Lego Software Engineers and the Bubble

If you’ve been in the software industry for long enough, you should’ve picked up on certain patterns of new products entering the market. An insane amount new “apps” hitting Product Hunt nowadays are mostly the same. “Like Uber, but for scratching your back”. Essentially, people are spending man-hours solving already solved problems.

Isn’t most of software development strangely similar to building furniture, cars etc? You take a few parts, fit them together, test and ship. Sounds familiar? It’s like Lego. Then who are Lego Software Engineers, you ask? We plug in frameworks and APIs to make softwares which are more-or-less similar to one another. This is Lego software development.

Here at DriveU where I work, I help crack the on-demand driver market. We do bring in really smart innovations to streamline the experience of the end user. But how different is it from Uber? The big difference is more so in the operations aspect than the software aspect.

Like assembly line and robotics automating work in a modern auto manufacturing plant, a lot of software development can be automated.

Funny enough, computing emerged from the need to automate tasks. So it’s no long-shot to say that computing itself, to an extent, will get automated. Of course, I’m not saying that some Skynet class of AI is at the verge of emergence. But, application specific AI will eventually do most of what of Lego Software Developers do. The Grid is already doing this to the web.

Sofware development is the hipster job of this decade. AI will rule the next few decades. What after that? Nobody knows. But it’s an exciting thought. For now, we should save up, avoid being religious about our own convictions and jump onto newer bandwagons as they come.