Will 'Coders' Exist in Five Years?

I don't believe a 'coder' as a profession exists anymore in five years.

That was a parting thought I left my team with at our tech leads meeting this afternoon, and I stand by it. In fact, I would have said the same thing (but replace five years with ten years) in 2020.

Will people still write code in 2031?

Probably. But more likely we'll be spending far less of our time bashing on our keyboards and more time on chatting through metrics, architectural designs, counter-measures, goals, drivers, competitors, and strategy.

The shift from coder to builder

I'm a firm believer that the days of sending a PRD back if it's not complete with every edge case imaginable are already over, and at some point in the near future such a thing would be laughable — because you should be helping to write those PRDs.

Don't wait for the designer to give you polished designs: ingest their design system, take a stab at it yourself, and send a prototype over to them so they can play with it and suggest how you can make it better.

If you can't already see that the industry is moving away from the coder archetype and toward a builder archetype, I would encourage you to take a critical look outside your team and evaluate what you need to do to be competitive in your career in the next half decade.

What if the new world isn't for you?

Maybe you're going to decide it isn't. That's fine, honestly. I make furniture in my spare time even though it's expensive, takes forever, and a machine could do it better. And honestly, some people would probably pay more for my furniture. But there's a time and a place for everything (and Ikea isn't going to hire me to build for them anytime soon).

How do you actually adapt?

The same way I've always tried to in my professional career: be curious. Be flexible. Be creative. Adapt. I've never been as good at coding as some of my colleagues, but where I thrive is being a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. And as luck would have it, AI is precisely positioned to 100x the output of that specific archetype.

And I promise, you can learn to lean in too. I'm convinced the literal only thing it takes is curiosity and a willingness to change. Frequently. That's it. No special training course. No bootcamp. Just you and a keyboard and maybe a YouTube rabbit hole.

So what are you going to do this year to get ready?