Thursday, January 7, 2010

The road ahead.

The article, The Best and Worst Jobs, puts actuaries as the best job on a number of categories, followed by software engineers and computer systems analysts.

Interestingly, one thing they all have in common is that they empower others to do their jobs "better" or "efficiently". Put in simple terms, the end result of their effort does not result in any physical goods/labor, etc. Yet, the number of software professionals is growing every year.


One interesting analogy may be made to the machine operators in the 40s. They were necessary to operate the complex machines that resulted in the mass-production. However, they were eventually replaced with the advent of automation. The same pattern, though yet in its infancy, can be observed in terms of automated IDE's, code helpers, etc.

Further, while leaders like of the business such as Google, Microsoft, tend to constantly innovate, will the market for software code allow for multiple mediocres providers to survive. In fact, we already see that 1 in 10 software startups eventually fail. Now, one may speculate that while radios have since been absorbed into cell phones, and hence there is and will be a constant need to VLSI engineers, one should also note that even in that domain - most of the processes have become automated.

Ultimately, major progress in a field occurs while trying to solve problems imposed due to real world limitations. Computer science relies on other fields of science to provide it with problems which it tries to model in some fashion. This is also partly true of mathematics. Therefore, there will always be a need for great mathematicians.
However, how many mediocre mathematicians can be found except in educational institutions :) When we factor in the fact that usually, only those who are interested in mathematics tend to become mathematicians, and that number is considerably lower - one might begin to see an uncomfortable truth.

The average software engineer of the future whose predecessors wrote mediocre code for automating a mundane process will find himself out of a job in a market filled with many competitors and shrinking opportunities. We will probably see this trend over the next two decades.