There will always be more people, and more need for people, writing high level application code, glue code, and "spit-and-polish" code than people writing deep, difficult systems code. Always.
Here's the thing, in computing the advances in tooling and performance continue to pile up at an amazing rate. In 2016 it will be even easier to roll out a product built by a couple "web guys" with little in-depth technical knowledge that does an amazing amount of business and has a profound impact on the tech world. Indeed, in time it will be possible to run ventures which support billions of active users per day on incredibly cheap hardware and with a rather modest amount of dev-hours behind them.
Imagining that the future is only for hard-headed systems programming is the time honored ego-stroke of the hard-headed systems programmer who sees all of these "dilettante" "web guys" doing amazing work in the real world and making an impact and money doing so. But that's just a fantasy. The truth is that software is art. It's often a thousand times more valuable to write software which communicates with users and evokes in them strong feelings and strong connections than to write software which is technically pure and strong, but sterile, impersonal, and useless.
There will always be more people, and more need for people, writing high level application code, glue code, and "spit-and-polish" code than people writing deep, difficult systems code. Always.
Here's the thing, in computing the advances in tooling and performance continue to pile up at an amazing rate. In 2016 it will be even easier to roll out a product built by a couple "web guys" with little in-depth technical knowledge that does an amazing amount of business and has a profound impact on the tech world. Indeed, in time it will be possible to run ventures which support billions of active users per day on incredibly cheap hardware and with a rather modest amount of dev-hours behind them.
Imagining that the future is only for hard-headed systems programming is the time honored ego-stroke of the hard-headed systems programmer who sees all of these "dilettante" "web guys" doing amazing work in the real world and making an impact and money doing so. But that's just a fantasy. The truth is that software is art. It's often a thousand times more valuable to write software which communicates with users and evokes in them strong feelings and strong connections than to write software which is technically pure and strong, but sterile, impersonal, and useless.