By, Manish Bhattacharya, Tedx Speaker Plaksha, Tech Leaders Fellow-Class of 2020, Plaksha University
In 2011, Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz (the prolific VC firm which has invested in Facebook, Twitter, Skype and others) wrote an essay “Software is eating the world”. The essay went viral, everybody was talking about it, and even The Wall Street Journal shared it.
Marc said, “software will eat all the values created by infrastructure and operations heavy physical industries.”
I was in my first year of college and just like any engineering student was worried about my career. As a computer science student, this essay had a massive impact on me. Today the world is a completely different place from 2011. We are in the middle of a pandemic, thousands of people are losing their jobs, people are stuck at places they don’t want to be in, most of us can’t go out to meet friends and family.
Considering the current situation, most of us are still privileged enough to have work from home, students are attending classes on zoom, we have apps like houseparty for socializing. Though most of us are affected, technology has made our life a bit easier during this global pandemic.
That’s not all, some businesses are thriving during this global recession. At the time of writing this post: Nasdaq is up 1.58% (not to forget it has mostly tech stocks and it’s green in Year To Date duration), Zoom is number one and most downloaded application in the month of April. During this global lockdown, Reliance Industries which owns Jio has raised almost $8 billion in less than 3 weeks. If you’ll look closely, technology companies are at a far better position than airlines, oil or mining businesses. People are changing the way they do business, be it online transactions, video meetings or automating their work with software. After this pandemic, there will be a big consumer market of business coming online for the first time and they will need customized software solutions.
Technology has changed the way we live, communicate and do business… and I believe we are just getting started. As a student, you want to be on the right side of the revolution. You can’t ignore the influence of technology on our lives and it will only grow from here. Industries will need more competent software engineers, data scientists, and AI engineers in the coming days.
For businesses, technology adoption is more important than ever before. There’s no wonder seven out ten most valuable companies (by market cap) are technology companies. Unfortunately, there are not enough competent engineers for these roles. Our education hasn’t changed from last decade, but the world has changed a lot. One needs to keep pace with changes in order to have a great career and successful business. Tech education is relevant and more important than ever before.
If we want to improve as a country, we can’t side-line the importance of technology. We have the potential; global investors are showing interest in Indian tech companies during these tough times are the proof! There’s a huge opportunity for India but we’ll need much more people in technology to bring the change.
Further reading:
https://a16z.com/2011/08/20/why-software-is-eating-the-world/ .