I realized at my last job that I was working to essentially replace myself and my co-workers. It was a pretty sobering thought.
We often joke about training our replacements but we're definitely in an age where it's just as easy (if not easier) to build our replacements.
This doesn't have to come in the form of AI which can ingest requirements and write code. It typically comes in the form of automating specific aspects of our current job. Build systems, pipelines, workflows, etc.
It's nice to kid ourselves and think of it as work intended to improve productivity but from a company's point of view the value is decreasing overhead and cost which comes in the form needing 1 person to do the work instead of 10.
Cross your fingers that you're the 1 and not one of the 9 :).
> I realized at my last job that I was working to essentially replace myself and my co-workers. It was a pretty sobering thought.
You've just described the purpose of the entire software industry. Did it really not occur to you that writing systems to automate tasks would displace anyone doing those tasks manually?
No need to cross your fingers. The demand for software is still out-pacing the creation of new developers. Those 9 have nothing to worry about, other than perhaps dusting off their resume.
Replacing yourself with something you built is what engineers should strive for.
Engineering problems just move higher up in the stack. Few people are coding assembly code now days, and in the future few people would be writing in other low level languages.
We often joke about training our replacements but we're definitely in an age where it's just as easy (if not easier) to build our replacements.
This doesn't have to come in the form of AI which can ingest requirements and write code. It typically comes in the form of automating specific aspects of our current job. Build systems, pipelines, workflows, etc.
It's nice to kid ourselves and think of it as work intended to improve productivity but from a company's point of view the value is decreasing overhead and cost which comes in the form needing 1 person to do the work instead of 10.
Cross your fingers that you're the 1 and not one of the 9 :).