When the world is software, what are the jobs? Many of my indie hacker friends believe there is bliss to be found in pure development - living inside code. The career-changers who have dropped nontrivial money on "boot camps" believe their goal is to get a "junior" development job.
But when I look around at the world of technology, I see the after-effects of Marc Andreesen's observation that "software is taking over the world" from a decade ago. He was right. It has!
As a result, lots of business has embedded technology - and the reverse. The two are colliding to form a new reality of how commerce gets done. The intersect of business and technology means that every day more disciplines are popping up.
Some of this is about the tech-enablement of "traditional" roles like sales. Supporting technology in those areas will drive a great deal of value. But some are more novel. A few that I think are particularly interesting follow.
Shipping is critical to development efforts. One can write code all day long, but it does not create value until it enters production. This transition has gotten more complex than ever just over the last decade. Ten years so, shipping was often a matter of uploading one's code to a server over FTP and maybe jotting down an entry in the change management system. A new discipline called "DevOps" was just on the rise. Now, the development of software is in many ways much easier, but entering production is more complex. Further, as software becomes a more standard way of delivering value, quality control and turnaround time are more significant concerns.
The work of managing the transition from a development environment to production is work! The "classic" web development work of getting to a server is hard enough. But now, with the advent of a plethora of "app stores," the work of deployment is even more complex. To take one example, deploying an update to an iOS application requires shipping promotional images in multiple form factors, managing a TestFlight beta test regime, and managing an automated pipeline for the codebase itself - ideally using an automated system like Fastlane.
These are all new skills that will reward specialization.
Documentation is more important now than ever before. Software without content cannot drive value without substantial hand-holding. As we scale software outside of the small number of mega-corporations, we need people to understand it without requiring significant personnel or consulting investments. Documentation can come in many forms: written reference material, tutorials, videos, drip campaigns, and courseware.
There is a need for people to create the content and to repurpose it. These are different skills. Initial creation requires interviewing and collecting data from both the development team and customers, which one then memorializes. People who can take long-form video or written material and chop it into pieces that support both training and the just-in-time search will multiply the value of that content.
Integrations. One of the essential parts of the technical organization will be facilitating integrating the firm's core technology with complementary systems. By enabling composition, value to the customer multiplies. In my experience, after an initial surge in core product development, marginal equity creation shifts to making these connections first possible and then easy.
Integrations are a vast potential complexity, which is why the core engineering team does not want to take them on. That is a good thing: the skills of figuring out which connections matter the most and how to make them easy are different and applicable across multiple organizations.
Finally, integrations require documentation. For the client to compose your solution into their structure, they need a different level of training and enablement that will create value. Integration documentation will be a high-value job description.
Community is the last novel discipline I want to tackle here. Mehta might call this "low touch" customer success. While support "communities" existed before now, I think the discipline of community management has taken a turn during the pandemic. The company does not get to control the community - lots of empty Circle spaces are floating around. Figuring out how to engage and help the user base to facilitate success will matter. I am only now starting to understand this value. Those companies that do it well will see a significant valuation multiple. Those individuals that enable community involvement will create that equity value.
What I particularly like about community is how it is looked down upon by so many engineers. I know of women doing well in this domain, in part because it seems less prone to "tech bros." The foundation can be a little less toxic. I don't expect this trend to continue - as things become more mainstream, the demographics will reflect mainstream demographics. But a healthier base can only be good for the maturation of the discipline, industry - and the communities themselves.
By focusing one's efforts on these areas surrounding core development, one can become an expert in an emerging domain more rapidly, rather than a junior trying to break into an established one. There are fortunes to be made by learning these areas early and becoming the senior expert who can transform recently-tech enabled businesses to become the engines for the next decade of our economy. Whether tackling these as job descriptions or business plans, there is money in these banana stands.
Photo by Jonathan Cosens Photography on Unsplash