Moore’s Law could be bad for your tech job and good for tech startups.
By: Dubem Kizito
Tags: Work, Design, Software Development, The Future of Work, Technology

Moore’s Law could be bad for your tech job and good for tech startups. Dubem Kizito Follow Jun 30 · 4 min read

What you should do to get ready

Isaac Smith Photo Credit

One common question people ask about technology is concerning it’s effect on Jobs. There are many views out there, but I believe it is a major contributor to unemployment and will cause even more unemployment in the future. I am often disappointed when I hear top tech experts and business owners saying that tech will bring in new jobs while neglecting the fact that it will take away far more than it will bring in. Well, what ever it maybe, I think the best advice I can give to answer that question is to prepare yourself, learn high demand skills, update yourself regularly, stay sharp and stay awake.

Let me introduce us to Moore’s law via the Wikipedia Definition:

Now to expand on the above definition, take note of following: “doubles about every 2 years”, “an observation and projection of historical trend”, “gains from experience”. Simply what this means is that things transistor are able to grow smaller every 2 years while keeping the ability and even reducing in cost. This is why your mobile phone got cheaper over time, why your memory card leaped from 8MB to 518GB within a short while, why sim cards grew smaller.

Basically, technology is subject to Moore’s law, which means that things get better, cheaper, faster exponentially over time. Since the advent of modern technology we have seen as things became easier and easier at an alarming rate, the whole world millions of years old is witnessing drastic change in barely a century.

Now how does this affect your tech job?

So these days tech jobs are on high demands and are one of the most lucrative places to be, and while a lot of people are getting comfortable, the technology is getting ready to disrupt even those who implement it. I was talking with a friend and we debated about how software development jobs will still remain relevant for a long while. I agreed with him to an extend, but after showing him some new technologies that were emerging to do his job designation better for almost free, he saw a bit of what I was seeing. We discussed further on how those emerging technologies are not standard enough to be used in the enterprise level. True, but it will become very attractive to tech startups that while mean things like; If I needed 3 developers, now 1 will suffice because there are tools to make the work easier. This is great for the tech startup because it means less cost. Also the productization of many tech skills has been going on for a while now, converting them from human craft into software packages that can do sometimes even a better job. There was a time, people coded email templates, but these days there a lot of drag and drop sites that do a fine job with all the cross browser compatibility gizmos at no price.

It might seem as if it is all good for technology companies, but the Moore’s law means something big for companies in business, which is low barriers to entry for competitors. As technology get easier, cheaper and faster, this means it will be header for anyone single company to have a technological advantage over the other. Everyone will be able to play the game easily and something else would be needed for a competitive edge.

I think the above points are enough. Now the point of this post is not to create panic, but to create an awareness that will cause you to stay alert, ready and always learning so you are not caught unawares by this gradual process. Some of the things I suggest include:

Always upgrade your skills, learn something of greater value at every opportunity you get and make sure you are growing career-wise. Don’t be too comfortable. Instead of hating on this tools that will inevitably do your job, become familiar with them and ease into a new professional stance as an expert of such tools. Moreover they are beneficial to making your work faster Soft skills are a good mine in helping you get ahead in your career and as technology advances learn to be more human in your engineering and design, it’s a concept that is becoming more valuable by the day. Basically technology and businesses are still trying to understand humans, you will profit from knowing one or two things. Embrace the change and as thing get easier, seek things that are more challenging because it can get really boring and mundane when work you used to do for hours now take just a click of a button after filling a form.

I hope this post opened your mind to what moore’s law is and how you can harness it for yourself.

Thanks for reading…