The Chart Is the Same Chart

The FT ran a chart about software engineers. Hiring down, job postings contracting, the curve bending in the direction you already knew it was bending.

The thing is, you can do a find-and-replace on "software engineer" — swap in paralegal, financial analyst, radiologist, junior copywriter, entry-level anything — and you get the same chart. The slope doesn't change. The story doesn't change. You just get a different label on the y-axis and the same sick feeling.

This is what makes the current moment genuinely hard to think about, and why most people aren't thinking about it directly. When one profession gets disrupted you can point to it as a case study — the travel agents, the video store clerks, the particular thing that happened to a particular thing. You can write the postmortem. You can learn the lesson.

But when the chart is the same chart regardless of what you put in the title, you don't have a case study. You have a condition.

Nobody knows how this plays out. Anyone who says otherwise is selling a keynote. The honest answer, five years into the serious deployment of these systems, is that we're watching something that doesn't have a good historical analogy — not the industrial revolution, not the PC, not the internet — and the only data we have is the data still coming in, which so far keeps drawing the same line in the same direction.

The software engineers are just the ones who got there first. The engineers who built the thing that's eating their profession. There's a joke in there somewhere but I'm too tired to find it.