Manish is currently in the 2020 batch of Plaksha University’s Tech Leaders Fellowship program. He started as a bug bounty hunter and contributed to the security of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Github, and many more companies. Manish was an early employee at SynapseFI, where he wore many hats. He worked with and consulted many startups, including HackerEarth, Quantinsti, Earthmiles, and over 100+ YC startups. He is quite passionate about personal finance and had given a TEDx on personal finance for millennials.
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 article went viral, everybody was talking about it, and even The Wall Street Journal shared it. Marc said the 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 an entirely 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 do not want to be in, most of us cannot 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 is 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 April. During this global lockdown, Reliance Industries which owns Jio has raised almost $8 billion in less than 3 weeks. If you 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. I believe we are just getting started. As a student, you want to be on the right side of the revolution. You cannot 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 is no wonder seven out of the ten most valuable companies (by market cap) are technology companies. Unfortunately, there are not enough competent engineers for these roles. Our education has not changed from the last decade, but the world has changed a lot. One needs to keep pace with changes to have a great career and a successful business. Tech education is relevant and more important than ever before.
If we want to improve as a country, we cannot 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 is a huge opportunity for India, but we will need much more people in technology to bring the change.