Remember when we used to spend all our days writing Forms and Tables for CRUD APIs? Boy, what a waste that was. Thank God that is auto-generated and we’re able to give our time doing “x” which is “clearly more important”.
John Ntevh, Software Engineer, 2030
Web development, and Front-End, in particular, has been having an identity crisis for at least 10 years. Frameworks as well as patterns come and go, and while most of us are still trying to catch up, the tide seems to constantly rise.
I’m not going to compare tech stacks in this article or try to guess which framework is going to survive simply because I believe that no framework is going to and I’ll explain why. #let_the_man_cook
Speculating
I feel that Layoffs will not stop for quite some time. Eventually, the need for web developers as we know them today will slowly decline up to 80-90% of what’s in currently demand until 2030. Here’s my reasoning behind this:
My biggest assumption is that, at least from my experience, the vast majority of us web developers are requested to create CRUD APIs that read/write to databases and Forms/Tables for submitting/reading data from those sources. And, to be frank, I don’t think these things are that much complex anymore.
These are issues thousands of developers are solving in parallel as we speak, with little to no deviation in terms of requirements. Yes, the schema of the data changes and yes, the interactions in a Front End app might change, but the essence of reading and writing data has been mostly the same since the 90s.
Now considering how technology usually evolves in society, those kinds of repetitive tasks are quite certainly the ones that tend to get automated as time progresses. It’s simply a matter of time before we solve ~90% of the CRUD issue with a simple UI for ~80% of what any business needs. As you’re not required to be an engineer to drive a car, you will not be required to be a programmer to create simple CRUD apps with a pleasant-to-use UI.
The numbers in the example are indicative.
To a certain degree, this of course has to do with AI. It seems that this is the piece of technology that’s going to change how we interact with each other in the upcoming years. I’m not saying that AI will come for our jobs. I’m saying that whether AI does come or not, I think it’s highly unlikely that your typical web development requirements will stay in the above form - Forms, Tables, Databases and CRUD APIs.
Hope for the future
I’m not advising anyone to change their field of study or abandon web development as a career path. I think that would be absurd. To back this up, I’m also doing web development bootcamps for people who have no idea what web development is and want to pick it up as a career, for free.
What I’m advising though is to build upon strong foundations and constantly challenge yourselves from both technical and communication standpoints. “Be ready to jump on the next train”, as one of my Software Directors once said. “The train will come, make sure to be well-equipped to jump on as fast as possible”.
I don’t know exactly what web development will be in about 7-10 years, but I’m sure it will be around in one form or another.
When in doubt, return to the basics.
George Spanos,