Automation will not impact software engineering roles — right?
Critical thinking software professionals should adapt like chameleons!
I am a member of the greekdigitalcommunity.com, a greek speaking digital community, where software engineering, agile and designing professionals discuss everything about their ongoing work and share their thoughts about future concerns.
A member asked the following question (translated from Greek):
Question
Good afternoon! I have a question and I would like us to discuss with you about it. Have you ever wondered how far is our software engineering profession going to go? I would like to find out whether you see it in an optimistic way, since day by day more and more automated tools are created. Have you wondered an alternative career in case something goes wrong (and we get replaced by the tools)?
Responses
“Automation is not the problem “
“Age is my personal concern”
“The professions is not that old to know what to expect but the more years you spend the more mature/senior you become “
“but who is going to write those automated tools?”
“Wordpress and Wix were created but web app developers still exist”
“It’s also bugging me, as the limits for enduring hyperfocus differ between the age of 20 and 50. I won’t be able to withstand and be patient like I am at the moment at my 20s.”
“Moving to teaching, leading, consulting, managing, founding positions as we grow is the alternative solution to constant coding.”
“No automation can replace the creativity/imagination and evolution that come with ideas and tools generated by a software engineer. Alegently, there is a shortage in softare engineering roles that reaches the 40% mark in Europe only.”
“The sector could be evolved into something different.”
“Regarding the age limitations, it’s always up to someone’s personality.”
“Soft skills like adapting and learning quickly, communication skills, planing/organisation are on demand from other sectors and we could also assist there.”
“I have personally observed the step by step disappearance of Physical Network Function engineers as they get replaced by software engineers developing Virtual Network Functions.”
“Sofware engineers might have the flexibility, critical thinking and will to change into something that will allow them to stay in a competitive level for the market.”
“We have withstood automations in the profession e.g. languages automating the internal resource management.”
“The sector will indeed evolve or transform into something different. Programmers and software engineering roles will always be relevant. Additionally, programmers will be moving into more subject matter expert roles. On another good note, we can think about very old languages such as Fortran that pay very good salaries even nowadays. What we can do as we are getting older? Keep learning and keep adapting. That is how we (older programmers) will not become reduntant ”
“and this is what I call a great pass for Low code platforms https://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/low-code-development-platforms/, which also require human coding and human intervention. Even if we ever reach the point where everything becomes automated, we will always be in the position to jump to another sector to reuse our knowledge and expertise. This is also getting us back to always adapting to the existing situation i.e. flexibility”
“always staying in alert mode and up-to-date is a major requirement in our jobs. We have also been alerted during COVID although, our profession was possibly the least impacted, since most of the software engineering positions remained intact. The question is how many years more we will keep learning and spending free time on this. As we grow older, we move chapters, especially when we start creating families, where the focus is then the family”.
“Age is relevant. Ex-colleague of mine, aged 60+, where a lot hungrier than other younger colleagues and he was always up to date with the latest trends and technologies”
“AI will take some of the pie in 15 years, but this is not only relevant to programming jobs.”
My personal opinion on this question
Various people have mentioned that although automation will be providing a good grip to develop software, the other concern is whether they will be able to do this job forever, since a major element of software engineering is patience to investigate, search, explore, learn, teach and keep progressing. Day-to-day activities will never be standardised and documented 100%. They will always involve iterative processes.
However, coming up with certain workflows is something a more senior software engineer can end up with and they can be based on past experiences. Maturity in these professions means seniority and vice versa. The more exposure the quicker a solution can be found and integrated into a software development project.
Additionally, there will be always a new platform or tool that will save common issues and struggles. Kubernetes and Docker came into our world and improved massively the operation of an environment. Software applications can scale/self-heal/ operate and serve the software end-user with a few simple commands. CI/CD came into our world to automate many human-based processes. That gave the software engineer the ability to focus on something else that needs human attention e.g. how the new user flows will look like, how to reduce costs, how to re-organize teams and become more efficient as a team, what will be the future strategy of the organisation. The latter examples can be considered as meta-problems and at this very moment they require discussions between a team of experts who can provide their critical thinking and fact-based answers. Potentially a software could help to inform these discussions but not entirely answer the questions.
Also, if these people have the ability to discuss and solve some complex problems, they will certainly be able to think about their future career steps. In the end of the day, it’s another complex problem that involves their personal life and their families! Saying that, a more mature software professional will also have to adapt to the new requirements (e.g. family, mortgages, children costs, flexibility during family commitments) as well as keeping themselves entertained with something that can keep them busy, happy and not impacted by a “boring routine”.
In conclusion, we, the software professionals, will keep adapting to the new life requirements and our employers will also need to adapt and provide flexibilities that can retain the experienced or less experienced employee, who cannot be lost from the team force! As humans, we will be learning and adapting like a chameleon because we will be looking for day-day improvements at work and also in life. One advice I would advise against is staying stale without the thirst for making these very much needed small changes that will result in the right work-life balance, as well as the need for “staying in the industry for longer”.
Be the chameleon!
Find me…
At greekdigitalcommunity.com;
At Reply.com. I’m a Senior Consultant at Net Reply UK. I like writing about various automation topics, from technical to more abstract. My team in Net UK consists of consultants, software developers, technology enthusiasts specialising in Telecommunications and technological concepts such as Software Defined Networks (SDN), Network Function Virtualisation (NFV), DevOps. Our mission is to build the Next Generation Networks leveraging the art of software and latest technological trends. If you would like more information, feel free to reach out to me LinkedIn (stelios-moschos) | Twitter (smosgr) | hiretheauthor.com/steliosmoschos | smos.gr. Alternatively you can learn more about us on LinkedIn (Net UK) and Twitter (Net UK)
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