A colleague has a story from a former boss of his that I am now telling everybody when the chance arises as it does now:
Software engineers often think their job is to build a killer robot, this automation machine that destroys everything in their path.
But killer robots are expensive, prone to mistakes, and forget about the humanity in a situation.
Our role is to actually build something more like the Iron Man suit: a tool that helps humans do things they could not do otherwise.
In this case, the tooling sounds great as a killer robot. But it's the wrong thing to have been built. Somebody should have been able to approve and decline each step and over-ride it.
Software engineers often think their job is to build a killer robot, this automation machine that destroys everything in their path.
But killer robots are expensive, prone to mistakes, and forget about the humanity in a situation.
Our role is to actually build something more like the Iron Man suit: a tool that helps humans do things they could not do otherwise.
In this case, the tooling sounds great as a killer robot. But it's the wrong thing to have been built. Somebody should have been able to approve and decline each step and over-ride it.