Loading… The Age of Individual Contributors in Software Development & Tech

Your greatest strength could also be your greatest weakness.

In the last fifty odd years of software development, our biggest asset, which helped us to progress enormously, was a group of people working together to achieve a common goal.

We refer to these groups of individuals as teams, and their collaboration is known as teamwork, which has been and continues to be one of the most valuable assets for any organization.

That’s why today’s organizations emphasize building exceptional teams. In fact, motivating team members and conducting team-building activities have become and industries of its own.

Also, we have frameworks and methodologies for team based planning and executions. We have mechanisms to take care of individual needs and wants so that they can play their part in the greater success of the team.

The biggest issue, however, with this is that forming a team doesn’t always mean team work. if it does for you, you and your organization is lucky.

All companies around the world can form teams, but the hard part is them working as a team

The greatest strength turns into the greatest weakness due to differing priorities, goals, skill sets, competition with other team members, and varying interpretations of what it means to be part of a team.

This results in slow progress, with most of the time being spent on resolving conflicts instead of advancing on the intended work item or product.

I myself was part of many such discussions where the agreement on how much time it will take, actually took more time than the actual work itself in terms of calendar days obviously??

Now, for a moment, let’s stop talking about teams and talk about a role which exists today and that role is called as Individual Contributor. The individual contributors are expected to generally be an expert, and help organizations to solve an specific problem or work in a technically challenging project.

Even though the title is named as an individual contributor, the individual contributors are not really working independently. They are also part of a team and bounded by team way or working where they have limited say in what to work on and how to implement.

Apart from the people doing PhD or research work, I hardly think there is anyone doing the job of individual contributor in true sense.

But things seem to be changing now, because of the arrival of A.I.

A.I. is already performing the role of a pair programmer for me and for all its faults, it’s really helpful if one applies their own mind, at least you don’t need to argue for hours to convince.

Because in software development, most often than not you need to see the results to pronounce your judgement, which can’t happen without actually doing it.

Think about testing, the A.I. can act as a very useful test team for my work, yes I do need to spend time on it to make sure testing is done correctly, but we do it even today and may be more than what we might be spending with an A.I.

Similarly, think about generating documents for your work or FAQ’s, or converting your software into a packaged executable or library, the A.I. can act as an effective and efficient team for me.

In a nutshell, you as an individual software developer or individual contributor can be the center of the axis, and A.I. can revolve around you, helping you.

Just like Ironman and Jarvis.

Just as Ironman builds everything on his own with the help of Jarvis, you may be the next ironman of the tech or within your company or team.

As a result, we’re moving into an era where individual contributors, aided by A.I. enabled tools, can operate at the pace of startups, and these AI tools might gradually become our team members.

If this happens, which i guess it will in the future, it may not exactly replace the concept of the team, but will move it upwards from HOW part of the work to WHAT part of the work.

With the arrival of Generative AI, I was skeptical about it and wasn’t sure how this will span out, but now, I think, I can see it, and hopefully you can too.

If there is one suggestion I can give to my fellow techies is that, don’t fight, be the ironman of tech, don’t fight, make A.I. your friend, make it your Jarvis

I do hope and believe that this information / blog was helpful to all of you

Thanks for Reading..

Daksh..