Building software has gotten easier and easier over time, and there's been other step changes in the past. If you understand this history, you can understand what the future might be like.
Before Stackoverflow, software research was rather difficult. You had books that acted like tomes of reference materials. You had maybe some tribal knowledge internally on how to do something. But even in the early 2000s something like MSDN was something you might search on a CD ROM! So the time to get a "basic Windows app" up and running was probably twice as long as it would be today. I'd say there's a similar thing with Github, languages with pkg management, with libraries that do every little thing, whereas when I got started in software even the C std lib might be sketchy and even then its very limited.
When Stackoverflow came out, there was a kind of similar panic that we forget about. Every problem would be solved on stackoverflow, and you just copy-paste everything from stackoverflow. It'll get way too easy to launch an app. Yet the reality is there's even more developers, with higher salaries than everywhere, with software in even more niches in our lives.
The current "panic" about software engineering going away is also happening at the same time as layoffs, so its hard to know how that colors things.
Before Stackoverflow, software research was rather difficult. You had books that acted like tomes of reference materials. You had maybe some tribal knowledge internally on how to do something. But even in the early 2000s something like MSDN was something you might search on a CD ROM! So the time to get a "basic Windows app" up and running was probably twice as long as it would be today. I'd say there's a similar thing with Github, languages with pkg management, with libraries that do every little thing, whereas when I got started in software even the C std lib might be sketchy and even then its very limited.
When Stackoverflow came out, there was a kind of similar panic that we forget about. Every problem would be solved on stackoverflow, and you just copy-paste everything from stackoverflow. It'll get way too easy to launch an app. Yet the reality is there's even more developers, with higher salaries than everywhere, with software in even more niches in our lives.
The current "panic" about software engineering going away is also happening at the same time as layoffs, so its hard to know how that colors things.