This week I was cleaning up my old work laptop before I return it (oh yeah, I quit AWS 🎉), and I finally got around to reading one of the many open tabs that had been lingering in Brave for the past few months of re:Invent madness: AI's Dial-Up Era by Nowfal Khadar, which I found to be a well-reasoned and measured take on where we are in regards to AI - namely, in a similar place we were in the mid-90s with the internet as a whole. There was one particular parallel he drew that stuck with me, about how the journalism industry was disrupted by the ascension of the internet during that time.
Most people I've worked with don't know this, but before I was a software engineer, I was a journalist. While journalism was something I fell into as a way to pay the rent while striving to be a writer, there was absolutely a part of me that idolized Hunter S. and Hemingway and the many others who long ago went deep to find truths and share them with the masses.
Unfortunately, by the time I entered the industry in the mid-2000s, it was in the process of falling apart and transforming into its present, degraded state. There was no going deep and truth was now a tangential goal, replaced by SEO and appeasing Google rankings long enough to survive another day.
So I left journalism and got into tech. This was around 2015, when startups were all the rage and unicorns were getting crowned left and right. I started learning to code online while working as a writer for a startup doing tech events, and eventually was creating content for startup founders while dreaming of becoming one myself.
It actually took several more years (and a move across the world and a coding bootcamp) before I landed a software engineering role, but I was lucky enough to still catch the tail end of the developer heyday, something I had completely missed by the time I was working at a newspaper a decade before.
So now we get to today; another decade has passed, and I'm facing the dilemma of being in yet another industry facing extinction. My fear is that just like with journalism, it will be to the detriment of society as a whole.
This juxtaposition in particular stood out to me in Nowfal's piece, where he asks if there will be more or fewer software engineers with the rise of AI:
To answer this question, go back to 1995 and ask the same question but with journalists. You might have predicted more journalists because the internet would create more demand by enabling you to reach the whole world. You’d be right for 10 or so years as employment in journalism grew until the early 2000s. But 30 years later, the number of newspapers and the number of journalists both have declined, even though more "journalism" happens than ever. Just not by people we call journalists. Bloggers, influencers, YouTubers, and newsletter writers do the work that traditional journalists used to do.
The same pattern will play out with software engineers. We’ll see more people doing software engineering work and in a decade or so, what "software engineer" means will have transformed. Consider the restaurant owner from earlier who uses AI to create custom inventory software that is useful only for them. They won’t call themselves a software engineer.
One aspect of this transformation he fails to mention is how much worse off we are because of this. Yes, democratization of information as a whole is a net positive, but in that process with journalism we lost expertise. Just as optimizing for SEO led to poorer writing quality (not to mention transforming a creative process into a soul-crushing one), optimizing for likes and subscribes has led to content that values sensationalism over truth. When "fact checker" is no longer a role that exists outside of a very few dying institutions, truth is no longer the outcome - and that was before AI started creating whole new realities.
Newspapers used to have subject matter experts, fact checkers, embedded reporters, and probably another dozen roles I'd never heard of because they were gone by the time I got into the trade. Similarly, an engineering team has frontend and backend experts, devOps, appsec engineers, support engineers (ideally), UX, and so on - not to mention doc writers, developer advocates, etc., which you don't need if you're just building an app for your local restaurant, but presumably some people will still make software they want to sell. Will we get to a place where those experts only exist in dying institutions that we call FAANG today? Will the expectation of software actually working well and bugs being fixed be a thing of the past?
Though there is a core difference between journalism and software's role in shaping a society, in that a free and truth-seeking press is essential to a functioning democracy, but apps are not. If anything, the last decade before AI has led to the enshittification of much of the software we use daily, so perhaps democratization will create a bulwark against the monopolies that allow enshittification to take hold (one can dream).
Or maybe that won't happen. Today, when anyone can create journalistic content, most people still consume it from others. I imagine once anyone can create software, most will still consume it from a smaller cohort of builders (though that cohort will probably be much larger than those of us employed as developers today). One thing I am pretty certain about is that the highly-paid, highly sought after senior engineer will become increasingly rare. Just as for every Christiane Amanpour there are millions of bloggers doing journalism at widely varying quality and for a lot less money, those highly-paid roles someone out of bootcamp could get a few years ago will become much rarer and require a lot more expertise.
And we may still be in the middle of the transformation of journalism from what it was into something that once again seeks truth as its goal, and that transformation might just be helped by the democratization of software development.
Either way, at least I'll be a little more ready for this disruption than I was twenty years ago.
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