Now that I’m blogging regularly, I figure that doing a yearly type post would be a great way to summarize my feelings and then later see how they change. So I plan to write a Tech Prediction article in January of every year and a Tech Reflection article in December of every year. It’ll be a fun way to see how right or how very very wrong I can be.

Standard Disclaimer: Don’t take anything I write here as fact. I am far from an expert in anything and these are just my personal opinions.

Block Chain / Cryptocurrency

Crypto currencies will see the most winners and losers this year because:

• Governments all over will be passing laws and regulations and with each move, the markets will fluctuate wildly causing many overreactions.
• The fluctuations will be far more frequent than any stock out there. Existing investment companies will attempt to take advantage of this, but it won’t be easy. Unlike the stock market where these companies have existing automated systems that compete based on algorithms and execution speed, cryptocurrencies are much slower at processing transactions. That’s a balancer for the market.
• Cryptocurrency’s true power lies in balancing the exchange rate across currencies. This takes away power from governments and agencies like the FED and puts it into the hands of the people. Or perhaps, what this really does is it makes it all currencies dependent on the true strength of each countries’ economies. No more messing with the fed funds rate to control inflation or positioning the economy. This is what scares the governments the most. The loss of power in controlling the economy. Not the loss in taxes or hiding money.

News and Information

We’ve seen news and social media go through a hell of time over the past two years. 2018 will be a new evolution in this wild ride.

• Manufactured outrage will be at its apex.
• Likewise, the reaction to this will be a power grab between old monopolies trying to control content and thus people vs. tech companies that will be trying to decide if the gain in controlling news is worth the hassle/responsibility of handling bad PR incidents.
• Tech companies will make a huge leap in ad tracking.
• We will all fail to stop fake news, whataboutism, and manufactured outrage.

The Death of the Junior Developer

Now that the H-1B visa has gone through a bunch of changes in 2017, local tech companies will be responding by fully killing off true junior developer positions.

This is already a well known loophole in allowing a company to hire people on H-1B visas instead of hiring locals at a higher salary. To summarize:

1. Post a junior dev job online.
2. Add the requirement of having several (3-5+) years experience.
3. Add the requirement of having knowledge of several technologies.
4. Reject all local junior dev applicants because #2 and #3 are unreasonable for a junior dev anywhere. Anyone with that can fulfill those requirements are far far from a junior dev position.
5. Legally start looking at outsourcing and hire people on H-1B visas.

This will only get worse in 2018 and I fully expect that the junior dev position will become 100% extinct in the US.

Apple

Their stock is going to have a down year until the new Mac desktop is released at the very end of the year. The poor quality of High Sierra, the “subpar” sales of the iPhone X, the ever worsening App Store, planned obsolescence rumors, etc. All of that will pale in comparison to what Apple will be facing in 2018 - reversing the image that their computers are no longer secure.

Linux

It’ll be the year of the Linux Desktop!

jk

It won’t and the various distros and desktops will not change in quality all that much. Just more of the same as every other year.

Windows

Their plan for convergence will… not be accomplished this year.

Me

I’ll keep this blog up and manage to write my review article at the end of the year :)

Anyway, that’s all that’s been on my mind lately and while there’s probably more predictions I can make, I don’t feel as strong about them as these. So here’s to a fun 2018 and hopefully I’ll get something right.

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