Should developer assistant be a thing?

1 points by ozy123 5 years ago | 1 comment

Automation is coming for a whole bunch of jobs. As task based routine work moves towards to non routine, higher-level cognitive or interpersonal type roles should we start looking to create new roles?

The first one I could think of was a developer assistant. In most dev teams I've worked on having a dev assistant (no coding background whatsoever think transitioning from fast food cashier - one of the most at risk jobs due to automation) who could help with writing basic code, occasional QA, documentation, support etc

They would be affordable for most teams, add value in the long term (short immediate term cost in training) and also introduce a group of people into tech who might otherwise feel it is inaccessible.

Like the barrier for entry is still quite high in tech and for a whole bunch of stuff that we do - it doesn't need to be.

reggiepret 5 years ago |

I think this is a great idea.

How would day 1 look for the dev assistant? and how mature would a dev team need to be to incorporate someone with relatively low experience into their environment? psql drop db --prod?