Rethinking Software Development in AI Era
Developing Software in the Age of AI Automation — or — Thank God, we don’t have to deal with those irritating programmers anymore…
Our work is so new it is not yet a profession. The labor category is only a few generations old and has profoundly changed in that time. It began as under-appreciated, highly skilled work punching out machine instructions. Work trail-blazed by women. Writing code in fourth generation languages is only a current expression of it.
Our tech culture is beset by hostility, bravado, and egoism. It treats talent as fungible and spends money on the wrong things. It’s a culture that fundamentally mistakes our work of translating human needs into working systems for rote construction.
Our economics are driven by speculators, true believers, and sideshow hucksters all eager to exploit our work and anticipating the day our expertise is irrelevant. We are complicit and sometimes eager participants in it all because it pays many of us very well and treats some of us like rock stars.
So, we are, in part, accountable for the world we find ourselves in, in which business leaders believe that thanks to automation they’ll be better off without us. As a whole, we are too expensive for the value we create. We do take too long. Our work products are just not good enough.
We have to acknowledge our current reality and the part we play in our own downfall in order to redefine expectations of us and get through to the other side.
Am I being unfair?
