Andy Hawkes

Today I saw a LinkedIn post from a a COO saying:

Today developers who spend 3 days writing "clean" code that someone else would have shipped in 4 hours with AI are no longer rewarded for their dilligence: they're penalised for their slowness.

What the customer is now measuring:

• How many features did you ship?
• Does it work?
• Does it create value?

The market no longer pays for the craft of writing code; it pays for results.
What if the best thing a senior dev can do in 2026 is teach their team to ship faster, not code cleaner?

Friends, I have opinions...

If you spend 5 minutes scrolling through LinkedIn[^1], you will no doubt be greeted with multiple "think pieces" about how AI is making everything faster, enabling all of the hustle and grind aficionados to hustle and grind extra hard while they maximise shareholder value, or something.

It sounds great — enabling the worlds most entrepreneurial entrepreneurs to entrepreneur at never-before-seen speed, making a thousand decisions before they've finished their first coffee — but I am personally coming to realise that it has a very specific personal downside when it comes to quality, focus, and cognitive load, and it looks like I'm not the only one.

I realised recently that I have now been working at Deltatre for as long as I have worked for any company in my career so far - 6 years and 9 months.

Even if I quit tomorrow my notice period would see me past the 7 year mark, which led me to think about why I have moved on from relatively long-standing employment in the past, and the 7 year figure in particular.

These realisations and questions to myself, along with some recent pondering about age and career direction, led to me wondering what I would want to do next if I decided to move on.

There's still a lot of guff floating about out there about whether the AI bubble is going to burst[^1] , whether AI coding is "good enough yet" (see my previous comments on my previous comments on vibe coding), and whether AI is the silver bullet solution to your problem.

I saw a great post by a former R/GA colleague on LinkedIn today which said that "if you think a specific new technology is the solution to your problem then you probably don't understand the problem enough", and I am minded to agree.

I'm generally a bit painfully averse to the big agency hagiography that goes on in that particular world, but I was actually quite struck that R/GA was voted as one of the "30 most iconic companies in internet history" according to the Webby awards.

A friend sent me an interesting job post the other week, where the hiring manager was looking for people who can dive in and get things done without too much process getting in the way, and it struck me as being a breath of fresh air in a world of process-driven teams and particularly Agile being presented as the de-facto saviour of software development.

It made me wonder what specific problems or constraints that approach was trying to address.

I turn 50 today.

The reason I mention this is because I have seen a lot of people — mostly on LinkedIn — making dire prognostications that anyone over that age will never work in IT again if they're not currently in work, and that gave me pause for thought.

Given some of my previous comments about vibe coding, I found myself taking a different track and questioning some assumptions (and biases) over the last week and wanted to capture a bit more nuance around the topic.

Once upon a time I was paid to write code in exchange for coins, and I wasn't bad at it.

Then I got paid to lead and manage people who write code in exchange for coins, and it turned out that I wasn't bad at that either.

These days I am paid to lead and manage people who lead and manage people who write code in exchange for coins, so I guess that:

1. I'm pretty good at tech and people,
2. My job is becoming more and more fractal, and
3. I only really write code for myself these days

Given that I'm attempting to start writing stuff / blogging again, I thought I would share a couple of the daft personal projects that I have put together in recent years.

It's been 11 years since I last wrote about a potential mid-life crisis and career change, and as I'm now a mere month away from my 50th birthday it seemed like a good topic to revisit!