Copilot Is Outsourcing 2.0

Decision-makers can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. (Or, in this context, remain employed.)

- Will Larson, "Career Advice in 2025"

"AI" coding tools like Copilot went from a mere curiosity to full-blown silver bullet territory in a few short years. I'm all for reducing the accidental complexity Fred Brooks wrote about in his classic essay on software engineering, but what’s driving me a little bit crazy lately is talk amongst people (mostly non-engineers) around the industry that Copilot and the like are magical productivity machines.

I'm not the only seasoned engineer to notice that this present moment feels eerily similar to the outsourcing craze of the 2000s. The dream of every non-technical executive who had a bunch of software engineers on their payroll was to lay them off and replace them with people in faraway countries with a lower standard of living who they could pay less to do the same job. Well...it didn't exactly work out that way. It turns out that software engineers are not, in fact, fungible code-typing machines. Outsourcing jobs to cheaper parts of the world is very much still a thing, but it took several years of reality colliding with the dream to bring expectations down to a reasonable level.

In 2025, the executive's dream is back, and bigger than ever. What's better than paying humans in other parts of the planet less to do the same job? We can get AI™ to do the job for even less!

The outsized hype around AI coding tools is premised on the idea that software engineers are primarily code-writers. If we could get machines to type the code, then we can save a ton of money, right? The reality in my experience is that typing code faster is not a bottleneck for any software engineer that you would want working on your product. Writing code is a small percentage of what a software engineer actually does.

I remember a friend of mine from college asking me many years ago, when learning that I was studying Computer Science, if I was worried about destroying my hands from typing so much. He apparently imagined that the career I was training for was similar to a court stenographer. In the software industry, we used to refer to engineers who produced huge volumes of repetitive code quickly as "code monkeys". This matches the outside perception of someone furiously hacking away at a keyboard, with speed of keystrokes making the overall impression.

The thing is, a “code monkey” is replaceable by AI. If there's anything we've learned over the last 200 years or so, it's that machines can do repetitive, mindless tasks faster and more cheaply than humans. If the work of a software engineer really looked like: 1. Do a Google search. 2. Copy and paste code from your web browser into your code editor. 3. Hit a button to commit to your team's code repository; then heck yeah, a machine can do those things way faster than a human.

I don't fear being replaced by an AI that can copy and paste code from the internet faster than I can. I do worry about non-technical executives either firing me or not hiring me based on marketing, or a belief that this is what software engineers primarily do to create software that is valuable to an actual business.

Just like the executive's dream of outsourcing faded to a modest incremental reduction in the cost of developing software, I believe that so to will the dream of the AI engineer. I don't need to ask Fred Brooks what he would have thought (RIP).

Engineering-led Research Tickets

One of my optimistic beliefs about software engineers is that we're full of good ideas about how things around us could be improved. We're smart people, problem solvers. We read tech news, we're friends with engineers at other companies, we bring diverse career experiences to each job--in other words, we're at least vaguely aware of better ways of doing things that are happening in other places.

If we want to go beyond just talking about better ways of doing things, we need to empower engineers to capture their ideas for improvement in the backlog right next to ideas from the product management side. It's critical, of course, that items in the backlog generated by engineers are refined, estimated, and actually included in sprints on a regular basis.

And we want to go beyond the all-too-easy step of adding a one-line ticket at the end of our backlog that says “do cool thing X”. Since no one has the foggiest idea how we’ll actually do that cool thing, the backlog item just sits there and no one ever puts it into a sprint because it’s too nebulous and scary and we don’t know how long it will take or if it’s even possible in a sprint-worth’s amount of time.

Make that “do cool thing X” a research ticket. Time-box the effort. We can put this into a future sprint because at the end of the time box (fitting within one sprint) we will have a documented outcome that gets us closer to the goal than we were before, and we’ll have a much better idea of the actual steps to get there with "real" tickets representing the work.

The output of these research tickets can be a comment saying we shouldn’t do this and here’s why. Or the output could be a series of other tickets the engineer creates with a ticket for each step of the process toward accomplishing the ultimate goal...or a nice intermediate goal.

Even if we end up looking at the list of steps for follow-on work and think, “Geez! That’s a lot of damn work to get the outcome we want!” and we decide it’s not worth the effort, that's still a great outcome.

Software Engineer Career Levels at Companies You've Heard Of

I found a site called Progression.fyi that curates a list of "career frameworks," or in other words, the level-progression system of titles that a bunch of tech companies use for their software engineers. It's pretty interesting to peruse.

Several of these companies define what the often nebulous title of Staff Engineer means to them, which I find particularly compelling.

Here are a few companies you've probably heard of, with links to their pages where they define their career progressions for software engineers:

• Dropbox
• Etsy
• Khan Academy
• Redgate
• Square