The future of software engineering - The future of software development retreat
10 points by jalcine
10 points by jalcine
Senior engineering practitioners from major technology companies gathered for a multi-day retreat to confront the questions that matter most as AI transforms software development. The discussions covered more than twenty topics across breakout sessions, but the most significant insights didn’t emerge from one single session. Instead, they surfaced at various intersections; we found that the same concerns kept appearing in different conversations, framed by different people solving different problems. This publication synthesizes those cross-cutting themes, organized around the patterns that senior leaders need to understand and act on now. The retreat did not produce a single, unified vision of the future, but instead produced something more useful: a map of the fault lines where current practices are breaking and new ones are forming.
The middle loop creates a genuine identity crisis for developers who fell in love with programming. Many were hired specifically to translate pre-digested tickets into working code. That work is disappearing. The new work requires different aptitudes and different sources of professional satisfaction. Organizations that don't help people through this transition will lose their most experienced talent to frustration.
I've been feeling this acutely over the last month or so, and it's accelerating every week. I just got into this carreer :( I don't like the new way of working so I guess I need to find new work.
I like the concept of "cognitive debt", I'd like to see that fleshed out some more, the document mainly just says:
Technical debt is becoming cognitive debt: the gap between system complexity and human understanding.
I think some of the conversation they have around junior and staff engineers implicitly expands on that, tbf!