When I went up to university I had a worry I didn’t tell anyone about: would I actually enjoy the work?
Up to then I’d always been at or near the top of the class. I suspected a lot of the pleasure I took in school came from that, rather than from the subjects themselves.
The trouble was that university was going to be full of people who’d also been at or near the top of their class. Would I enjoy the work if I was not longer able to distinguish myself through it?
I turned up, and studied hard. I was… average. Not terrible, just somewhere around mediocre.
What surprised me was that I still enjoyed it. A lot.
Being average took away the bit I’d assumed was the point (coming top), and what was left underneath was the reading and the arguing. That turned out to be enough of what I actually liked to keep my motivation.
This got me thinking about what’s happening to software engineers right now.
For a long time, being good at this job meant, in large part, being good at producing code: knowing the syntax, remembering the flags, being able to knock up in ten minutes a script that would take someone else an afternoon. That was the bit you could be top of the class at.
AI is taking that section away. Not all of it, and not perfectly, but enough that ‘can write the code quickly’ isn’t much of a distinction any more. One-shotting a working site is old hat. In other words, we’re all average at that now, or at least as good as whatever model we’re pointing at the problem.
If your sense of yourself was built on being the one who could churn out the code, it might seem like that’s going to hurt. It’s the first term at university all over again.
But strip that section out and you might find out what you liked all along: understanding the system underneath, working out why the business wanted the thing in the first place, and learning something new every week. Some people will discover they really did just like the typing, but fewer than we might think right now.
It took me a whole degree to find out what I actually liked. AI is going to tell a lot of people faster.
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