All Things Open: What’s Your Future as a Developer? 

RALEIGH, N.C. — Developers want to build cool stuff. But to have a future as a developer in the 2020s, they need flexibility, according to panelists at a New Stack-led session at All Things Open.

For instance, sometimes, a developer’s role is about deleting old code rather than writing new, according to Lisa Shissler Smith, an engineering manager at Netflix.

Her teams are responsible for systems that run 85% of the company’s streaming traffic. Netflix runs on codebases created over multiple decades at this point; she told the session audience: “People talk about throw-away code all the time, but I can guarantee you, after looking through our repos, we throw nothing away.”

Sometimes, those outdated codebases stand in the way of innovation, said Shissler Smith. “Think about it like a garden. You need to weed and tend that garden and get rid of the things that aren’t serving you anymore so that you can grow what you need.”

While acknowledging that “it’s exciting to work on the new bleeding-edge stuff,” she stressed the importance of pattern recognition as a must-have skill for developers who want to keep their careers vital.

“If you can learn patterns, you can survive in any system,” she said. “It really doesn’t matter. All languages are intrinsically the same. They’re just wearing a different T-shirt. So get used to being able to decompose something into its problem space, then you have the room to innovate.”

Coping With AI-Related Anxiety

The last half decade has been marked by change and uncertainty in the tech employment landscape, to a degree probably not seen since the late ‘90s/early ‘00s. The pandemic-fueled Great Resignation, the emergence of generative AI, the recent massive layoffs — it all adds up to a lot of anxiety for anyone trying to establish and sustain a career in software development.

At All Things Open 2024, Alex Williams, The New Stack’s founder and publisher, shared data from the 2024 Dice Tech Sentiment report, showing that while 39% of tech professionals surveyed said they are looking for a job — up from 32% who said the same in 2023 —  only four in 10 felt confident they will find a job that meets their expectations.

But he also shared data showing current and predicted growth in a number of tech specialties, notably in machine learning, data, AI, cybersecurity and among software developers and engineers.

Other panelists — Taylor Desseyn, vice president of global community at Torc and Jessica Kerr, engineering manager of developer relations at Honeycomb.io — added their perspective on what the future holds for developers.

Several audience members expressed anxieties about generative AI and its impact on their careers as developers. Kerr encouraged attendees to consider the technology’s benefits as well as its downsides.

“So much of software development is deciding what the code should do, and they can't take that away from us as humans,” she said. “We're fitting the code into the situation that we're in, the human situation, and that critical thinking is still ours.”

Also, “AI can help us learn faster,” she said. For instance, “At Honeycomb, we have a lot of Go code. I'm not super comfortable with Go.” When dealing with Go code, she realized she could ask Claude or another GenAI assistant to explain the code in that particular context.

”I can be like, ‘Well, I understand Java and TypeScript pretty well. What is what the heck is this?’ And it can tell me. It can write a blog post. That's exactly what I needed right then. So we can use the AI to learn faster, and then our critical thinking skills become immensely more valuable.”

Fractional Work and Flexibility

Desseyn, whose current company, Torc, is a marketplace for tech talent, stressed the need for flexibility to the audience’s job seekers.

“If you trust a recruiter, listen to what they have to say, be flexible,” he said. “And there's so many engineers out there, they're like, ‘I want this amount of money and that's all I'm gonna do.’ And I'm like, how long have you been on the job search for? And they're like, ‘A year and a half.’”

He encouraged attendees to open their minds to the idea of fractional work. “The idea of full-time salary is not as safe anymore as it used to be three to four years ago,” he said. “And so I think a lot of engineers are more open to contracting and freelancing, which hiring managers need to be aware of to scale up their engineering teams quicker.”

Desseyn, who told the audience he’s been around the industry “since I was recruiting at .NET Web forums,” has seen trends come and go. Currently, hiring managers are putting more emphasis on specialists than generalists.

“Hiring managers need to hire somebody right now who have this skill set solve this problem right now,” he said. “If you can clearly define what they're looking to hire for, and say, ‘Hey, you are hiring for this. I have this. This is why you need to hire me,’ It's gonna be a lot easier” for a hiring manager to choose you.

“Because,” Desseyn said, “you explicitly explain how you can provide value.”

But he also asked the audience to weigh work-life balance when considering job opportunities, posing a provocative question: “How much is your happiness being taken away from you because of the money you're making?”

Over the past two years, he said, he’s been pondering this question in his own life and encouraging job candidates to do the same.  “I've talked with a lot of engineers about this, a lot of my friends, about how much is it really worth your sanity if you can't go walk with your partner at the end of the day because you're too busy taking calls, right?”

Kerr summed up the choices facing developers about their futures in 2024. “It's not the future that you expected,” she said. “Maybe it's not the one you wanted three years ago.

“But I had a very wise friend who said, ‘I find it useful to look at what's in front of me and adjust my expectations to match.’ The jobs that are available are not the same. The ways that we're going to learn what we need for that job, they're not the same as they were, but they are interesting. So try something.”

Check out the full presentation for more: