by bartread | 2025-10-01 11:10:30+00:00
I went through something like that transition the first time I moved into management.

It took me by surprise how much I tied what I did to who I was, and how much it bothered me that I could no longer so easily articulate what I'd done during a day at work. It was no longer I made this, I made that, I added these features, I fixed those bugs. It was all relational. It was all meetings and conversations. It felt like anyone could be doing it. So I felt like I had no value. Like I was a spare wheel. Three or four years and in all that time I never made my peace with it.

So burned out and dejected[0] I went back to software development and performance consulting. I did that for about 3 years.

The second time I went into management was different. Maybe I was just older. Maybe I'd done a bit more reading and thinking about management and leadership. I certainly knew what I liked and disliked, and what I admired in other leaders. Because of the consulting I'd seen a variety of leaders at work in lots of different contexts, with different challenges, different styles, and different personalities. At any rate, I had a different and broader view of what good looked like.

I also had a clear and strong remit and room to operate: build a new product, build and lead a new team, open an office, rearchitect and rebuild our platform, become CTO.

But the critical change was that I now saw my value in enabling the success of others - our team, the teams that relied on our platform and products, our customers and clients - and so I loved my job (for the most part).

This doesn't directly relate to AI but does show that it's possible to go through a transition where you lose a big part - or all - of what you thought gave you value, status, and satisfaction in a role, and grow into something new and valuable as a result of that.

In my case that took for-fucking-ever - I've always been something of a late developer[1] - and many people reading this have and will adapt much more quickly. I'll say this: it's much easier to let go when you have a stronger idea of what "next" looks like[2], so figure out what that is. Software development is changing, for all of us, and even now nobody really knows what that means, but it doesn't mean there aren't plenty of opportunities.

It's also worth bearing in mind that a lot of the more extreme viewpoints published online regarding AI and software development are no better than noise: they're just clickbait designed to generate reaction and engagement. Their real informational value is close to zero.

That is obviously not the case with this piece, which describes the author's personal experience in our new AI enabled world.

And I get their point about the craft. You really do feel that. But what you have to realise is the craft doesn't go away: it moves to a different level of abstraction. What can you (what can we) do now that you couldn't do before? What do the wrinkles and contours of that, where your (our) finesse will be needed, actually look like?

This all reads more like a pile of scattered thoughts than I'd intended, but hopefully there's some value in there for some of you.

[0] Not just for these reasons: there were other things - including one or two other major contributors - going on that I don't want to talk about here, but my lack of comfort with the nature of my role was certainly a somewhat chunky factor. Just don't overread or assume too much from what I'm saying.

[1] No pun intended - nobody should read anything delivery related into this comment.

[2] This touches on some of those issues I didn't want to talk about. Within that organisational context I'd reached a ceiling and no-one, including me, was grown up enough to be real about that. So I kept trying to push on and break through and, well, I guess we all wasted a lot of eachother's time although, from my side, I don't feel too bad about it.