Getting everyone to understand the problems, working together, etc, etc are issues that are inherent to organisations.

They’re orthogonal to AI and to the actual hard technical skills needed to execute on a specific strategy. And if the technical skills are lacking, it doesn’t even matter how good an organisation is at collaboration, whereas hard skills plus organisational disfunction are a known successful pattern :)

Many people did look at this through an individual lens and claimed that design skills, domain knowledge are the truly important abilities. I remember reading on HN at least a couple of popular articles claiming that. Actually, they’re all important and having great design skills without matching coding skills is IMO not really possible. The code feeds into the design, the requirements, the architecture and shapes them.

I don’t disagree. I’ve worked on teams that definitely valued the non-coding skills more and it showed in their inability to deliver on certain requirements… mainly performance and stability.

But these are skills that can be taught to individuals.

But teaching an organization that their real bottleneck isn’t how fast they’re writing code; it’s producing production-ready software that people understand and are willing to take responsibility for… that’s much harder.

Many businesses want to treat software development like an assembly line and revert back to Taylorism. It’s knowledge work and there’s no royal road. Good teams get fast when they have the right mix of skills and trust from the organization.

What we’ve been delving into for the last decade has been a decline in the value of labour and work.

“Code isn’t the hard part,” isn’t meant as an insult at individual programmers or to devalue their work. That’s being done by big tech and their AI hype machine.