Guessing on the coffee grounds, or what will be the IT in 5 years?

Long-term forecasts are not working now.

When I wrote my first program on the MK-61 in 1992, Assembler struggled with machine codes. No database and web. When I received my first IT salary in 1999, I did not expect the average salary to increase 10+ times. In the first place of work there was not even the notion of a bugtracker and repository, and now it is the norm of life.

When I studied as a software engineer, I did not expect to become a manager and get carried away with the project "Psychology in IT". Perhaps you even read in Habré articles from this project about working with Group Resistances (attracting attention, the struggle for power, revenge, helplessness) or the sequence of Denial-Anger-Torg-Depression-Acceptance .
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Long-term forecasts do not work, but fortune telling about the short-term changes is possible. Colleagues, let's think about how the life of an IT person will change in the next few years. Under the cut my ideas in theses.

Technology and training

In one line of code will include more and more machine operations. Example: an online store 10 years ago demanded a man of work, and now - a day or two to adapt the template. The demand for new employees with new technologies will grow. As well as the desire of firms to save people on old projects on old technologies. So cheaper. This will cause strong conflicts between companies and employees.

The classical university education system will continue to lag behind life. Online education systems will receive priority. Even now, there is more respect for PMI than for diploma. When an online diploma will receive equal status with offline at the state level, the universities, in the form in which we know them, will cease to exist for several years. Only the largest and most prestigious universities will remain afloat.

Holivary will remain, the topics will change. It used to be popular Pascal vs C, then Linux vs Windows on the desktop, now it's Android vs Apple. Which is typical, holivars do not end, just the subject of the dispute dies first.

No other market leader can guarantee a cloudless future for several years to come. For example, Motorolla before the launch of Iridium, Microsoft after Windows 2000, Samsung in the days of CRT. As soon as someone stops developing or stumbles a couple of times in a row - he dies. Or you need a genius like Steve Jobs to climb.

Labor market and wages

The demand for IT specialists in the next few years will only grow . I would like to believe that further - too, but ... At various times, chemists, physicists, aviators and radio engineers were in demand. Now - much less. Pay attention to the speed with which the demand for admin-middles is falling due to the transition to the clouds. Specialization (“tyzhprogrammist”) will acquire a greater role.

We will soon see a wave of people who have worked on the same project for 5+ years, have fallen out of the mainstream, and are now little in demand on the labor market. I want a large salary, learn from the habit, and the labor market requires new knowledge and a lot of free time.

The growth of IT salaries will change . If earlier growth was more influenced by the average bar for the market, and this bar was driven by the price of programmers in Europe and the USA, now growth will depend more on business benefits. In the next couple of years, I estimate the salary ceiling, under which will be 95% of IT people - at ~ $ 40 per hour. Moreover, many will be below $ 25.

Our demographic hole of the 90s has already affected the first courses of universities, in a few years it will become more difficult to find juniors . Programmers in China and India are also learning. I think that in the coming years we will see many teams of “Russian Signor + Asian Junior”. Spoken English will become a basic requirement, like owning a bugtracker.

It seems that grocery firms will continue to crowd out outsourcing . At least, while the salary in India is not equal to ours.

An outsourcing company, when it sells a person, takes 50-80% of the money for itself - this is the company's profit, office, accounting, hardware, software, admin, risk insurance, vacations, sick leave, etc. The freelance salary ceiling is much higher . Of course, not all freelancing is suitable. Personnel vacuum cleaner is already working, look at the growing popularity of the theme of freelancing on Habré.

Pension By that time, the IT people born in 1975-1991 will start thinking about a pension, it will become clear that when there are two pensioners for one worker, they will not have to rely on a larger pension. And a bank deposit will not help here. Most likely, this will lead to a great desire to work "to the last."

The working process

Freelance and work from home will continue to gain popularity . It is cost effective. The business flaws of distributed teams will be circumvented due to the increased requirements for managers. The ability to manage such a team requires few other skills than the same in the office.

It will be less than the average firms . Big will live at the expense of economy on wholesale, small - at the expense of mobility. Similarly, issues with protection from the state and raider attacks will be big solved by lawyers and big friends, and small ones by uninteresting raids.

When I started, it was possible for the two to make a super project. Now we need a team of 6+ people. The time for singles is over, it's time for big teams . Since the experts are not summed up as the workers on the conveyor, the loss of interaction is becoming increasingly important.

Scrum and other development methodologies will continue to mutate . General direction: from a strict process to the greater influence of the human factor. The desire to have a self-organized and self-motivated team will give way to the understanding that even people with good specialized knowledge are not necessarily capable of self-organizing and self-motivated. Someone can be helped in this (no, not by corporate parties), but for some it simply does not fit.