Career paths for software developers have always been a touch problematic. 

Early on, you started out as a junior developer, and maybe there were ladder rungs that got you raises until you became a senior developer. But there was typically a ceiling to that, leaving you with little choice but to move into a management position if you wanted to continue to advance and make more money.

On top of that, promoting developers to be managers is often less than optimal for the company or the developer in the long run. Many of the qualities that make a good developer don’t always translate into being a good people manager. And certainly, many software developers want to continue to write code and not have to worry about the bureaucracy and paperwork that often comes with management. Plus, it hardly seems optimal to take your best coders and tell them to stop coding. 

The industry dealt with this by creating technical positions such as “Architect” and “Staff Developer” and “Chief Scientist.” That works well, but then these positions often lead to doing less programming and attending more meetings.

No matter what the title or role, the simple fact of the matter is that the more senior you get, the more you’ll be dealing with other people. “Tech Leads” have to supervise the work of other developers. Maybe you aren’t responsible for managing their careers or writing their performance evaluations, but you are responsible for making sure their code is up to snuff.

You’re the boss

It will come as no surprise that agentic coding changes this entire dynamic.

We don’t write much code anymore. And we are all too aware that coding agents aren’t perfect. Like humans, they make bad decisions, write bugs, and do things they weren’t asked to do. They need clear instructions, wise guidance, and the right working environment. You need to keep an eye on your agents to make sure they are on track and headed in the right direction. 

One might even say that you need to, ahem, “manage” your coding agents. 

And in that sense, we are all managers now. “A coding agent is most useful when you treat it more like an employee than an autocomplete tool,” says Jim Bourke, founder and CEO of Zide Software, producer of a development tool that treats developers more like managers than coders. “It needs a clear assignment, the right context, a safe place to work, checkpoints, and a way to evaluate the result.”

How you deal with coding agents isn’t all that different from how you would deal with a real live developer. You have an array of choices to make about who/what will write the code, what they will be building, and when their work can be called finished. You have to guide them, give them clear instructions, review their code, and decide when that code is ready to be checked in. 

Career twists and turns

All of that should sound pretty familiar to managers and individual contributors alike. In fact, one might argue that this is the job now — managing coding agents. Even the most junior of developers will be managing a “developer” in the future.

What does that mean for the career path of a person who manages coding agents all day? I hate to say it, but I don’t know and I don’t think anyone can say for sure. The set of skills required to successfully lead a “team of coding agents” compared to those needed to manage a team of real live people overlap, but they are not congruent. 

It may be that managing coding agents is an innate talent, leading to some junior developers suddenly outproducing seniors. Or maybe it will be a skill that needs to be carefully nurtured and grown under the mentorship of an experienced manager. It’s hard to say. And how the career ladder will look going forward, and exactly what skills will be rewarded, are questions I don’t think we can answer right now.

Everything is so new and changing so fast that it’s all a blur at this point. 

Wherever we may be headed, I don’t envy the person who will have to rewrite all those job descriptions.