Automation will not impact software engineering roles — right?
By: Stelios Moschos
Tags: Future, Ci Cd Pipeline, Devopsintelco, Automation, Software

“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!

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

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)