Most of the conversation about the future of work is people worrying about their own role. Widen it for a moment, because the roles around you are moving faster than yours, and how you behave while that happens will define a lot of your working life.
Look at who you actually depend on. The support agent who knows which customers do the strange thing. The tester who can break your feature in four minutes. The ops engineer who has kept a fragile system upright for six years. The technical writer who understood the product well enough to explain it. Every one of those jobs is being reshaped right now, some of them quite roughly.
Three things follow from that, and they are all practical.
First, learn what they know before the role changes shape. That support agent is carrying a map of how the product behaves in the real world, built from thousands of conversations, and it exists nowhere else. Sit with them for an hour. Ask the tester how they decide where to look. This knowledge does not survive a reorganisation on its own, and once it is gone, your team will rediscover it the expensive way.
Second, do not be smug about it. It is a very small industry and a long career, and the person whose function got automated this year is often the person interviewing you, or approving your budget, or running the team you want to join. More importantly it is just a rotten way to treat people you have worked alongside. Your turn will come around in some form.
Third, understand that when a role next to yours thins out, the work does not disappear. It lands on you, usually unannounced. The testing your team no longer has a tester for is now your problem. Notice it early and say so out loud, because the alternative is absorbing it silently until quality quietly drops and nobody can explain why.
The people who come through the next decade well will not be the ones who protected their own patch. They will be the ones who kept noticing what was happening to everybody else's, and made themselves useful in the gaps.
– Asael Shinder
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