My great-great-grandfather thought he’d be replaced by technology too.
He was a farrier in the village where I grew up. Then he saw a car drive through the next town over, or read an article about it in the paper. So he became a mechanic, like every man in the family after him.
In the end, he kept his purpose: helping people get around. He just changed the technology, going from horses to engines.
I think about this a lot these days, surrounded as I am by so many developers who wake up every day wondering what’s going to become of them. There’s some comfort in knowing that someone in my family had the same doubts before me.
Because, yes, we love to say AI is the biggest revolution since the Industrial Revolution, and that we’re going through a transformation unlike anything we’ve seen before. But that overlooks the farmers who watched the tractor roll in, or the farrier who watched the car arrive. They didn’t have X to doomscroll first thing in the morning (lucky them), but they too wondered what on earth they were going to do, imagining the worst.
And my great-great-grandfather’s story illustrates something we hear all the time but rarely take in (probably because it’s usually hammered home by people who no longer code): our job was never just about writing code.
Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself. After all, many of us decided we wanted to be developers before learning to code, just to create video games or websites. The desire came before the code.
Be willing to let go of the how to hold on to the why.