Full Stack Everything
The CTO at my current company has been vocal with his team recently. Our organization doesn’t have frontend engineers and backend engineers anymore. Everyone is full stack.
Haven’t literally worked at “Stack Overflow” this struck a chord. Since I entered the world of tech as a journalist in 2010, the demand for software engineers, along with their salaries and social status within the labor market, had only gone up.
The arrival of AI that can generate code has radically changed that, and fast. The data on demand for software developers and their salaries is muddy, but you only have to spend a day on Hacker News or r/programming to see the sturm und drang.
People who spent their lives learning to code are nervous - watching in dismay as company’s that conduct massive layoffs see their stock prices rise. If you’ve begun to work seriously with AI agents, you know that they can handle many of the simpler, repetitive tasks once assigned to junior employees - from coding to accounting to legal research to…yes I admit it…content marketing.
So, where do white collar workers go? You need to get fullstack. As someone who can’t draw a stick figure to save his life, I find some of the new tools at my disposal intoxicating. I dictate m ideas and see them transcribed perfectly. I can generate blog images and short social videos that look studio commercial quality using only my imagination and a few dollars in token credits.
In the past, as a journalist or a marketer, if I wanted to pursue an ambitious multi-media project, I relied on the design team, the video team, the web team, and many others to bring it all to life. Today, I can do all this myself. Look ma, I’m an auteur!
To get the highest possible quality for the finished product, it pays to work with the experts on each of these teams. But gaining the ability to bring the idea to a fully fleshed prototype, and in some cases creating a wealth of materials that are maybe 80-90% to finish, is a massive unlock.
What is means for the intern or junior content marketer I would have hired….that is the trillion dollar question.