Rachel Trebach, a UX Researcher reflects in her post Convenience at Our Doorstep on the effect of AI on software development at Amazon. This is in light her being let go as part of a large round of lay-offs.
She pushes back strongly on the "shipping first" culture, without awareness of its consequences, that is emerging.
The first is a great description of her work and value as a user researcher.
My entire practice is built on the premise that you can’t think your way to understanding in isolation. You have to get outside your own head, test your assumptions against other peoples’ reality. The work should be shaped by perspectives you didn’t anticipate, and usually can’t.
This work is increasingly unglamorous.
The work I was hired to do isn’t the kind you can point to in a demo; it’s the kind that keeps bad decisions from getting made — slow, invisible, and only noticed when it’s missing.
Shipping first and fast is what is most rewarded.
Shipping is the metric, and shipping fast on high-risk bets is courage — a “good bet.”
The work of understanding does this actually work for humans is becoming increasingly undesirable by what she calls the "system".
In the middle of the largest technological transformation most of us will live through, the people whose job was to ask does this actually work for humans are the ones being let go. The questions still matter — arguably more than anything else — but the system decided the questions were slowing things down
It is an observation I agree with. I think thinkers such as Jacques Ellul help us further along the way by pointing to the underlying cause: a turn away from meaning to efficiency as the highest good.