Today’s Software Developers Will Stop Coding Soon
Reflecting on the software career development cycle in 2022
The Journey of a Junior IC
Imagine: the path of junior individual contributor (IC) begins. She is in early into her first software development role. She sits, tucked away at her desk, cranking out thousands of lines of code per month.
She delivers high quality work and begins building trust among her teammates. Over time, she receives additional meeting invitations from project stakeholders. Her manager asks her to work on problems of wider scope and greater ambiguity.
A shift begins. Instead of being handed well-defined and tightly-scoped tasks, she is asked to write design documents outlining problem areas and possible solutions. Gradually, her time spent coding decreases from 90 to 80 to 70%. She is no longer green.
Her expertise grows. She is juggling multiple of her own projects and becoming more involved in the design of teammates’ projects. As her capabilities scale, the new features and improvements she’s described pile up faster than she can address them. Seeing this, her manager offers another teammate’s help, but with a catch: all of the designing and planning must be done up front. She accepts, then writes up and hands off a dozen…
