Just a short article. I’m interested in how software engineering is converging into niches. It’s interesting to think about where to position oneself.
Just as everyone “learns to code”, as is touted so often, are we going to have an order of magnitude less coding that needs to be done?
Big Co’s: AWS. DevOps. API as a Service. Nothing on-prem. Not a lot of software dev occurs. Outsourced dev to people factories when necessary. Most everything they need exists as an ‘enterprise’ plan of some SaaS, or can be clicked together with AWS. Everything has an API, and everything is connectable with stickytape and API proxies.
Medium Co’s: SaaS where practical. A few in-house developers – no budget or means to find people factories. They’re a little big for SaaS for everything, or a little bit niche and the product doesn’t exist yet. The in-house devs firefight this custom made stuff.
Maybe still use on-prem mostly, with a sprinkling of AWS.
Small Co’s: SaaS for everything. Google Docs, Xero, IFTTT. Nothing on-prem. If it doesn’t exist as SaaS, they don’t do it (or write it themselves, to their peril). They don’t use AWS at all as a first class customer.. But probably all of their services do.
I wonder what the equivalent of a plumber is for software developers (you always need someone to unclog your toilet).