The Scientist and the Machine

A scientist at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk Akademgorodok (which also has a funny monument to a laboratory mouse knitting DNA out front) spent his life decoding the human genome. He did it by hand, using the Sanger method: test tubes and pipettes and all of it. Years of painstaking work.

Then came the Millennium Prize and next-generation sequencing. What used to take years now took a day and cost less than $1,000.

The people behind the method came to give a talk at his institute. He couldn't sit through it. Halfway in, he stood up and walked out.

A lot of people in tech feel something similar right now. Writing code by hand, the thing we've done our whole careers, is becoming unnecessary.

But there's no need to take it that hard. As Kent Beck put it: "90% of my skills just went to $0. The other 10% went up 1,000x."

So what's that remaining 10%? It's not just architecture, engineering culture, process, or business analysis. First and foremost, it's judgment: knowing what is worth building in the first place. Taste. The ability to look at a problem and see the one solution people will actually pay for, and the ten they'll ignore.

We're at the start of an IT renaissance. Anyone can spin up a startup now. And surviving in that brutally competitive environment, that's the skill that will define where we go from here.