Humans vs. robots: the battle for the workplace

As a developer, my job is going to pretty safe for a while; however, I think the big data revolution is real. If you want to continue making the big bucks as a developer, you'll have to learn to automate. A current example is the rise of DevOPs.

When we first started talking about Web 2.0, all the focus was on the interactivity that better browsers and stronger web standards enabled. In retrospect what makes Web 2.0 significant is what these better UXs enabled: big data collection on a scale never seen.

The snappy UIs enticed Sally Q to take up an interests in the Internet. The web was no longer the playground of boring people and nerds. Sally was now willing to become someone's autonomously updating data source. Web 2.0 was really about the creation of autonomous survey networks. The surface of Web 2.0 was UI/UX; on the underside of the iceberg, it was a revolution in data gathering.

The autonomous survey network's value is derived from the data it collects. This is why there are crazy billion $ valuations for what appear to be silly and/or banal web sites. It doesn't matter if the idea is silly; if it collects a lot of data the site has real intrinsic value - not as a website but as a honey pot.

Web 2.0 is over. New honey pots will spring up from time to time, but the (adult) public basically sees online communication as a commodity and therefore doesn't have much interest in the next new social network. Just like most people don't have much interest in the next ketchup innovation (although I must admit I am waiting on those nano-coated bottles that will let you get every drop out). Once it's a commodity, we pretty much stick with what we have.

Web 3.0 is all about consuming the bugs in the honey pot and making (commercially viable) sense out of their corpses. This is big data network engineering, AI, and machine learning. Most of the billion dollar software companies of the next 10 years will be companies that innovate in these spaces.

As companies begin to loose trust in the security of the cloud, they will begin hiring their own teams of statistician/programmer hybrids and big data network engineers.

TL;DR If you're a developer, start learning something related to big data.