Product Engineers > Software Engineers

I think this probably based on Dave's definition just about qualifies as a lightning talk.

So it's quite high level. And as I was writing it, product engineers greater than software

engineers, I know it's quite a big statement. But when I was writing it, it sort of reminded

me of the passion that I felt for what software engineers have to go through on a daily basis.

So with that, I took the opportunity to rename it slightly. Software engineers are sort of

on their way to product engineers already. And it's down to a sort of never ending evolution.

My name is Ellis. I'm currently the CTO and co-founder at Novalap. Beforehand, I was the

lead technical architect at The Economist. My background is in all things AWS, Golang,

Node, and a bit of React and TypeScript as well. I was previously AWS solutions architect

and developer. However, that's expired. And apparently they don't care that much about

in interviews about it anyway. So I never got it renewed.

So one question that I have been trying to answer over the last, at least the last year,

is how fast the industry is actually moving. And one of the reasons I started asking myself

this is because throughout the years of my professional career, people have always asked

me, "What do you do?" And I'm sure some of you guys have had the same question, "What

do you do?" And said, "Oh, I work in software." And the response more often than not is the

same. The industry moves very quickly, doesn't it? And to sort of preserve their opinion

and understand, I say it moves very quickly.

It's taken me about 15 years to get a base understanding, professional understanding

of JavaScript, Golang, and AWS. From a macro point of view, one of the things I've been

trying to understand is where the market in terms of software engineering is actually

heading. For the last 25 years or so, it's grown and grown and grown. In fact, 2023 was

the first year that it didn't actually grow as a labor market. It looks like there's a

bit of a bounce back this year, but that is about half of what we've seen in previous

years.

So the aim for this session, really, over the next 15 minutes, is to try to make some

sense of what we've seen over the last 30 years and whether that's changed in the last

24 months. And there's specific reasons for that. We won't go into the underlying data

and research that I've done for it now, but if anybody's interested after, I've got quite

a bit.

So, hands up, any web developers, software engineers in? Most. Not unexpected. Project

managers? Very good. Product owners? Any recruiters? That's good.

I hope not.

Everybody who's happy in their job and doesn't want to leave? Okay, good. People who are

not so happy in their job and looking for something new, officially? Okay. Okay. And

people who, if you've come with colleagues from your current job, don't put your hand

up. But people who are secretly looking for a new job? Very good. It's a shame there's

no recruiters.

So before we can go forward and try and assess what's going to happen over the next five

to ten years in the market, it's worth looking briefly at history. And the history doesn't

always reflect what's going to happen next, but it can give us a bit of an idea.

And the way we're going to do that is with a bit of a timeline. So on the top half, we

can see the engineering skill change as different inventions and innovation arrived in the world.

And what it took for a software engineer to overcome that innovation. So you can see,

World Wide Web, obviously, software engineers had to start to get to grips with HTML, whatever

beast that was at the time. We've got things like Netscape, Java. So a lot of engineers

had to specialize in actually learning Java and backend engineering became more important.

On the bottom half, we've got incoming roles. And by that, I mean incoming flavors of roles.

Roles that have been transformed by certain innovations and roles that fell out of favor

as a result. And this is just three of maybe 100 in a decade. And that's true for the 2000s

as well. So 2001, the Agile Manifesto was released. All of a sudden, software engineers

had to go from working in long waterfall style of engineering to much shorter rounds of trips.

They had to sort of go back and forward between customer, go back to UAT engineering. The

process became much quicker. In 2006, Amazon released AWS. And there's a number of concepts

that weren't previously available to software engineers that were classically in the sort

of network engineering domain or the sysadmin domain, things like scalability, load balancing

and distributed systems. But through the power of infrastructure as code, software engineers

were exposed to that. In 2007, Apple released their first iPhone and some engineers diversified

into native engineering, whether that was Objective C, Swift. And for those who didn't,

they had to learn this thing called responsive design. Early 2010s, Microsoft released Azure

and the cloud computing boom sort of ignited. All of a sudden, there was a whole host of

different services that software engineers had to get to grips with, even just in the

AWS domain. Things like the concepts of microservices, Terraform, CloudFormation and Lambda, all

different ways of applying the same sort of code but different techniques. The containerization

revolution, the release of Docker and Kubernetes, different ways for deployment. In around 2016,

talking about machine learning was very popular. Data scientists and machine learning engineers

became very popular. Have we got any of them? No, okay. Trying to gauge where they all sort

of went. And in around 2018, although it didn't have a big impact on the skills of traditional

software engineers, we sort of started to see the rise of no code and no code engineers.

