A bit of a different blog post today. I’ve just finished a course that I teach to 2nd year undergraduate students – embedded and real-time software systems. I love to see how my students grow from not knowing anything about C to programming embedded systems with interrupts, serial communication between two Arduinos and using preprocessor to implement advanced variability.
In this blog post, however, I want to write a bit about the future of software engineering as I see it. Everyone talks about AI and how it will take our jobs and reduce the need for software engineers. It will, no doubt about that. What it will not do is take the jobs of the BEST programmers on the market. If you are a great designer and software engineer, you will be even better, you will take jobs from everyone else.
This will happen only if we engage in competition. We cannot just rely on ChatGPT, DeepSeek or Manus to write our software and texts. We need to be the best programmers with these tools – faster than anyone else, more secure than anyone else and more innovative than anyone else. That means that we need to get closer to our customers. We need to understand them better than they understand themselves, and we need to do it in the ethical way – we cannot treat our customers as products, we need to treat them as people.
The same goes to our stakeholders. In my course, my stakeholders are my head of department, my dean, my boss and my students. The students are the most important ones. I am here to help them to grow, and I am priviledged when they come to my lectures, but I cannot force them. I need to make sure that I enrich their days, that they feel that my lectures are worth their while. I hope that I deliver, I see that most of them come to the lectures, most of them are happy.
We must engage in competition a bit more – the best ones must feel that they have deserved it. Otherwise, what’s the point of being the best if everyone else is also the best?
