Remember Q&A positions? What happened to developing software and handing it off to someone that has good testing skills, whether it's manual testing or writing automated tests. If I'm not mistaken, the majority of software eng./dev. positions will now require you to do a lot of testing with the help of other engineers/developers, and this basically shifted the Q&A responsibilities over to the people who used to only solve the problem. Of course this has a huge impact on how many hours a week you need to work.<p>Now I'm feeling like there are even more responsibilities being tacked unto engineers and developers, where effectively, we are arriving at two main roles in software companies: Technologists, and Managers. Of course everyone is going to have to work more hours because everyone has more roles to take care of.<p>At least the software industry has been consolidating roles, and from my experience I have gone from developing, to developing, testing, managing people, communicating goals, doing presentations, and much more, when all I want to specialize in is problem solving for code. If we still had specialty roles, there would be a lot less weight on people's shoulders and they could optimize their role to a comfortable spot where they are not overworking so much.