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About 8 or 9 years ago, I talked to a friend who started their first software engineering job. They talked about their job as taking tickets from the JIRA board
by pbiggar 1y ago
About 8 or 9 years ago, I talked to a friend who started their first software engineering job. They talked about their job as taking tickets from the JIRA board, completing the change, and putting the tickets back. They were expected to complete 2-3 tickets per day. They didn't enjoy the job, needless to say.
I found this ultra-depressing, and far from what coding was for me - a creative role with great creativity and autonomy. Coding was always solving problems, and never felt like some sort of assembly line. But in a lot of companies, this is how it was constructed, with PMs setting up sprints and points, etc.
Similarly, I spoke to a doctor about how much they loved being able to work remotely at their role - with 2-3 days a week where they just responded to email and saw patients over telehealth. It felt very "ticket" focused and not at all the high status doctor role I imagined.
I suspect that both those roles will be lost to AI. If your role is taking a ticket that says "the box should be green, not red", and nothing more, that's the sort of thing that AI is very capable of.
- randallsquared 1y ago> They were expected to complete 2-3 tickets per day. Based on my experience with sprint teams, breaking things down into just a couple hours of work per ticket implies that someone else is doing an enormous amount of prep work to create a dozen tickets per feature. I agree that your friend is performing the work of a development system. I've heard this called "programming in Developer" as opposed to whatever language the developer is using.
- leoedin 1y agoI've had plenty of colleagues who expect the job to be that. Just working on a small ticket and moving it to "to test" when done. It's incredibly frustrating to try and get anything done in a team like that. The reality of most software jobs I've had is that problem discovery is part of it. The only people who know the code well enough to know the problens it has are the developers.
- wiseowise 1y ago> They talked about their job as taking tickets from the JIRA board, completing the change, and putting the tickets back. Where do I sign up?