On May 12, 1941, Konrad Zuse presented the Z3 in Berlin as the world's first computer. The Internet, then called Arpanet (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), has been picking up speed since 1969. In 1994, the first search engines were launched with Yahoo and Lycos. In 2004, social networks such as Facebook and XING appeared on the market. And since Steve Jobs presented the first iPhone in 2007, the mobile Internet has become indispensable. 

Many still know the world without smartphones. The time when you still had to click keys several times to type a letter into an SMS. That world was only 15 years ago. Today, we talk to our devices and the text is created automatically. Our world has been "software-ized.

1. The importance of software development

Modern life would be inconceivable without software. Consciously or unconsciously, we constantly encounter software in our everyday lives. The preparation of our morning coffee, the traffic lights on the way to work, the organization of supply chains so that we can buy our groceries in the supermarket. Software is in use everywhere. And it is becoming more and more effective and faster. It facilitates our lives enormously and we have all developed a small or large demand for it. Who hasn't been annoyed when the website loads too slowly or the registration on a website was answered with an error. 

To meet this demand and further softwareize our world, software development is continuously evolving. Sometimes so fast that even developers have difficulty keeping up. 

2. The future of software development

Programming languages, frameworks, libraries: technology is evolving ever faster. Frontend-For example, frameworks are constantly being updated, with major breakthroughs also occurring. What is "hot shit" today will be replaced by more efficient technology in a few years. This is what is currently happening, for example, with the programming language Rust, which in certain Big Data and machine learning applications. Python replaces. 

But what does this mean for the future? How will software development change? And what does that mean for us as tech recruiters as a result?

The future is automated: Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Software Development

One of the big topics of the future is AI. The potential of AI is far from being tapped. Just as in every other area of life, it will continue to make its way into software development. After all, software development is not just about ingenious virtuosity, but often quite routine work. And this is what AI can take over. For example, AI is already being used in test automation to help ensure software quality. Added to this is its application in the practical day-to-day work of developers. The automatic writing of code has already begun.

In the future, AI can be used to implement very interesting ideas. Let's take Natural Language Processing (NLP) as an example. As the name suggests, this involves the machine processing of natural languages such as German. We are all familiar with this from voice assistants such as Siri, Alexa and Co. We say something, the machine understands it and responds. If we transfer this mode of operation to an AI that could write software on its own, we can imagine a software developer sitting in front of his computer and dictating code as a first step. That would be conceivable, but not very exciting. In a second step, however, we could also imagine ourselves, as non-developers, sitting in front of the computer and describing our ideas of the program, which the AI then translates into a working program. In this way, everyone could talk to the AI as if it were a software developer, except that the AI could potentially take over the work of an entire team of developers. 

The future is simple: low code and no code

What can already be found today, especially in website construction kits, will be found more and more in the future - low-code and no-code. As the names suggest, it's all about building programs with little or no code of your own. Essentially, individual building blocks are simply put together using drag & drop. That goes fast and can be made also by Nicht-Entwicklern. There are limits to the amount of customization that can be achieved. In the future, however, more and more people will be able to participate in the softwareization of the world, even if they are not developers. 

The future is secure: DevSecOps - security already in the process

The more creative we become in developing software, the more creative the group that attacks that software becomes; namely, hackers. According to the industry association, cyber attacks cost the German economy Bitkom 220 billion euros per year. Almost every tenth company even sees its business existence threatened by cyber attacks.

The topic of IT security is central. For this reason, it will become more central to the development process in the future. With the introduction of DevOps, two departments (Development and Operations) have practically been linked over the last ten years. Modern developers therefore not only write their code, but can also bring it live themselves. Previously, this required a different IT specialist (Operations), who only took care of the infrastructure required for this. Merging the two issues therefore brings more speed and agility to the development process. However, the security aspect is all too often neglected. Seen in this light, they are still located in a different department. So now DevOps and security are being brought together and DevSecOps is being created. This means that security issues are considered directly in the development process. 

The future is mobile: Native Mobile

In our modern society, smartphones and tablets take up a significant part of our time. For this reason, a mobile-first approach has already become established in the past. An application is therefore primarily developed as an app for the smartphone or tablet. In development, this goes hand in hand with the fundamental question: which end device should be developed for? Android or iOS? Special programming languages have already been established for this purpose, which improve the speed, memory security and parallelism of the apps. These include Swift and Kotlin, for example. 

3. The future of tech recruiting

What can we derive from the future trends of software development for tech recruiting? 

Due to the mobile-first approach, a higher demand for mobile developers can be expected. Apart from the existing ones, new developer jobs will also be created. One only speaks of a DevSecOps approach, for example, when a separate security team is really superfluous. Usually, a "security champion" is appointed within the development team who, trained in security topics, assumes responsibility for security fixing. As a result, the profiles being sought are becoming more extensive in their requirements. DevOps developers need security expertise. Security specialists go more into the development process. New role titles may emerge that we don't even know today.

As fast as the technology world is changing for software developers, it is also changing for us tech recruiters. An understanding of software development, languages, frameworks and the like is essential for successful recruitment. For this reason, tech recruiters will also have to deal intensively with the contexts and technical language in the future. 

As artificial intelligence finds its way more and more into software development, it is important to observe how teams change as a result. Routine work or simple tasks are usually taken over by junior developers. Whether these will then become "superfluous" and be replaced by AI remains to be seen. 

The list of possible trends is not exhaustive. It is notoriously difficult to predict how the future will shape up. In any case, there are no limits to the ideas. What is your idea of the future of software development? Have you ever talked about it with someone in your department?

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