The engineer of trusted change

Code is not scarce anymore. We are already living in the world of too much plausible code. That does change our job as developers. However, the job was never just typing anyway. Good developers always brought other things to the table and those things matter more than ever.

Judgment matters. Debugging matters. Taste matters. Systems thinking matters. Tradeoff analysis matters. Being able to explain what the system is doing and why it matters. Saying no matters. Deciding what gets reused and what gets thrown away matters. A lot of what you’re actually paying for in a strong senior engineer is fast, correct judgment over and over again.

In regulated parts of the industry this gets even clearer. The valuable person isn’t the code-machine archetype. It’s the person who can get a change through engineering, control and into production. It’s the person who can repeatedly turn an idea or requirement into deployed trusted change.

The expectations have changed. A senior engineer is now expected to produce and direct more change, faster, without trashing quality or losing the plot. Working with agents becomes part of the job. Preserving understanding becomes part of the job.

That’s also why both of the common comforting stories are wrong. The first is that nothing really changed and engineering carries on exactly as before. The second is that engineering is basically over and developers are now just in the way. Neither is true.

So yes, something has changed.

Less syntax priest. Less merge cop.

More engineer of trusted change.