London, Escalators, and the Future of Software Engineering

London. In particular, the London Underground. A vast sprawling mess of ascents and descents. People coming and going, up and down, in and out.

The vast majority of the London Underground is traversed by folk on foot, walking from one place to another.

In the early 1900s when the tube was designed, you had to either walk an exhausting set of stairs, spiralling into the darkness, or take a claustrophobic lift into the depths. This was just the way of things back then, and folk accepted that it would probably always be like this.

Then, on October 4th 1911, a new innovation came to Earl’s Court underground station – Two enormous escelators. Moving staircases were installed which took passengers from one platform level to another without the tedium of the steps or the queue for the lift. The escelators were perpetually in motion, taking passenger after passenger on a conveyor belt ride from level to level.

Of course, it wasn’t perfect from day one. Within the first week of the operation of the escalators, 9 dresses were torn, 1 finger was pinched, and one person on crutches fell down the escalator. This led to a guardrail being added to the escalator design which all but prevented the aforementioned incidents. And notably, these moving stairs became a very safe way to travel between levels.

Still, there was resistence – People proclaimed that the escalators would make folk fat and lazy. In 1912, a lady of the time wrote to a newspaper describing the “unsettling sensation” of “moving into an abyss-like space”.

Eventually, Londoners became used to the escalators and as more and more of them rolled out they became just a part of life in the capital.

Back to the here and now, you have more than likely been on these escalators and not even had a second thought as to your safety, or the detriments to your health. They simply exist.

Yet, when you use the escalator, more often than not you see in the middle between the up and the down, a stationary set of steps – for those who are either fit enough or prefer to use them.

So what does this have to do with us as developers? I mean, this is a tech blog right?

Well lets look at escalators as an analogy for AI. It’s new, it’s profoundly different, and it can be quite unsettling looking into the abyss-like space in front of us. We have had some torn dresses and some pinched fingers in the AI world already – but the guardrails have gone up and we are learning the lessons as we go.

Like the Londoners in the early 1900s, we have been thrown an assistive technology and given the responsibility of using it respectfully. After all, if we decide to slide down it on our suitcases, we know that it is going to end badly!

There is a lot of fear in the digital world that developers are becoming obsolete, because of the use of AI. The feeling is that companies are seeing AI as a cheap workforce that can produce code at faster and faster rates, without having to pay pesky humans for annual leave and sick pay and pensions and national insurance…

The reality is that we as developers now have an escalator. We can still see the steps in the middle, and we can still walk the steps (in fact it might be a very good idea to do it once in a while, for fitness sake) – but the escelators take the strain off us.

It is encumbant upon us as developers now to become more of an architect for the software we are developing. We have spent years arguing about the right syntax to use in which situation, and fighting with debugs to try and get to the bottom of how something is working. The onus is on us now to start owning the why. Why are we building this application in this specific way? Can we architect this application to be faster and better by utilising a method which we previously would have avoided because nobody in the team understood it?

As a PHP developer myself, I have been through that fear of an ever-decreasing job pool and ever-more candidates vying for the available positions. I’ve worked through the prospect of having to switch careers to one which isn’t at risk from AI.

The risk, though, isn’t AI – the risk is that we don’t get on board and start to use AI responsibly to take ourselves up to the next level we need to operate at for future job markets.

It’s conceivable that I, as a PHP developer, might be able to step onto the ground floor of a C# developer role knowing nothing about the syntax, but still be immediately productive as a junior .net developer thanks to the versatility of AI being able to act as that translation layer.

Javascript-based front-end technologies move at a rate of knotts, but AI is abreast of that curve, and I can use it as a flotation device to push off into the waters of a new language or framework. The learning curve just became so much flatter!

The key to the job market over the next decade is going to be adaptability and versatility. Sticking to the one language and framework that you love is no longer going to cut it. We need to be bettering ourselves, raising ourselves higher, and abstracting ourselves from the syntax and the IDE.

As developers, nay Engineers, we have the future of technology in our hands and if we don’t learn to leverage AI properly and use it to help us reach that next level then the companies who are starting to embrace AI themselves will have no use for us.

As we use SOLID principles in code, let’s start to see our careers as SOLID too – Abstract ourselves away from one language, and use our broader engineering skills as an interface for whatever we are required to do next.

Remember, that we are the humans that should be kept in the loop. We have the knowledge and the experience to ride the elevator.

Happy Engineering.