For most of the time this industry has existed, working was the standard. If the thing ran and the customers were served, nobody came asking how you knew it was right.
That is changing, and not because of one law. Customers now send questionnaires before they sign. Insurers ask what controls you have before they price the policy. Buyers in regulated industries ask who approved a change and want to see it. And the rules arriving around data and automated decisions all converge on one question: not does it work, but can you show how you know.
So expect the job to grow a second half. Not more code. Records. Where this data came from and what you are allowed to do with it. Who approved the change and on what basis. What the test actually proved rather than that it passed. What the system was told before it produced that answer.
The expensive version of this is reconstruction. Somebody asks in October about a decision made in March, and three people spend two weeks reading chat history and guessing, to a deadline set by a customer. The cheap version is a handful of habits.
Write the why down where it will be found, not only the what. Put the decision in the record rather than in a thread that will scroll away. When you cannot say where a number came from, treat that as a defect rather than a curiosity, because that is precisely the question you will be asked. And get comfortable saying you will find out and come back by Thursday, since a confident guess is a liability once your words are being written down by somebody else.
Here is the part I want you to take as career advice rather than compliance advice. Very few engineers can sit in front of a customer, an auditor or a regulator and walk calmly through how a system reaches a decision, in plain language, without becoming defensive. It is a rare combination of knowing the system and being unbothered by being questioned. The people who can do it get taken into every conversation that matters, and they tend to find out what the company is really worried about long before anybody else.
Monday: pick one thing you own and see whether you could answer, from records alone, how it decides what it decides.
– Asael Shinder
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