I have to vote yes, for a few reasons. Software technology is progressing in a number of areas, but the most notable ones are distributed computing and decentralized computing (blockchain, tangle, etc). The awareness of blockchain technology that boomed into the public consciousness in January has given momentum to the creation of software-defined decentralized economies . As decentralized and distributed economy software technology matures, it will more and more become a viable alternative to the more traditional approach of working for a local business or corporation. I think a lot of industries that are better suited to decentralization will no longer provide the option for software professionals to work from a local office because the development community will be too spread-out (for example, insurance and banking are two industries that I think would be fairer and more secure if totally decentralized). It is already true that a lot of blockchain initiatives are, indeed, 'hiring' a lot of remote engineers (the one that stands out in my mind is IOHK, which is working on Cardano). I think this trend will increase going into the future. Traditional companies are having difficulty finding the talent they need, locally. This might not be true for web developers, but it's certainly true for professionals in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, so-called Big Data, Data Science, decentralized computing (blockchain), high performance and scientific computing, and so on. While the talent pool for these disciplines is small, the demand for professionals who specialize in these fields is growing rapidly. If companies cannot find someone with the skills they need locally, I believe they will become more open to hiring remote workers. I also believe that the companies that are more willing to hire remotely in order to find the right talent will be the ones that suceed in the marketplace. The internet has matured to the point where there are alternatives to working at a company, anymore. You can make a fair amount of money by writing (Kindle) ebooks, keeping a blog, vlogging and keeping a YouTube channel, outsourcing your writing skills on sites like TextBroker, flipping websites through tools like Flippa, crowdfunding your own projects, starting a Patreon, creating an online course, and the list goes on. I would consider freelancing your talents online and running an online business a form of working remotely since your patrons, clients, etc. wouldn't necessarily have to be local.

This is a very good point about many professionals (both engineers and those creating the requirements for engineers to follow) not trying hard enough to write bug-free software to really make bug-free software feasible assuming the tools to do so were available. If the world were perfect, then everybody would be using memory-safe and type-safe languages like Rust, Haskell, Coq, etc. that catch a lot of your errors in the compiler. As it stands, there's only a small subset of software professionals that really value the safety these languages provide and therefore use them. Further, even a lot of people writing in these "safer" languages are still being lazy about how they use them and not utilizing all of the features for writing bug-free software that they provide. Heck, I have a difficult time just getting my entire engineering team on-board with running the EXISTING unit tests (let alone writing the tests, and writing them in a way that would catch errors).

Writing bug-free software is dependent upon people writing bug-free requirements. People will always ask for things and then realize later that what they asked for is not really or exactly what the want or need. I think AI will make it easier for engineers to write fewer bugs into software, but there's no good way to fix faulty human understanding of the problem we're trying to solve through software.

In order that I learned them (I'm only including languages I've written decent-sized libraries or applications in - something beyond just HackerRank and Project Euler): C C++ Python SQL Java Visual Basic Ruby Javascript Haskell Scala Bash Go Prolog Emacs Lisp Common Lisp Scheme In Progress: Rust Elixir

This depends on your goals. If you have personal goals and desires outside of your job, the 40 hr week can be really restrictive and prevent you from really pursuing the things you care about. However, if you just want to hold down a job and cover the bills, 35-40 hrs/week is quite easy to do and still have plenty of leisure and self-care time. I, myself, and full of ideas and curiosity, and have trouble finding the time to devote to all of the things I want to explore and concepts I want to build out. I work around my 40 hour job and still manage to stay in shape, spend quality time with my wife, pitch-in with the housework, and chip away at a few personal projects, but this does make for a fairly busy schedule and I must admit that I've had to adopt some daily practices for fostering mental and emotional consistency and control in order to keep this lifestyle. As of right now, my aim is on holding down my current job to invest in things that can reduce my expenses and hopefully free myself up to work part-time and build up more independent (and more passive ) styles of making money (b/vlogging, airbnb, writing ebooks, flipping websites, etc) so that I'm freer to work on some of my own ideas in software that I really believe in.

My first was DOS. I was the first kid on my block to own a computer (and then the first kid to have internet access) back when everything was green screens and floppy disks were 8". Space Invaders was the first ever video game (and DOS program) I ever played/used. I remember being amazed when Windows 3.1 came out and everything was graphical and clickable. I'm amazed, today, even more at how far and quickly technology has progressed (and a little horrified). Despite being impressed by nice UIs and detailed graphics, though, I have come to prefer the command line. These days, the only operating systems I use are Unix-inspired (Linux, mostly, but also BSD on occasion).