I deploy on Friday. I have heard the arguments to the contrary and I still continue to deploy on Friday. The end of the week is as good as any other to deploy! Why wait another two days to realize the value or return-on-investment from the work I have queued up? I feel confident making this judgement call for two important reasons: I am confident in the success of the changes being deployed and I am willing to take ownership for when I’m wrong.
My current role as a “Principal Infrastructure Engineer” and most of my value comes from my understanding and judgement relating to the systems for which I am responsible.
I would argue that every developer’s key value is in understanding and judgement. If you do not understand what it is you’re doing or when not to do something, what exactly differentiates you from the lowest possible wage-worker?
Setting aside the executives and their “AI agenda”, the zealous adoption of “AI assistants” for software development by developers conveys a pretty key misunderstanding of “what is is you actually do here.”
If your job is to slap out code regardless of whether it works or not, then yes, a large-language model is coming for your job. But you know what else is coming for that job? Better abstractions or even cloud-native services are also coming for that job. I remember working with a number of talented Database Administrators (DBAs) when my career started in the early 2000’s. I have not worked with somebody whose title has been DBA in almost a decade. First Percona and then AWS Aurora made it possible for lots of organizations to not need a DBA.
Their “code” was not their value.
Those talented DBAs were not simply adding indexes to tables, reviewing schemas, and tuning MySQL black magic. They were understanding what the application needed from the database and vice versa. They’re still gainfully employed, but they’re no longer called DBAs, they’re Cloud Architects or DevOps Magicians or whatever.
Fundamentally almost every coding job is temporary in the technology ecosystem. At the beginning of my career I remember companies hiring ASP and ColdFusion developers. If you hung your hat on being either of those, you were probably put out of work by PHP maturing or platforms like Drupal coming onto the scene.
This post captures a hypothesis that I have shared with some close friends:
I’ve now had several clients come to me to take over projects that another agency was working on because the other agency started using generative AI. Apparently there was a real drop in product quality. I wonder why.
With large companies like Microsoft claiming up to 30% code written by AI, I feel more confident in my future career prospects.
As developers, our job is not to produce code.
Code is a result of understanding the problem and judgement in creating a solution.