The Two Types of Future Developer
For context, my journey as a developer over the years followed the path of many others: during university, I started as an intern in Eastern Europe at a small company, 100% of my time writing code, and later became a staff engineer at big tech (Netflix, Stripe), mainly focusing on alignment and architecture. Today, I’m running a startup (OpenMeter) and doing more product, sales, etc., than coding. This would be all irrelevant, except I don’t think this path I followed will work in the future for others. You and I, as developers, need to think about what’s next.
I often think about this AI-driven developer transformation for selfish reasons: Will I still have a job in the future? And as a founder, I have to be strategic about hiring. Let’s break down what’s happening.
I have seen this analog about AI changing developer jobs somewhere that resonated a lot with me. It goes like this: Copywriters' job, before the invention of the typewriter, was mainly focused on the craftsmanship of typography as their writings had to be easy to read. Their job changed when machines came out and shifted towards being grammatically correct, which later also changed with the invention of computers. It will change again with AI as it’s easier to write cohesive narratives with it. But you know what didn’t change? They must still develop a good story, make it easy to read, and sell it to their audience.
People who say developer jobs are going away only see the act of writing code previously inaccessible to most people. Suddenly, anyone can do it (or at least that’s the promise). But hold on, isn’t that writing code what most developers do? Not really, only early on in their careers. For example, I wrote almost zero code at Big Tech as a staff engineer. My job was to identify big technical problems holding back the entire company, understand why and what we can do about them, build alignments with leadership about prioritization, recommend a solution, design the architecture, and delegate the implementation to developers focused on coding. The only problem was there were never enough developers writing code precisely what AI is changing now. Some of you may say this sounds terrible or straight of pissed that this was my job as a Staff Engineer but believe me, it was both fun, and the impact on business was measurable, not talking about the salary. Still, the reality is simple: I was more of a product manager with deep technical knowledge than a developer. But you are probably getting the point; there is plenty to do as a technical person, and developers are just having a typewriter moment; writing code will become a commodity, and being a developer will stay, but the required skills will shift into:
- Good communication skills
- Product management skills
- Architecture knowledge
- Being a generalist
My two cents are that the roles of product managers and developers will merge, and future products will be mindblowing because all that energy and creativity will be used to solve customer problems instead of writing and maintaining code.
You probably noticed that the title of this post mentions two future developer types, but I only talked about one so far. I’m less confident about this second type, but I think this will go away last from how developer jobs are perceived today. No matter how good AI is today or will be, someone has to understand the code for mission-critical applications. Many businesses like critical infrastructure and fintech must be correct, compliant, and auditable; you can’t just ask ChatGPT to implement billing and hope it’s accurate. I think for a long time, even if they are just about reviewing pull requests, a new type of developer who is highly focused on correctness will be paid a lot to ensure the critical systems work flawlessly.
Comment to agree or disagree.