What Will Programming And Architecture Look Like In 2020?

With Cisco training, for example, your Cisco certifications are your credentials. We haven't seen this model of certification move to programming in general. We probably will as these new training hubs form and begin to monetize through being a body shop rather than through fees. A few Guilds will become popular and their certs will have more value. Via small networks potential programmers will flock to these services and the phenomena becomes self-reinforcing. Guilds may specialize around certain subjects, as guilds did in the past. These Guilds will recognize their power and monetization opportunities and take a greater and greater role across the entire value chain.

The scalability of online training means vast numbers of potential programmers can be filtered out and stratified into various skill levels and specialties, much like a MMORPG across a vast virtual world. Programmers will gain experience points by being apprenticed on projects that have been bid out. Each project can be thought of as a quest. As new skills are required the Guild can bring on new training and integrate it into the game, quickly creating pools of new subject matter experts. This will be cheap labor and will be highly profitable. Masters will evolve that can access large pools of labor. Specialized tiger teams can form to solve difficult problems, all mediated by these new training Guilds as the Game Master controlling their Game World.

Virtual economies can evolve around code and skills. Each Guild may evolve their own infrastructure, code banks, tools, styles, networks and processes that will make bootstrapping new projects even more profitable. Instead of GitHub we'll see Guild Hubs. Instead of the Amazon Cloud we'll see Guild Clouds. Instead of Frameworks we'll see Guild Frameworks. These will not be open as they will be used as a competitive advantage as the open source community is compelled by game mechanics to become part of a Guild.

Will guilds, like in the Renaissance, be formal parts of the government having government enforced powers and benefits? It's not hard to imagine, especially if privatization becomes more popular. But even without the government picking winners, through market forces very powerful actors can emerge by controlling the supply of a necessary good.

Will this happen? Who knows. That's why it is a prediction :-)

2) Agreed.

3) Sorry you feel that way. I think the emphasis on building things rather than people is a central subject of our times.

4) Lots of people are more qualified than I to speak on those subjects. And have. What are your thoughts?

Sure there is: nondisclosure agreements, secret APIs, expensive proprietary tools, etc. You already see this to some degree with video game development. App stores are going to make this worse, as people are going to have to pay more in order to develop software and will not be able to just run development tools on any old system.

"a greater spectrum of people will do programming type things"

Those people will also be more restricted in terms of what they can do. People will know how to write macros for a specific product; they will not be able to write programs in general. I suspect that the number of people who can write general-purpose software is going to decrease as platforms become less open.

"Finally, no mention is made of things like superior parallel processing, something that is integral to continuing to do fancier things with advancing technology."

First of all, we do not even know if we can benefit from parallel approaches to certain very important problem classes (see: NC v. P). Second, we have heard the "parallel processing will save us" argument in the past, but we were not saved. From where I sit, algorithmic improvements will be more important than parallel programming over the next decade: better approximations, better heuristics, and faster operations are going to win over more cores.