Archetypes instead of professions

Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code and an active voice on AI social media, posted a reflection on the professions of the future and archetypes these past months and, actually, he is talking precisely about the profession not really having the name of a profession.

I like it a lot because, ever since the agile world, since the Agile Manifesto appeared and later entered corporations in force, we have seen job titles disappearing. Some companies, banks included, one from the Netherlands (ING, in 2015), made a big announcement that there were no more titles on the badge, that everyone was working toward the same goal inside the bank.

I also see this in how we are pushed to be more generalist, to be able to attack the problem from several angles, since the more specific tasks can be done by the computer, by Excel, by artificial intelligence. I think that’s my provocation: the profession in software development is not only still valid, it is reinforced by a need for us to be even more generalist, in the format of The era of the Dash-Shaped Professional.

Boris will say that there are some archetypes, instead of professions. He says that professions won’t be domain-specific anymore. Obviously he has a very specific view of the corporate tech world of Silicon Valley, which can be applied in some other places in the world and industries, but still in those that are very tech intensive.

The names Boris uses for these archetypes, like builder, prototyper, grower etc., show that people are acting at moments and stages of a product, usually a digital product, instead of being focused on a specific part of the product. They work with the product as a whole, but at one period of its existence: maturity, testing or prototyping, growth, finding market fit.

And notice that these names are truly generalist. He even says that whoever is a builder, for example, can be a designer as well as a product person or a programmer. It will depend a lot on your knowledge, your maturity and even your profile as a professional.

I believe badges are quickly losing their functions. In talks, I usually ask the audience the following question: “You know when people at your company meet you for the first time and ask: so, what do you do here at the company? What’s your title?” People usually start that answer with “so, here at the company I do a…” and they hesitate. And this happens even with people from the same department. You can’t explain your job description perfectly.

Even today, when writing a job opening, it’s more and more complicated to say what we need, which specialty, which education, which technical knowledge that person would need to do the job well. Because not only is everything boiling over, it’s possible that people with very different technical knowledge and titles can fill this new position on your team and in your company even better than the background you stitched together in your imagination.