So it didn't impact us on a skill set basis. However, it did have some underlying effects

in the industry. So what do we know? Software industries evolved with increased accessibility

due to the abstraction of technology. Sounds reasonable. Secondly, every innovation expanded

the pool of who could work in tech. For example, mobile developers in the 2000s to what we

now know as no code creators. Let's call them creators, not engineers. But no code creators.

And merging and consolidating of roles. Thirdly, where accessibility to developing technology

increased coexisting roles were consolidated and merged. And finally, the shape of industry

and in demand roles have been in continuous change. And it's more than likely that they

will be over the next 10 years. So slight segue, but recently, Sam Altman, the chief

executive officer at OpenAI, talked about five different steps to AGI. Conversational,

reasoners, autonomous, innovators and organisation. We won't go through all of them. Is everyone

familiar with what they actually are? What is AGI? That's artificial general intelligence.

So we're only going to cover the first three because that's all I think we can get anywhere

near to trying to predict. We're at step one. So I think who on a daily basis uses things

like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, GPT? Some. It's OK. It's fine. So quite a few of us have felt

it. And in terms of how AI, the step one of AI has actually changed our job already. Next

year, maybe we won't see step two, but we might see a sort of step one point five. And

at that point. We see it sort of see an enhancement of what we've seen over the last three years.

And then based on Sam Altman's predictions of thousands of days by twenty twenty eight,

we might see a sort of step two. And that's where AI properly assists in how we design

our applications. And maybe or maybe not is quite I'd say it's quite far out at the moment.

We might see a step three and then software engineers sort of migrate into a position

where they actually become sort of more system architects and they're working with AI agents

to augment different applications. But they're not actually writing the code for the applications

themselves. They're actually augmenting the AI to go and do that. Picture the provisioning

of a relational database, for example. At the moment, you set up you go through all

of the schema, you go through the different access patterns in some some platforms already

claim to be able to do this sort of thing where they can automate the provisioning of

it. But by sort of step three onwards, you would be working directly with another sort

of entity to do that for you. And it all leads us here. We all know about what abstraction

actually means from a software point of view. But I suppose there's this concept of hyper

abstraction when you roll together things like no code and AI platforms, they reshape

software, they look like they're going to reshape software development again and again,

even in the next five years. The barrier between idea and implementation is disappearing slowly.

So what could change? A single engineer may be responsible for more things, things like

product and stakeholder management, design and other roles may begin to emerge as part

of the engineering role. And why should we care? Well, longevity. Engineering becomes

about a combination of different things. Code, yes. System architecture and design, more

of that. Soft skills, things like just communication and leadership. Engineering becomes more holistic

as a role. So the main takeaway is the industry over the last 24 months, I believe, is now

on rocket boosters, whether it's no code, AI or something else, the engineering landscape

is changing rapidly. So how does the conversion take place? Because AI and no code tools may

begin to automate routine coding, developers will be able to do their thing more quickly,

possibly freeing them up to take on other roles. Where is it happening? Well, the shift

is happening, I would say in startups and SMEs now. Large companies of maybe a thousand

or more who can naturally react less quickly, it might take a little bit longer. When it's

happening is now. It starts to happen over the last 24 months, maybe three years. But

it's not going to slow down. If anything, it will speed up. There'll be lower barriers

to innovation, AI and no code tools, democratized software creation, enabling faster iterations

and reducing reliance on specialized engineering teams. So how can we prepare for the future?

Regularly engage with emerging technologies like AI and no code platforms. Explore how

they complement your skills to remain indispensable in a shift in landscape. And develop soft

skills alongside technical skills. Develop complementary skills such as communication,

leadership and user focused problem solving to seamlessly move into hybrid roles. Align

skills with market direction and prioritize strategic learning. Identify where the industry

is heading, whether in AI integration, product ownership or advanced system design and invest

in mastering those areas. Be adaptable. View change as an opportunity because there's

going to be a lot of change over the next five to 10 years. And maybe most importantly

of all, remain open to evolution. Software engineering is evolving, but the demand for

creative and adaptive problem solvers has not gone away. Stay curious and be willing

to sway with the industry. The industry is moving at light speed. But by understanding

its trajectory, we cannot only keep up, but as software engineers, we can lead the way.

The future of engineering belongs to those who prepare for it today. So take proactive

steps toward professional development in technical and software and soft skills. For anyone who's

interested in hearing more about product engineering, there's now a product engineering manifesto.

So if you are interested, scan this QR code. You can start a repository and have a read

list on a PDF. So, yeah, that's it.