Discover your ideal developer profile for Growth, Team Synergy, and Career Success. (4 minutes)
Read in full here:
1 Like
One of the best articles I’ve read on this. Basically, the idea is that as you grow deep in a skill, language or technology, stretch your wings and enlarge your breadth i.e learn more skills, languages or technologies.
Value both depth and breadth, so that you don’t end up limited or one-dimensional.
Bookmarked!
Just curious @alvinkatojr - how do you line this up with all the AI driven development. If, as our bosses would have us believe, we are just drivers for agents, is there a value to a T shaped or comb shaped developer? Putting it slightly differently, aren’t we all T shaped developers now?
We can’t be masters of everything. Awareness is crucial.
Interesting article.
I haven’t done much AI-assisted or AI-driven development, but I agree that somehow AI changes everything, even a little bit.
1 Like
I am glad to hear that you haven’t done much AI-assisted development. Neither have I. I am unsure what exactly AI changes, and I am unsure whether it is meaningful to think too much about it. But it certainly changes the public discourse.
AI-driven development has its purpose. Over the weekend, I did a lot of debugging in minutes that would have taken days and weeks under the old system of coding. 10-15 years ago, debugging this would have meant posting on StackOverflow, asking for help and waiting for hours and days for someone to respond with a working suggestion. So AI is a game-changer, especially if you know what you are doing and most importantly how to use it.
I think this is a false or nonsensical belief on their part. When the aeroplane autopilot was introduced, it didn’t mean pilots were mere observers and that the plane could drive itself. If anything, if you are/were a pilot, your skills needed to be sharper, so that you could correct the plane if the autopilot went crazy. And as we saw with the Boeing 365 Max, even the autopilot can run amuck.
Skill is necessary for anything worthwhile. You don’t abandon flying school because auto-pilot exists. You still need to read the instruments, monitor the engines, and still take off or land the plane each time.
When I was debugging the other day, I needed to know the inputs and outputs to ensure that the results were correct. AI made my work easier but it didn’t remove or absolve me of ignorance. So yes there’s still value in being a T-shaped or comb shaped developer.
This would be equivalent to saying that you are an English speaker because you own an English dictionary or thesaurus. Having an AI tool doesn’t negate your need to be skilled in what you do. Proximity to genius doesn’t make you a genius. You are NOT automatically smart because you have a smart friend. Because these LLMs are “smart” in text generation and answering questions, some people assume they are “smart” because they know how to prompt them, which is both laughable and sad at the same time.
I think in general, there’s a lot that AI tools do to make our lives easier, and they should be valued for that. But making it seem like the programmer is irrelevant is the worst mistake any forward-thinking boss or person can make. AI or not, you still need to be skilled.
I hope this answers your questions, @mortz!
1 Like