With this revival of software engineering maybe it is time to think about what software engineering looks like in about a decade or so. Just extrapolating what we are already doing is not enough. For a start, I simply assume that all infrastructure, application package, and bespoke software engineering converge into one single profession. Make, buy, re-use, free-use, and generate will melt into one pot of components. On top of that, business and technology knowledge will merge as well. So the average experienced solution architect (?) will become an octopus with tentacles in all areas. Only juniors will have the privilege to specialize on their way to the top of their careers.

 

Gee, if this is already today's business, what is beyond all this? Well, first imagine with Moore's law in our hands, the processing power in 2020 will be about 30 times of today. For example, with this power, a CPU in your game-station (of course, virtual) has a design of lets say a 32-core running on 20 Ghz. Wow, that's enough to have virtual actors looking very very real (will real actors still exist?), enough to connect you to the game with visuals, sound, and other nerve teasing channels you can not distinguish from the real world, and also enough to finally move to the nextchapter of IT, i.e., Artificial Intelligence. Competing with human intelligence will probably take another decade (not very much more) but the power coming from a neural net with the intelligence of already a significant chunk of a human hemisphere, will change the way we can handle our overload of information to survive, in business and personally.

So on top of the above mentioned convergence I predict that a lot of applications will become hybrids: a triad of a traditional (data accumulating and processing) component, a knowledge-rule processing component and a neural net, all three exchanging information with each other, and do what the other two cannot do.

Well, now back to the revival of software engineering. Does all of this help us? Yes! Of course! The growth and accompanying competition in software engineering will help accelerate all these developments in our profession. So I am glad for the world. And am I glad for us, IT-professionals? Well, I guess we have to do our best a bit more. When the 15-year old son of a good friend of mine comes to me today asking me to help him out with his first Apple-App, it's still OK I guess. But if I do not move on and incorporate all above mentioned concepts into my profession to maintain my edge on this new breed of software engineers in about a year or two, I would have to ask him for help. Help!!!