The 'AI' Software Crisis: Software Developers have been promoted into incompetence

Software Developers have been promoted into incompetence

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Developers have been promoted into incompetence #

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With the age of “AI” and agents, software developers have been promoted into incompetence.

And it all comes down to comedy and satire.

Sort of.

That probably requires some explanation.

If you’re actually working in an industry – any industry – reading about management theory is often indistinguishable from reading comedy.

Not just because the reality of how you experience “management” is frequently absurd or grotesque, which the theories often fail to address, but also because the alternative to laughing at the mess, is to cry and despair.

When we – as people working in a deeply flawed industry – read about management theory and practice, most of us won’t recognise any of the “good” practices, but we will be intimately familiar with all the “bad” practices. We could even probably list a few more “bad” examples so awful that they have hitherto been unknown to science or sanity.

We’ve all had bad managers. Sometimes we’ve even been the bad manager.

Occasionally you do get a management book that leans into the inherent comedy of the farce that is the reality of the modern corporation.

Like the book Management of the Absurd by Richard Farson. It doesn’t take itself seriously, has a few useful pointers, and is appropriately mocking at times.

But comedy has also made genuine contributions to both the theory and practice of management.

One of those being The Peter Principle, which has its origin in a satirical book of the same name.

The principle it describes is that people tend to rise through organisations through promotions until they reach a level of respective incompetence.

What it means it that you or I might work, say at coding, at an organisation, and we get good at our entry-level job. Our skills get noticed so we get a promotion that involves more important coding. Same skills, just better and more important. It builds on our skills, which is recognised, so we continue to rise through promotion.

Until, that is, we get promoted to a manager position that doesn’t involve coding. This position instead involves a bunch of skills we haven’t practiced at all.

At this point, it’s entirely possible that we might be worse at the managerial job than we were in the entry-level job where we started.

And because we are now incompetent, we no longer get promotions. We’re stuck. Our career has reached a dead-end because we’ve been promoted into incompetence. We’ve become bad at our jobs through no fault of our own.

Why software industry career ladders have been different #

This has especially been a problem for software companies. The job of a software developer has traditionally been very different from that of a manager.

Coding lends itself to a singular focus during each task. Management requires juggling tasks.

That singular focus means coding is very light on the kind of monitoring work that can be a big part of management.

Coding lends itself to unambiguous communication that deliberately strips nuance and ambiguity away. You mean just what you say and nothing else. Management communication is almost entirely nuance and ambiguity.

Management is all about coordinating unruly “processes” to make sure the work they do is delivering value to the organisation. Busywork of no value is worse than idleness because idleness actually reduces delays and shortens task queues. You can’t react quickly to an unexpected need, if you’re occupied with busywork. But you can react immediately if you’re idle.

Management is all about maintaining a constant vigilance towards the bigger picture: the queues, the delays, where value is being created and destroyed, avoiding both over- and under-optimisation, and coordinating things that are unruly and chaotic.

And, normally, somebody who manages coders rarely codes themselves.

The two jobs are very different. Promoting