I honestly don't understand the point you're trying to make. As far as I can tell you are saying that people that can code are fundamentally superior to everyone else, to the point where everyone else is useless not only to corporations but society?
It's helpful to understand the fundamentals of the area you're making strategic decisions about. Even better if you're the one who has to deal with the aftermath, so that you have some incentive to learn for the next time.
The typical C-level dictatorship provides neither of those (besides just being a plain miserable environment to work in).
I think the C-Level dictatorship know the relative strength & weaknesses of their company. Sony isn't good at online services and its infrastructure relative to other companies like Microsoft and Google. It took them a decade to allow users to actually change their user names on PSN because they were effectively using the username as a unique primary key and associating all game save data against locally and remotely.
How are they going to make a Google Stadia style service that requires custom hardware units in data centers around the world with the lowest possible latency to the end user? And how are they going to do it quickly?
I guarantee Microsoft has a competitor to stadia ready to go, they have the data centers, they have the development expertise and they've been pushing xbox apps onto every platform that will take them.
If Microsoft will give them a good long term rate on the custom azure instances that the xbox team will be using to host the games then that's probably a whole lot better than Sony trying to roll their own.
>>How are they going to make a Google Stadia style service that requires custom hardware units in data centers around the world with the lowest possible latency to the end user? And how are they going to do it quickly?
I mean....they already do, so in that sense they are ahead of Stadia. Playstation Now is a real service that exists and which you can use already, and which required custom hardware in datacentres around the world. Now we can argue whether it's as good as Stadia promises to be, but that's purely theoretical at this point - one product is an actual commercial thing you can get, the other one exists in beta stages.
Just let's assume the basic tenet is correct - software is a new form of literacy [#]. No I do not believe that people who are functionally or totally illiterate today are useless or should be discriminated against. But the value that an illiterate person in normal circumstances can deliver is dramatically reduced compared to the same person but literate.
And I am simply transferring the same intuition about this to software.
If "Google SRE is what you get when you ask a developer to design an ops team" then what do you get when you ask a developer to design a whole corporation. Or a government ministry?
People who can code are not fundamentally superior to everyone else as you say, but they offer different ways to organise as much as people who 300 years ago were literate were not fundamentally superior to the rest of us, but offered different ways to organise.
So here is my simplest idea - as pretty much everything is being eaten by software, then project management should flow entirely from code. How is Project X doing? Ask the codebase.
[#] Bicycles of the mind if you wish. But something important is happening - its beyond telegraphs or telephones in enabling communication between humans.
Literacy is the ability to read and write regardless of the domain (science, history, poetry, religion, software, whatever).
Software is, ultimately, a set of logical instructions. Other people who understand those instructions are literate in that domain. You seem to be taking a single application of literacy (software) to be the entire scope of literacy writ large. It isn't clear to me why you think that, especially when no programming language is capable of "encoding" the range of human thought that, say, English is.
Please respond in the programming language of your choice.
You seem to be saying that software is one "silo" of literacy, like the jargon one needs to understand film criticism or the politics of the hundred years' war.
I don't think that's fair. Software if anything is a means of modelling and transmission of that model - being able to create and manipulate models is what we try to do with language and written word - but the compiler we are targeting is on other people's heads.
so it's a bit hit and miss - we spend a lot of effort making us all share the same compilers, from schools to legal judgements.
but with software the compiler is simpler and so the models can be more transparent and that Inthinknis the big difference.
No I cannot express my model in english as well as I can in any program- I am not trying to express the whole range of human thought in software - but what we can do is and will be so valuable I can only compare it to the shift in value we got from mass literacy
Not jargon. The ability to read/write code is a knowledge domain. Literacy allows communication about all sorts of knowledge domains (software being one).
But knowledge of the software world does not (dis)qualify one for business leadership, or to be a heart surgeon, or a janitor, or any number of fields. Your original post implied that knowledge of software, the "new literacy" is a prerequisite for any moderately advanced task, which is nonsense.
I think your point is that software is like "engineering" "Biology" or "house building" - one siloed skill amoung many that some people will specialise in
I disagree - I think software is more horizontal - it allows great improvement of any form of knowledge work, and is much more comparable to "learning to read" (or perhaps sits somewhere in a hierarchy of horizontal skills between "reading" and "statistics")
