Comment by roenxi
8 hours ago
Old value: Producing high value software.
How to do it? Focus on writing code.
New value: Producing high value software.
How to do it? Focus on writing specs for code / identifying needs.
I expect there are a lot of hypocrites in the mix, scared for their job. But this isn't a fundamentally hypocritical position - agents are changing the game for how software gets produced and the things that were important as recently as a year ago might reasonably be said to be irrelevant now. Ironically, we might yet see a great software engineer who has never written a program in their entire life. The odds are slim but it is possible now.
Sorry, did people not identify needs when developing "high value software" before? That doesn't seem true to me at all. I took a "Needs Assessment" course in my class of '09 undergrad...
This is shifting the principle/value discussion up to a level where it's meaningless. Let's use a different example.
Old value: Returning value to shareholders.
How to do it? Treat your employees like family and don't be evil.
New value: Returning value to shareholders.
How to do it? Treat your employees like human resources and get away with what you can get away with.
Is this hypocritical? Most people would say yes, but in your framing it's not because we've backed up to the least specific articulation of an underlying principle. It's a species of the motte and bailey fallacy.
Agents may be changing the game for how software gets produced, but all it's really done is switch software developers from being managed to being managers. And software developers trying to square their historic value/principle that management tasks are useless, easy, and ceremonial (to borrow GP's word) tasks that should take a back seat to ~flow state coding~ with their new view that management is an integral, difficult, and requisite part of writing code reeks of hypocrisy.