You don't know what you don't know

I hear a lot of the times that the software industry is doomed to be replaced by AI or that software engineers who are not coding anymore, because their day-to-day job have been automated by LLMs.

One thing I have learned in this industry and in life, is that nothing is this black and white. There are always layers, nuances and "it depends" to all of these things, but I find it curious why software developers believe this? (besides the ones who have a vested interested in AI).

One possible answer is just that, skill issues, and before you close this page, let me explain, please.

Let's say you are a talented 25 - 30 year-old developer with a 5 - 6 YoE at big tech, but not much other experience outside what you learned about computer science at your university. Your day-to-day is implementing fixes and features that potentially could affect billions of users. You finish a task, and a day later, your feature is in production. To you, software development is simple, or let's say simpler, than it really is.

You are deeply specialized in one (or a few) really narrow areas of software development.

Viewing it through this lens, of course you think that these domains are simple, and everyone else's job is easy too; and I don't blame you for thinking that this year's LLM will automate 90% it, and next year's model will replace these jobs entirely.

What you don't realize is how your implementation is affecting all those billions of users. Do you know how to set up a cache layer, how to deploy to a production server, how to make changes to a database or even what version of the database is being used?

Can you reliably jump between front- and back-end code? Navigate through every part of the system and understand how it actually works? Know how can you access a server, how to secure everything or how to balance the load on the traffic?

Most likely not, because you don't have to. The reason your change is affecting billions of users is because of an incredibly complex system that was put in place by thousands of other talented people where you work and it has been all automated away for you.

When I worked at a large company, not big tech by any means, but a fairly large one, all our managers did was to keep us in small teams, in silos, working on fairly specific tasks and being super productive in our one and only niche area of work. Could I have set up that company's entire software stack? Nope. Did I think I could do it? Sure thing.

It can be incredibly humbling to anyone who leave one of these jobs just to find out they don't know a damn thing about running a software company and have to rely on basic skills that they never needed before.

In that context, I can understand why these developers think "coding is solved".