The software engineering industry in 2024: what changed in 2 years, why, and what is next

Keynote at Craft Conference 2024. The past 18 months have seen major change reshape the tech industry. What does it all mean for businesses and dev teams – and what will pragmatic software engineering approaches look like in the future?

I tackled these burning questions in my conference talk, “What’s Old is New Again,” which was the keynote of the Craft Conference in May 2024.

01:22 Small teams moving faster than before
03:21 What else is familiar from earlier?
05:13 What is going on in the tech industry?
11:13 Root cause #1: interest rates
18:37 Root cause #2: smartphone & cloud revolution
20:57 The new reality for software engineers
23:41 Shopify's preparation to this "new reality"
25:56 The new reality for software engineering practices
34:21 Haven't we seen this before?
39:01 Takeaways

[roma]

the swing from micro to monolith (or the other way around) shows that we also follow fashion trends

[For--nop]

I think a very important component to this discussion is the lack of signficiant corporate tax rates at the highest profit brackets that we saw in the 70s and 80s. If VC startup funding is a low intrest rates phenomenon, I believe that high marginal tax rates are a internal innovation phenomenon. Creating internal startups if you will. When corporations are forced to either hand over 50, 60, 70 percent of their profits at the highest marginal tax brackets, or choose to invest that revenue in internal research and development, they're overwhelmingly going to chose to invest it. I dont think we would have seen the likes of Bell labs and the massive private sector investment in essentially academic research, without the high taxes the U.S. carried during that time frame. I'd like to hear Mr. Orosz's thoughts on that.

[toxicitysocks]

My whole team was notified of layoffs in October. Agreed to plan on effort in your job search. I put probably 20 hours into a take home to nail it and landed a job at my top company. In addition, playing the long game with your career is important! I got the interview via referral from someone I hadn’t worked with directly, but we have several mutual connections that felt comfortable giving strong recommendations. Your reputation catches up to you: make it a good thing!

[forthrightgambitia]

So I started in the IT/tech space in 2012. And in reality the first company I was in was still really in the 2000s IT space in terms of how they operated. The thing about silos really resonated, I remember working in my first job as a tester and having very siloed responsibilities before moving on to be a dev. And the business anaylsts/project managers all having their role. So none of this was a shock to me, if anything moving to a tech company in 2016 was a culture shock. I wonder if in tighter times we will see a return to this as companies need to plan more carefully, conserve their resources and each person needs to justify their output.

[TechTalksWeekly]

This is a fantastic talk and it has been featured in the last issue of Tech Talks Weekly newsletter 🎉
Congrats!

[AlbertoDeBortoli]

I rarely stay up past midnight to watch a tech talk. Thanks Gergely, absolutely amazing talk 🙏

[FlushDog]

This talk conflates the incentives for workers with the incentives for employers. When employers earn record profits but do layoffs, there is no incentive for workers to make themselves replaceable. The boring old technologies are what employers are pushing for because those are easier to offshore. When companies stop treating engineers as stakeholders who also benefit from the company's success, engineers will inevitably look out after their own wellbeing above any profit or efficiency motive that the employer has.

[daliaabosheasha]

Fantastic talk! Thanks for sharing all your insights Gergely!

it's remarkable that typescript suddenly means you can talk about having fullstack engineers where in reality learning the framework is more difficult than the language itself.

[palharez]

Yeah focus on career security is always the best choice, really great talk!

[BlackwaterElte]

It would be nice to just choose the boring tech for 3 years then do some new tech choices as a tech stack refresh.

[chrisogonas]

Nothing like job security; focus on career security! Can't agree more!

[vijayramachandran]

A friend at work pointed out the money is also choking open source projects, making the cost of development higher. If you tie this back to other things you spoke about, businesses will take far fewer risks with product development, as cost is higher, and RoI is more unknown?

[punkbuster]

Well i am just starting on programming, i hope everything goes well !!

[flavbmusic]

That's a fantastic and huge work of compiling information and presenting it simply. Thank you.

[HoDx]

i *never* understood why anyone would prefer to get rid of compile time safety, stacktraces + low network overhead... (aka use microservices by default)

[ajimbong]

I enjoyed listening to this, and found it insightful. Thanks a lot for sharing.

[felippesimoest]

A excellent talk, Thanks very much Gergely!

[billykotsos]

The interest rate.
The return on capital.
Investment.
Bonds/ Stocks/IPOs
We need to know about all these because they have a direct impact on our lives

[EduAnmoldeep]

Really Necessary overview, much needed one, thanks for the effort of research and delivery!🚚