A Job With No Name

I have a job that doesn't have a name yet. Maybe you do too. Mine lives inside insur-tech, a phrase that has never once made a stranger lean in at a party. But stay a minute anyway, because the future rarely announces itself where the cameras are pointed. It shows up first in the boring rooms, the unglamorous industries, the places nobody's performing for anyone. That's where it's easiest to catch, honestly. I've been chewing on this for a few weeks now, and a lot of that chewing started after reading Laurie Voss's essay "We are all Product Engineers now," which argues that as the cost of writing code collapses, the job that survives is the one nobody can automate: figuring out what a specific customer actually needs, in enough detail that someone (or something) can build it. I'm not writing this to summarize his argument. I'm writing it because I read it while living a smaller, messier version of the same question inside my own team, and I wanted to work out what I actually believe…