On Facing Extinction (Again)

Source: Dev.to

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. I found it 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. One particular parallel he drew stuck with me: how the journalism industry was disrupted by the ascension of the internet during that time.

---

From Journalism to Tech

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. Thompson, 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 already in the process of falling apart and transforming into its present, degraded state. There was no going deep; truth had become 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.

The Current Dilemma

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.

What the Transformation Might Cost

One aspect of this transformation he fails to mention is how much worse off we are because of it.

• Journalism: Democratization of information is a net positive, but we lost expertise. Optimizing for SEO led to poorer writing quality (and turned 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 a few dying institutions, truth is no longer the outcome—and that was before AI started creating whole new realities.

• Software: Newspapers used to have subject‑matter experts, fact‑checkers, embedded reporters, and a dozen other roles that vanished before I entered the trade. Similarly, an engineering team has frontend and backend experts, DevOps, app‑sec engineers, support engineers (ideally), UX, documentation writers, developer advocates, etc. You don’t need all of those 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 that software actually works well and bugs are fixed become a thing of the past?

A Core Difference & a Possible Hope

There is a core difference between journalism and software’s role in shaping society: a free, truth‑seeking press is essential to a functioning democracy, whereas 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 that to happen (one can dream).

Looking Ahead

• Consumption patterns: 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 the developers we employ today).

• Senior engineers: 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 a bootcamp could get a few years ago will become much rarer and will require a lot more expertise.

• Potential renaissance: 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, the landscape is shifting. The question is not whether software engineering will disappear, but how its practice, expertise, and societal impact will evolve.

Ay, at least I'll be a little more ready for this disruption than I was twenty years ago.