Software development as a growing profession - Future

Software development is a growing profession. In three blogposts we’ll be looking at the past, present and future of software development. This post I’ll be looking at the foreseeable future of our profession. 

As a software developer I receive quite a few job offers, even internationally. It’s been rumored that our profession is quite popular. So let’s put our popularity in numbers. 

Sadly, I could only find some statistics on the US hint at the popularity of our profession. For the US it’s been estimated that by 2021 there will be a shortage of 1.4 million software developers. This is besides the estimated 7 million developers already to be employed in the US. So 1 in 6 software development positions remain unfulfilled. This doesn’t even seem to take a decline of developers into account, e.g. because of  or just changing their profession. 

Because of a lack of data I’ll presume that software developers are globally equally desired as in the US. To fulfill such demand, our profession might need to grow double the current amount (40% instead of the 20% it already grows). This would require action on a global scale. And let’s not forget that a larger supply might well grow demand. 

But just suppose that our field would need to grow 40% each year. That would mean we’d duplicate the amount of developers every two years. I highly doubt that would be sustainable in a practical sense, unless we'd degrade our craft to a set of Udemy courses. 

Looking at the future, this was only the major problem of the supply and demand of our skills. But have you heard that joke on the micro service reaching its final release version? In the little time that I've spend in software development, I’ve been astounded that the lifetime of software is mostly not taken into account or understood. As a financial advisor I had to take the next 30 years of my clients into account...

Shiny GUI of the future

As developers, we know that software needs upkeep, updates and be replaced when it’s out of date. Even now there are countless companies and institutions struggling with their old legacy (Cobol) programs. All the legacy tech alone should be taken into account, because it will probably effect the directions that our profession would need to grow to serve both society and companies.

Still..

Whatever the future may be... 

Software is a young profession and this is only the beginning.

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