Differentiation in the age of commodity.

How do you differentiate as a coder in the near future when coding is headed towards being commodity.

We have seen how the three level pyramid (labour force, information processors and entrepreneurs/creatives) created during the industrial revolution is playing out in the west. Automation and AI are attacking the bottom two layers.

The same is and will be true for coding becoming commodity as the Cloud adoption increases world-wide. You wouldn't need the same set of teams across companies when there is one mega team providing it as a service from a Cloud company like AWS. The cost and time taken to build a product will come down significantly. Suddenly, you will see redundancies getting removed from all the companies thereby increasing bottom lines and enhancing the cost to efficiency curve. Does this mean we will need less engineers? Hell no, the civilization moves on the premise that growth is infinite, we always move towards a better future. As we see today, change is hard, at scale people get left behind. What strategies should people in coding pursue?

One of the ways to think about this is to study that why are MBA courses so costly world-wide and folks get paid highly. It's assumed that once you go through MBA then your perceived ability to think about a problem, the business opportunity it presents and making a successful strategy to capture the market is very high. Now, thinking is not commodity and no two people think alike; at-least in theory. This is precisely why you see an implicit pyramid in a typical tech org where the ratio of thinkers to coders go top to bottom forming a pyramid both in number of people and how they are compensated.

It might be a good strategy for engineers to appreciate and stretch their thinking beyond code, tech architectures, etc and attach to the larger mission of what product to build to solve the problem, and, what strategy to pursue thereby blurring the boundaries of tech and product teams. This will also super-charge the innovation boundaries in enterprises since you will have people who can think and make it happen, it's like nuclear power. Today, we live in a world of relay race where thinking, strategy, product design, engineering work in an assembly line model with people passing the baton across different functions with serious gaps as information is passed on. The classic example can be seen in the launch of best Android phone till date, S8 (https://wccftech.com/galaxy-s8-rushed-design-flaw/), most probably the launch date got fixed by the marketing and strategy teams and eventually engineering/design had to make calls to meet them. If engineers can stretch and blur the boundary as is evident by Google's parent company Alphabet then you will see more innovation and successful products coming out.

From my experience, it's not about ability, it's a choice and some of us think it harms our perceived image of being a super GEEK. Eventually, we might not have a choice here. This might sound too far into the future as the pyramid of industrial revolution is now under attack, a good 80-100 years but the rate at which information technology moves is different and we might see this becoming a reality sooner than later.

I would love to hear more thoughts and what people think how this can be applied in organizations with large setups.