Spirited Conversations

At the close of work today, we had a spirited conversation on the role of software developers in the future.

For anonymity I’ll name the two central characters as I-man and A-dev.

I-man was of the opinion that programmers would decline in relevance as technologies advance.

A-dev on the otherhand stood against this view with…passion.

A-dev does a lot of things with…passion.

I’m doing my best to not say we had a heated argument 😂.

How did I do?

I shared my own take on the discussion with I-man and it went along these lines:

For all professional extinction events over the next few decades, developers will be the meteorite, not the dinosaurs.

Wix, woocommerce and the like have helped democratize access to creating on the web but anyone that wants even a little more needs to write code.

Traction tends to make people want more.

So if whatever it is anyone does online becomes successful, the next step will be to code the ideas and features you have for growth.

A-dev and I joined our company for this exact reason.

Developers take a lot of pride in their work and rightly so. Few other fields have shaped modern life as much as software development.

I became one because of what was to me a uniquely sublime realization- with my laptop and an internet connection I can influence people all over the world more quickly and widely than almost anyone in the past could have dreamed possible. Certainly more than any other profession today.

I could go on with examples of developer-driven innovations like self-driving cars et al.

Yet as human beings we’ll always need each other.

A time will never come that the only job openings will be for software developers.

And this is just plain fact.

I routinely

• eat food someone made
• listen to music someone made
• go to places people built
• consume content others put out
• do a bunch of other stuff that involve people who don’t write code

I shared how every organization needs an I-man and not just the crop of A-dev and I. Even the “techiest” of organizations.

Written by Mayowa Daniel who lives and works in Abuja building useful things. You should follow him on Twitter. I'm iterating on this voice note journaling and sharing tool called olog. Get it on iOS, on Android and on the web. You can see WIP and suggest edits to articles here