The Golden era of software engineering is gone

1. You are building a software that otherwise could be built by a 12 year old kid, if given proper training. 2. You cannot code if I cut off google, stackoverflow & related websites. 3. You are just concerned about producing the output quickly because a. your work is time bound, b. you want to stand out from others. 4. You attend countless meetings that carry no value, thanks to Agile. 5. 10 people write code for the same software which otherwise could have been written by 1 person. 6. You write pages of documents just because you are expected to write for the team, compliance & stuff. 7. You don’t care about non-functional requirements as nobody asked for it. 8. You are spending hours together in coding a simple thing & you are branded a hard-worker. 9. Or you don’t spend much time in coding because you impress people with tech jargons that you learnt recently. You are branded a smart-worker. 10. The code you write will be completely rewritten in next 3-4 years just to catch up with the industry trends. 11. Your only goal is to earn loads of money which otherwise could not be earned in other engineering fields. That’s one of the reasons why you are on grapevine. Prove me wrong if you can, by commenting your opinion.

It’s clear that companies won’t need engineers 10 years from now. They’ll just need people who know what to make. Who to sell to. How to sell to. At what price. This will be the great commoditization of Software development Take it or leave it.

It's very important that engineers should learn & get practical exposure of different multi faced roles( UI, backend,SRE,devops,QA,security etc)to be ready for future jobs. No course can teach you that it's only you who have put efforts else you will be kicked out of the future job market.. Currently we are in the era if solving problems no one has ever solved or met. . Be a part of a team where everyone wants to include you to solve unknown problems.

Marc Andreessen famously declared, "Software is eating the World," and the truth in that statement has only grown with time. But here's the kicker: software itself is now under threat, because "Data is eating Software." The evolution of technology has reached a fascinating moment. Back in the day, individuals and organizations ran their own servers. Essentially, it was highly centralized and resource-intensive. Then came the era of Cloud Computing, which transformed computing into a utility, much like electricity. Cloud computing became widely accessible through AWS, Azure, and GCP and quickly commoditized server infrastructure. This shift enabled unparalleled scalability and flexibility, essentially democratizing access to computing power. Now, a similar transformation is underway in AI, particularly with the foundational models developed by tech companies like Meta, OpenAI, Google, and others. Here's where the ambitious vision for the future unfolds. Just as Cloud Computing commoditized servers, data is poised to commoditize foundational AI models. These models are remarkably powerful, but they will too hit an upper limit on how great they can be. As Data accumulates at an exponential rate, it's becoming clear that Data, not these foundational models, will be the only sustainable moat in any AI application. The true moat isn't the model itself; it's the data that refines and trains the model. Data will be the key to unlocking the full potential of AI, enabling personalized experiences, hyper-accurate predictions, and previously unimaginable insights. So, while Marc Andreessen's proclamation about software remains timeless, the torch is passing to "Data is eating Software."

Humans mind are not trained to understand exponential nature of any trend.... Currently people are mocking AI because current models are not that good. However people are unable to see the double exponential trend with which AI is improving without any slowing down of scaling laws...Ray Kurzweil was indeed right! Hence it would be more prudent to plan a career path not by keeping capabilities of current models of AI in mind but by understanding how capable AI models would become in 2-3 years.

Prediction below, open to feedback and criticism: As soon as GPT can learn programming languages through self reinforcement learning, it will become invincible and you will be able to create webapps at negligible cost by just giving it objectives. Coding as a career is likely downhill from here on. Right now, we are in the DeepBlue version of GPT. It has learned from all the code available online just like DeepBlue had all human chess moves till then as its training data. But AlphaZero learned on its own from ground up, and similarly led to AlphaGo later on. Future GPT will learn all programming languages on its own from ground up, and deliver fully functional apps at neglible cost.

Off late, the frontend engineering at Razorpay has become more of a data entry job. The design system (god knows how many years it will take to be completely ready) is restricting both the devs and the designers a LOT. Designers are literally fed up with being dictated to design things only in a particular way (limiting even animations, font-size, choice of italics v/s bold). There was even a long 2 month discussion to get font size for a component to support higher value, if you honestly want to know. The so called core team has been developing blade since God knows when. Agree that they've done a great work with tokens and other stuff, but it seems that by the time it's ready, it'll already be outdated design wise (suxs). So, any other devs, all they have to do is follows. 1. Open Figma 2. See if the component in Figma is supported by Blade. 3. If yes, then see if our designer has by mistake used any font-size, color, margin or spacing not supported by Blade. 4. If yes, start a thread between everyone and give them a month to come to a resolution (Blade team always retaliates like it's a personal attack) 5. Eventually end up using your own component to save time and move fast. 6. Explain to your manager's manager's manager why you can't use Blade. (they've funded it for 2 years and no dev likes it, so they push it from top) If your company has some interesting approach to this, please add in the comments.

I have been getting a feeling that software engineers (SEs) have a sense of entitlement, believing they deserve a salary of 50-60 LPA with 2-3 years of experience and a 30-40% raise every year. As an SE myself, I believe this sense of entitlement leads to unrealistic expectations in the workplace and hampers actual output. Past nine months have been brutal, with mass layoffs and minimal or no increments. Due to this I have noticed people putting minimal effort into their work. I understand that getting no appraisal can be demotivating(trust me I do) but considering what we are paid for what we do is just insane(I am comparing with other industries). With funding becoming scarce, many companies are no longer burning through cash. Most Indian companies will prioritize profitability to secure further funding rounds or pursue an IPO. Since engineering teams account for a significant portion of expenditures, everyone will be looking to cut costs by any means necessary. What are your thoughts on this situation? Do you still give your 100% even if you didn't receive a raise but are being well compensated?"