Prediction: every company will soon have a developer

At the time of writing, the market for software engineering roles looks pretty poor in some areas. There’s good talent out there, but a lot of the big players seem to be hiring much more selectively. It doesn’t feel like the days of those big recruitment drives.

There have certainly been layoffs as companies shift investment towards AI. My reading of it is that big companies are starting to question whether they need thousands of software engineers to get the output they want.

But I think this is a phase. As AI becomes more prevalent, I think more and more companies will take on engineering talent. It’ll just look quite different from the way they’ve done it before.

Smaller businesses will want help keeping up

Everything’s going so fast. As modern technology and automation become more accessible, businesses will need people who can help them keep up.

In some areas, your competition is going to start eating you up unless you’re staying ahead of the game. Not all industries, not all things, of course. But it’s certainly going to help to stay up to date with this stuff.

As that becomes more of a requirement, I think businesses will realise that hiring someone full-time is probably overkill for what they need. Hiring an agency with a team of people may not be needed either.

That’s what I mean by every company having a developer. It could be someone part-time or freelance. Someone they can turn to when they’ve got something they want to build or automate, without it being such a big engagement.

Doing more with less

I think automation and AI-powered software engineering explain some of what’s happening in those bigger teams. You don’t necessarily need as many developers to get the same output.

That’s a slightly restricted mindset, because you could say, well, if we keep the same engineers, we can massively multiply our output. That would be a good thing.

True, but there needs to be an economic return. Being able to build more doesn’t automatically mean there’s a return on everything you could build. At the moment, doing more with less is an attractive option.

In some cases, I think we’re talking about the possibility of moving ten times faster with a tenth of the resource. That’s how dramatic this stuff can be. It isn’t a formula for every project, but I think that scale of change is why it’s making waves.

So there’s talent coming onto the market, and I think there’s going to be more demand from smaller businesses that want help keeping up. That’s where I think some of this talent will end up going.

Apps on demand

I think the future is going to involve a lot more apps on demand.

Over the weekend, you’re thinking about your business. You might be the operations director, the owner or the MD, and you think, okay, we could really do with this booking system. Or actually, maybe it’s just a booking form.

You take that idea to your developer, who might work with you part-time or freelance. By the end of the week, you’ve got the working app. For something small enough, perhaps by the end of the day.

As you think up things you need, or things your customers need, they can be done in record time. It becomes much easier to act on those ideas.

There’ll be plenty of people who crack on with this stuff on their own. If you’re technically minded, it’s already quite accessible, and I think it’ll become even more accessible to develop your own complicated things.

But I think that will still represent a small percentage of the market. Realistically, a lot of people are going to need help.

The engineer’s role will be much more human

The difficulty is that software engineers have a stereotype, and that stereotype usually lacks a few interpersonal skills.

Just being a techie, churning out code, living and breathing that stereotype and getting away with it, I think that’s largely gone. People who only want to do that are going to struggle.

I’ve written about how AI is changing my own role as a software engineer. I think the engineer businesses will want to work with is going to be more of a mix of product management, business analysis and project management, with a technical foundation.

They’ll be doing the human parts of this. Speaking to stakeholders, gathering requirements, managing milestones, handling QA and keeping all the moving parts together. They’ll be the orchestrator.

My prediction is that eventually no one will be doing the low-level coding themselves. The idea of someone who just does the code is dying out very quickly, I think. The work will be much more about understanding what’s needed and making sure it gets delivered properly.

I may be wrong about all of this, of course.