Strong agree. I think the fundamental challenge of working in fields that increasingly become AI-enabled will be the ability to understand and direct large or intricate systems without prior knowledge/the advantage of having built the model as implemented. That’s already how it works in complex domains or large businesses.
It does require a different kind of ego/abilities than before. My (negative) framing of the whiplash effect is that it’s a reckoning of “process fetishism”/a bad kind of careerism in the tech hiring market (because for the labor market to work, candidates need to be evaluable and sortable by businesses, and many people build an identity/optimize for legibility around “best practices” or very particular “technologies” which might get them a job).
Ultimately, you need to know and learn/be responsible for stuff, and be able to help people with your labor, not be “a type of person” that isn’t effective at the task of helping. But at the same time knowing things and being able to take accountability/help people remains critical, especially because that’s what people will want to pay for even as “time spent typing it in” decreases.
Personally, I think it will be a good thing because software and “tech” will become a more strongly domain-driven/enabling medium for real-world or specialized things. IE it is the end to “software for its own sake” or “willingness to type it in and play with Jira/jenkins/frameworks” and the beginning of something that is more applicable or knowledge-building rather than “being the X for Y at Z”. Harder but more fun :)
It does require a different kind of ego/abilities than before. My (negative) framing of the whiplash effect is that it’s a reckoning of “process fetishism”/a bad kind of careerism in the tech hiring market (because for the labor market to work, candidates need to be evaluable and sortable by businesses, and many people build an identity/optimize for legibility around “best practices” or very particular “technologies” which might get them a job).
Ultimately, you need to know and learn/be responsible for stuff, and be able to help people with your labor, not be “a type of person” that isn’t effective at the task of helping. But at the same time knowing things and being able to take accountability/help people remains critical, especially because that’s what people will want to pay for even as “time spent typing it in” decreases.
Personally, I think it will be a good thing because software and “tech” will become a more strongly domain-driven/enabling medium for real-world or specialized things. IE it is the end to “software for its own sake” or “willingness to type it in and play with Jira/jenkins/frameworks” and the beginning of something that is more applicable or knowledge-building rather than “being the X for Y at Z”. Harder but more fun :)