How will I know if I’m good at my job in a world with AI?
“How will I know if I’m doing a good job?” is a question I’ve asked in almost every job interview I’ve had. I later realized it’s probably not the most common question based on the slightly stunned reactions I got when I asked. Despite that, it’s a question I ask myself now and then as I struggle to figure out how I’m doing professionally.
I’ve been working for 8 years as both a UX designer and a front-end developer and I still have no idea if I’m where I’m supposed to be skill-wise for my experience. Not because I’m not handling my every day-to-day, but because I have no idea where the bar is or if there is one. In university, everything we do is graded or at least we get some kind of feedback, making it fairly easy to know if we’re keeping up with the expected level. Whether the level from university is the same as the one expected from companies is a whole other topic, but the fact that the requirements for what is considered a junior and senior developer vary from company to company shows that we’re struggling to define what’s expected of us as developers and designers.
I’m mentioning both developers and designers as I have experienced the same insecurity in both roles in different ways. As a UX designer, I worried about whether I had enough insight into the business/service to make good design decisions, along with insecurity about my ability to be creative under pressure. As a developer, I worry about keeping up to date with everything and coding in a way that follows good practices that won’t make me and/or my co-workers confused in the future. Ironically none of these worries are mentioned in any of the articles I found about what makes a good developer/designer.
Curiosity. Open minded. Problem solver, good team player, and willingness to adapt are all descriptions that seem to be repeated in these articles. All of these are personality traits more than actual skills, and knowledge within our field of work — and not to mention incredibly hard to measure! If this is truly the metric of how good of a developer and designer we are, then the only way for us to truly know how we’re doing is through talking, getting and trusting the feedback from our peers and some cases our users. In many ways that means that we’re only as good as the quality of the communication and relations we have with the people around us.
But if we’re only as good as the feedback we get, then what will happen with our confidence and perception of our value and skill now that AI is set to take over a lot of our feedback arenas? Where a co-worker previously offered advice or a thumbs up during a coding session/review, an AI is now set to do that job for us. Where design critiques have been used to discuss different approaches to the UI, AI can now generate several options for us. We’re not quite there with the quality of the tools — yet, but one day we will be. While that will be amazing and increase productivity in so many ways, I also can’t help but wonder about the impact it might have on our self-image and motivation long term.
Earlier in 2023 I took a leadership class where we among other things spoke about motivation. I’m not going to dive into the details of that class in this article, but simply put we can divide the types of motivation into 2: Internal and external. External motivation is when the motivation to complete a task comes from an external factor. Examples of external factors can be a fear of getting into trouble with the boss or just wanting to get paid. While internally motivated people also want to get paid, their main source of motivation comes from themselves. They are motivated to complete and do a task well, just because it’s a rewarding challenge and something they want to do. Internal motivation is a result of several different factors in our day-to-day, one of them being how able we are to see the value of our contributions. And what is the value of our contributions, when it might as well be the output of an AI? Another factor is the freedom to make our own choices, and how often will we be able to defend our design or code choices against an “all-knowing” AI?
We’re past the point of whether or not we should use AI tools, now the question is which tools. And while we discuss all the different options, do we take the time to discuss what human interactions we’re losing to said tools, and how it can change our expectations of what a good developer/designer is? Maybe we should?
Because if, how good I am at my job is decided by the feedback I get and my motivation by my contributions and the freedom of choice. Then it’s easy to be discouraged when the feedback is based on a comparison with “the world”, rather than the people around us or the people with the same skillset/experience. It’s also easy to be de-motivated if the freedom to make code and design choices is limited to the conclusion of a machine.
So how will I know if I’m doing a good job in a world with AI when I barely knew in a world without it?
