The future for Software Engineers by 2040

How the latest trends will impact software engineering by 2040 and how developers can thrive.

Azure Community Conference happened online this week (October 2021). With over 200+ talks across ten tracks, speakers from around the world, this is one of the largest technology conferences organized by Microsoft community enthusiasts. I was invited to deliver a talk on the future trends that are under way in the software industry.

Titled “The future for Software Developers by 2040” I presented on four topics:

1. First, the current job market, immediate changes expected post pandemic and long-term trends.
2. Second, the changes that have in the last eighteen months around the practice “Work from Home”, which has led to a boom for hiring of remote talent.
3. Third, the technology trends that are underway with Automation, Low-Code & No-Code platforms, Open AI Codex platform that promises to generate codes and code-patterns improving developer productivity, and a demo of GitHub CoPilot. Changes and huge strides are happening on the way software is being tested and deployed, we can see this with Functionize, Code Defect from Microsoft, URL2Video from Google, CodeBert from Microsoft Research and so on. In the future, I see majority of software testing and deployment will be above the capabilities of humans and will be handled entirely by computers. The impact of Quantum computing will be complimentary, bringing huge benefits to cryptography and related fields.
4. Fourth, how software developers and software engineers can stay relevant for the next two decades. I propose CO.L.A. which is about continuous learning (and unlearning) and seeing technology to compliment human faculties and not as a threat to their jobs.

“let machines be machines, and let humans be human”

The future for Software Engineers by 2040 (Slides are here)

References:

• Microsoft Research blog on “Creating the future of Software Development”
• The AI Effect: Working at the Intersection of AI and SE: IEEE Software July-Aug 2020
• Thanks to many other publications & articles that I read and referenced for the talk.

Originally published at https://venkatarangan.com on October 29, 2021.