What Developers Get Paid For
~370 Words | ~1.5min Read
Years ago, I wrote that software developers are translators. We translate human intent into machine instructions. But AI has compressed much of that translation work. So what’s left?
Well, do you pay the carpenter for cutting wood and making sawdust, or to build a fence? The cutting and sawdust are instrumental to the fence. Code is instrumental to new computer behaviors. The business never paid you for the code. They paid for the new behaviors and verbs your code gave them.
But here’s what was always implicit: to write the right code, you needed skills beyond coding. Seeing through to the real problem. Understanding what actually adds value. Knowing which constraints matter and which to avoid. These skills told you the right code to write. The better-than-average developer wasn’t distinguished by writing more code. They were distinguished by writing the right code.
Now AI can generate code. But it wasn’t in the meeting with the product owner. It doesn’t know what was discussed, or how it was said, or what “it” even refers to. The compressible labor, translating intent into syntax, is being compressed. What remains is the value-added work:
- identifying the real problem,
- determining what behaviors the business actually needs,
- and knowing how to deliver those economically.
Lean manufacturing identified seven types of waste: transport, inventory, motion, waiting, overproduction, over-processing, and defects. With AI, the wastes have shifted. Now, humans writing code the hard way is overwork. The question isn’t whether you can code. The question is: can you find which new behaviors create value, and compress the path to deliver them?
AI won’t transform your work unless you use it to create new ways of working. Your job has always been to create value for your community and business. Code was a fun way to contribute that value, but value creation was always the goal. With AI compressing the translation step, we need to get very clear on what value-added work actually means for software engineers.
The business doesn’t want your code. They want the machine to behave differently, reliably, without breaking three minutes later. Are you ready to shift your focus from code as the chief thing to business value as the chief thing?