16
I’m trying to come to terms with this inconvenient truth as a pretty good
developer in my 30s. At some point you just can’t compete with the 20 year old
recent grad drinking Jolt cola and working till midnight. You have experience
on them, but also a lot of other things that hold you down: family, mortgage,
etc. The future looks very confusing.

------
chillacy
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.

~~~
maltalex
What career choices are you making based on that assumption?

~~~
chillacy
Some standard stuff: high savings rate, aggressive career progression to stay
ahead, no specialization (which might get oversaturated e.g. all these new ML
programs that colleges spin up).

~~~
maltalex
I asked because none of the things you've mentioned are "standard". Except for
the savings rate maybe.

Aggressive career progression - in a recession, it's often harder for senior
people to find a job. Especially for managers (how many companies are looking
for senior technical managers in your area?). _Not_ advancing might be a valid
preparation strategy.

No specialization - Again, there's something to be said for specializing in
_core_ IT areas which aren't booming. For instance storage technologies,
networking, distributed systems, databases and data engineering. Heck, even
being a top expert on something like JVM garbage collection. These areas are
more mature and have a lower risk of oversaturation. Yet both big and small
companies always need people with _expertise_ in these fields.

~~~
chillacy
Re: career advancement, there’s definitely a sweet spot, “senior” (google L5)
makes 3x starting, beyond that it’s diminishing returns and gets further from
code. As long as I write code I can phrase my resume to get a programming job.

Re: specialization, seems risky to me, either way full stack suits my
interests.

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javierluraschi
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.

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spo81rty
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.

~~~
GoldenMonkey
Guess what, over 70% of software project fail. The cycle of 'saving money' via
outsourcing and offshoring never ends. "This time is different" continues.

