Programming

Someone tell my boss this, they don’t understand agile. They think we can “start the process” of developing a solution before we’ve understood a single thing about what the customer needs.

And it’s not that we don’t have 100% of the requirements either. It’s basically a we don’t talk to the customer or perform market research to know where we should take the product, so I’m going to make up features at an absurdly abstract level and no you don’t need to meet to talk about it, just start working. “The requirements will come later”, they say. From whom exactly? 🤔

I'll do you one better. The hardest part of making crap people like is the damn people. I have been a product manager for a decade and I can confidently say if I deliver exactly what the customer asks for I would be an utter failure. Requirements and software that fulfill what a customer says they want will ultimately lead to them asking for something they previously didn't realize because it actually turns out they have no idea what they want, have an agenda, or the conditions have shifted from under you and what they said no longer holds water.

I could go on a tirade about this but my two cents is you gotta listen to what everyone says, but assume they are a human at the end of the day. It's too damn easy for me to suck up dev time with what people want. Hell, just one word can keep a dev team busy for a long time. Internationalization! Boo!

I also need to build an environment where the dev team doesn't despise the business due to a history of constantly shifting goalposts, borderline abusive metrics, and expectations that just create a battered development team. For some reason hiring a PM aligns with an org hitting the point where the original dev team has lost critical members because of terrible burnout and a culture of blaming people and not process. Takes a lot of therapeutic communication to remedy that.

TLDR; People. People are the reason all things are difficult.

it’s the fucking humans

But coding seems quite literally like modeling those requirements.

It's coming with names

“Did I say ‘we want it to do this OR that?’ I meant we wanted it to do this ‘AND’ that!” 🤦‍♂️

I think he's missed a potential benefit of AI.

He seems to be speaking mostly of greenfield development, the creation of something that has never been done before. My experience was always in the field of "computerizing" existing manual processes.

I agree with him regarding the difficulty of gathering requirements and creating specifications that can be turned into code. My experience working as a solo programmer for tiny businesses (max 20 employees) was that very few people can actually articulate what they want and most of those that can don't actually know what they want. The tiny number of people left miss all the hacks that are already baked into their existing processes to deal with gaps, inconsistencies, and mutually contradictory rules. This must be even worse in greenfield development.

That is not saying anything negative. If it were any other way, then they would have had success hiring their nephew to do the work. :)

Where I think AI could useful during that phase of work is in helping detect those gaps, inconsistencies, and contradictory rules. This would clearly not be the AI that spits out a database schema or a bit of Python code, but would nonetheless be AI.

We have AI systems that are quite good at summarizing the written word and other AI systems that are quite good at logical analysis of properly structured statements. It strikes me that it should be possible to turn the customers' system descriptions into something that can be checked for gaps, inconsistencies, and contradictions. Working iteratively, alone at the start, then with expert assistance, to develop something that can be passed on to the development team.

The earlier the flaws can be discovered and the more frequently that the customer is doing the discovery, the easier those flaws are to address. The most successful and most enjoyable of all my projects were those where I was being hired explicitly to help root out all those flaws in the semi-computerized system they had already constructed (often enough by a nephew!).

I'm not talking about waterfall development, where everything is written in stone before coding starts. Sticking with water flow metaphors, I'm talking about a design and development flow that has fewer eddies, fewer sets of dangerous rapids, and less backtracking to find a different channel.

I think AI isn't going to replace the upper level of programmers, but I do believe the absolute number of programmers will drop as AI completes more and more of the labor involved in coding.

A lot of entry level jobs just won't exist anymore, because the AI will do the typing work while a small number of people manage the AI.

And this will apply to pretty much all white collar work - at least that's my prediction.

I believe that besides blue collar jobs, AI will practically eradicate the middle class, and sadly there won't be a UBI to pick up the slack. But maybe I'm just too damn cynical.