Let me start by admitting that I’m a bit uncomfortable in the middle of this cute dystopia we are living. We are in big 2026, where we were supposed to be smashing it out with cars flying around, human rights not being under discussion and people getting rid of their manual, tough jobs in order to have more time to think.
Spoiler: we derailed a bit.
I’ve been trying to understand and I still struggle, but my gut feeling is that vast of the society got stuck in the COVID period, still applauding in silence the doctors and nurses every night while self-convincing that we will be better once over and out, hoping for the best but expecting the worst.
That fear has translated to a desperate survival mode where everyone else represents a risk. Grumpy people around, shifting the calendar one day more with a cynical view of the world, scared of loosing their tiny parcel of ownership and protecting it by shooting whatever might put it in danger.
At the same time, everybody wants to be part of every massive music show or social event, willing to pay any amount of money because missing it would mean not being part of the tribe. Absolute misanthropy for breakfast; “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” with 70k people more for dinner.
Social-economics are a huge spoke in the wheel to get it back steady: companies does not reach their economic goals with consistency and that leads on frequent layoffs; go to the grocery store leads on depression; we cannot live close to the job place, friends and family because it’s way more important to keep the macroeconomic KPIs healthy; we cannot live far neither because, no matter how strange it may seem, robots are really close to replace half of the humanity whereas we couldn’t find yet a way to make trains to depart and arrive on time — shoot out Renfe, shoot out Rodalies!
With this social background, of course IT as well as software development cannot be aside, becoming a tiny representation of all the mentioned above —I guess though that is pretty similar around. LinkedIn has become a sort of aura farming battle, where everyone is over-acting on every and each topic that concerns the industry, hoping this way to gain visibility and survive the next wave that will wash down yet another batch of jobs.
The umpteenth AI-based post of architecture solutions; people begging for attention doing the Six-Seven —I like to imagine them shaking their hands at home while writing the post— advising how accurately well they use AI agents and the impressive amount of software they are building followed by a post of an AI negationist that sticks to use vi as a way to protect the software development purity. Everybody willing to win a minuscule portion of the cake by broadcasting prescriptive —though misleading— content.
I’m not that different and certainly not better than all this, but my pessimistic, introvert personality makes me hesitate constantly and about everything while everybody around —tech and non-tech— has a formed answer for every kind of question that may arise.
Given that I’m too old to take part of an aura farming battle and strike a pose of senior tech lead AI expert, I’d rather prefer to share the questions that lately have being surrounding my head and are related to all the uncertainty and discomfort I have been talking about.
- Where are we supposed to chime in and focus our efforts within the software development pipeline? In many cases we are not coding much and, for instance, reviewing PRs become a clear bottleneck that seems that must be delegated to AI too.
- Shall we be closer to a Product role? It seems that becoming a domain expert will make a big difference, but when you’re getting familiar with the ubiquitous language of a certain domain, it’s time to depart for one or another reason.
- Are the good practices that brought us here over? I’m currently in the Python ecosystem and I haven’t written a single line of code in almost one year — and if you ask me, I think it’s fine. If I don’t write code though, why for instance to be concerned about clean code and thoroughly optimize for human reading?
- Is then the “orchestra man” the ultimate shape of a software engineer? Will ever get back to the specialists? Will even the orchestra man eventually disappear? Step by step looks like the market is pushing forward to have a whole department replaced by a couple of developers boosted with Claude Code.
- Is still taking care of building a software team such a thing? Reorgs, elasticity to scale pods based on business requirements, layoffs, burnout, etc. Shall we get used to rotate our teammates almost every year?
- In-person vs hybrid vs full-remote: Where we are? Full-remote supporters treat as stupid people who prefers a hybrid model. Managers distrust workers that have good reasons to lean towards full remote. In-person hooligans cannot understand that commuting for 2 hours every day, if possible to avoid it, is merely crazy.
- Why is so difficult to cooperate when some boundaries within the company are crossed? The airplane oxygen mask™️: if I help you I cannot do my stuff, even if that means that if I don’t help you, you cannot do your stuff. Everybody wants to “survive” one month more.
- Is pair programming over? Given that your preferred AI agent acts a sidecar without need of sharing your screen nor explaining all the decisions you are making, feels like pair programming is passé.
- Shall we call it pair architecturing? I always have dreamed about coin a software term and becoming a guru
- What are companies seeking for? I personally don’t see much difference in all the offers I receive now than 6 years ago, but the game has totally changed. I’m totally lost in what building software means in 2026, however seems that most of the people is not way far from my position.
- What should be evaluated? If AI is executing, what’s the skill that we must focus on: Background? Communication skills? Coding skills? Tech stack fitting? Is he/she good on making jokes?
- Has AI slightly changed the game by shifting a big % of importance from coding to soft skills?
- How to evaluate? I’ve been hosting quite a few interviews lately and I still don’t know which is the best approach to discover talent. Live coding still feels like being in an escape room; take-home exercises are an extra workload that not everybody can handle/wants to handle.
- 🤖 yes / 🤖 no?
- If I let to use Claude Code, Codex or whatever you are used to during the live coding exercise, we will likely end up looking together at the screen seeing how the AI agent solves it for you and, in the best case, I will be able to assess candidate’s communication skills.
- If I don’t let to use any, I will be able to assess your ✨OG coding skills✨. But then we are in the same situation as we were few years ago, with people asking to close the browser and even prohibiting to use an IDE. Sorry my friend, but of course everybody looks odd if their eyebrows got removed.
− Wait Rubén, you admitted that you haven’t coded in a while, isn’t? Also, that you are using AI agents for these daily duties, right? So, where’s the doubt if you’re actually benefiting from one of those options?
− True, but hesitating also means disagreeing on things that you do or even like —AI as a guilty pleasure, oh gosh.
- Are we in the Fast Software era? Just like Fast Food or Fast Fashion, where everything is built to be consumed immediately and throw it to the bin. “Business opportunity” and “momentum” seems to have hijacked the scenario.
- Will any software be profitable ever? Looks like the extended heuristic is: Hiring when an investment round have been raised, layoff when the money is gone. It’s a controversial topic but, am I alone in this feeling?
There’s nothing more software-related than caring about humans. Just like there’s nothing more gangsta than calling your grandma every week.