Ask HN: What's your predictions for the next few 18 months?

[de-asis-kevin]

I've seen the previous posts from this year and the previous years.

It seems like there was a lot of unexpected things these past few months that no one really expected. Knowing what we know now, what are you predictions?

I don't really have a prediction, it seems it's easy to predict things when things are going really well, but it seems, like things are hard to predict when there area a lot of uncertainty

[mikewarot]

Over the next 6 months, the penny will drop that Covid in the US never really ended, we just stopped treating it as a public health emergency, unlike the rest of the world. As a result, our long covid numbers will continue to climb. Workers will become increasingly hard to find as the disabled population of the US climbs at a staggering rate.

Evidence: Look at the trends for the rest of the world, vs the US where we no longer fund testing, nor encourage it, nor reporting of Covid cases.

Sources like [1] Johns Hopkins still track it, world wide.

1 - https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

[jsz0]

I've been saying this for a while but I think we're about to see a ton of tech jobs disappear or see dramatically lower wages. With modern DevOps practices, managed services, etc I just don't see how a lot of these job roles can continue to exist. One of the reasons I got out of network engineering was I realized one day a decent algorithm would be able do 95% of my job better than I could.

[andrewjl]

There's always going to be a need to adapt generic managed services to fit into a particular business domain or organization. I think asserting these jobs will disappear is susceptible to the lump of labor fallacy. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy)

If this trend continues the more likely outcome is these roles will evolve. Deep technical understanding will still be required along with a need to spend more time in dialogue with these systems users. If anything it'll cause wages to dramatically skyrocket because relatively fewer have the capacity to perform both of those effectively.

[guilhas]

I don't see this

Where I work we have everything in Azure and Azure devops, but most developers don't care for configuring the cloud objects, or deployment pipelines, or deployment life cycle...

In practice the complexity is the same for small/medium companies for setting up, maybe easier for long term maintenance, even if not as reliable. But because things keep so much changing we always need the same people available

Although a lot of tech companies are somehow hiring at the moment. Not sure if investment fund money. So it seems that at some point there will have to happen a tech companies crunch

[BOOSTERHIDROGEN]

Any books references about deployment life cycle? Thanks.

[burntoutfire]

Currently, somehow people who can wrap their heads around the "modern devops practices" command the highest wages, not the lowest.

In my opinion, the promises of devops and other automation are largely overblown, and these concepts are just replacing one set of problems with another - at least in software development. In hosting/provisioning, I agree that cloud was a game changer and for example renting a cluster of DynamoDB is massively simpler than running your own Cassandra.

[BOOSTERHIDROGEN]

Mind sharing the details about network engineering replaced by ?

[nonrandomstring]

> but it seems like things are hard to predict when there are a lot of uncertainty

Have you ever heard of novelty waves?

[BOOSTERHIDROGEN]

What was the unexpected things ?