I am trying to expound a concept I call “software literacy” - where a business can be run via code just as much as today a company can be run by English words (policy documents, emails etc).
This leads to a few corollaries - things like “If GPUs do the work then coders are the new managers” or we need whole-org-test-rigs to be clear about the impacts of chnages.
This seems directly related to this excellent article - to my mind if all the decision makers are not looking at the code as the first class object in a chnage process (is opposed to Jiras or project plans) then not all decision makers are (software) literate - and this comes up a lot in the threads here (“how do I discuss with non-technical management”) - the answer is you cannot - that management must be changed. This is an enormous generational road block that I thought was a problem thirty years ago but naively assumed would disappear as coders grew up. Of course the problem is that to “run” a company one does not need to code - so until not coding is something embarrassing like not writing is for a newspaper editor we won’t get past it.
The main point is that we need companies that can be run with the new set of self-reinforcing concepts - sops, testing, not meetings but systems as communication.
I will try and rewrite this comment later - it needs work
You had me at "whole org test" harness. This is a very, very interesting idea. Especially in conjunction with the concept of corporation as "slow AI" that I don't hear referenced often enough.
I don't see why you call it "literacy," though. I think Maturana & Varela's term "autopoiesis" more closely orbits the kernel, and I'll bet Stafford Beer's Autopoietic Systems would contribute to a good intellectual foundation.
At a certain point, though, I wonder if a purely software "business" doesn't just look like... SaaS?
This leads to a few corollaries - things like “If GPUs do the work then coders are the new managers” or we need whole-org-test-rigs to be clear about the impacts of chnages.
This seems directly related to this excellent article - to my mind if all the decision makers are not looking at the code as the first class object in a chnage process (is opposed to Jiras or project plans) then not all decision makers are (software) literate - and this comes up a lot in the threads here (“how do I discuss with non-technical management”) - the answer is you cannot - that management must be changed. This is an enormous generational road block that I thought was a problem thirty years ago but naively assumed would disappear as coders grew up. Of course the problem is that to “run” a company one does not need to code - so until not coding is something embarrassing like not writing is for a newspaper editor we won’t get past it.
The main point is that we need companies that can be run with the new set of self-reinforcing concepts - sops, testing, not meetings but systems as communication.
I will try and rewrite this comment later - it needs work