Hiring for both early career engineers and executives is prone to a kind of myopia that I’m calling “capitalist ignorance.” This is a form of blindness that causes leaders to consider people filling these roles as fungible parts in a giant machine, rather than the designers of it.

“Complexity is why communication and coordination dominate all other costs when it comes to building software."—Kellan Elliott-McCrea

When you’re leading a software team of any substantial size (let’s call it 10+ people), the biggest challenge, and the biggest cost, that you face as a team is coordination.

Back in the ’90s, when I first started playing around with writing “dynamic” websites, I was using Apache “cgi-bin” and writing Perl. By the late ’90s, I was really into PHP. You can shit on it all you want, it was a hell of a lot nicer than Perl.

Every “should” is a burden. Every “ought” or “must” is a weight bearing down on you. You can feel it, right?

“I should exercise more often.” “I should eat better.” “I should keep in touch with old colleagues.”

You have to let those go to make real progress in your life.

In the civil war between those of us who yearn for the hallway serendipity they got around the office coffee machine, and the ones who unlocked a more productive and joyful way of working from their homes, there can be no winner.

The notion that this debate is reconcilable, that there is a mythical “hybrid” solution that checks all the boxes, that with enough thoughtful compromise we can put this conflict behind us, is blindly foolish, and chasing it is a distraction.

AI is not going to replace the majority of programming jobs, full stop. I roundly reject any argument that presents AI as a solution to converting a set of business requirements into functioning software.

But, if you don’t learn how to use AI, and stay abreast of what it can do, it may very well replace YOU. Let me put that differently: it will be the reason your boss replaces you.