Until now it has been somewhat of an established truth that if you’re a software engineer, and you know your programming languages of choice really, really well, you can do pretty much anything;
You can bring new ideas to life, build new products, build new business even, if you’re an engineer with a keen interest in business as well.
On the flip side, business people have had a more rough time. Yes, they can get ideas, and yes they can sell products and run a business. But they have a hard, hard time building the actual products. For those they need the engineers.
It is all good. But maybe times are changing. Especially for the software engineers.
Because as Moores Law is nearing its end, chances are that the big advances in computing and innovation going forward is going to come from other places; from good old scientists working in labs on more material things that have little to do with what software can do in itself.
Thus a new dependency is created. Where business people used to be dependent on great software engineers to get anything done, software engineers will likely be growing a dependency on hard core scientists in order to make radical advancements that goes above and beyond what they can do themselves.
This will require a whole new level of collaboration across sectors and a mutual respect for what each skillset brings to the table. We will most likely see the ‘rockstar’ mantra vane and give place to a more collaborative and perhaps even humble approach, as we are to a certain extend moving into territory where no-one has been before, and where it would probably just be foolish to steam full ahead without taking the context and environment into account.
There is little doubt that these new collaborations will be able to do great things – and that they will need to in order to help us solve some of the massive challenges, we all have in front of us. And that those who can’t or won’t see this change coming is going to add new challenges to the ones, they already have.
(Photo by Science in HD on Unsplash)