I don’t know how things work in Silicon Valley - I’ve never been to any place west of London.
But here in India, across acres of the software support and systems maintenance ecosystem - call it IT services, outsourcing, offshoring, or GCCs - the most respected people are the ones who can debug.
Not the ones who write the most code.
The ones who can fix what breaks.
These are professionals who have seen so many systems fail, behave strangely, and recover that they’ve internalised how technology really works. Give them a problem and, within minutes, they can trace the root cause and suggest a fix.
Early in my career, I worked with one such professional.
The probability of finding him at the sutta-tapri outside the office was often higher than finding him at his desk. But when something broke, someone would walk up to him, explain the issue, and he would calmly point to the exact place in the system where things had gone wrong.
And, he was almost always right.
That’s the beauty of real technology expertise - people who have seen systems behave in the messy complexity of real-world environments.
Will AI replace such experts?
Maybe. Maybe not.
But will AI create the need for many more such experts?
I would say - yes.
Someone will still have to debug the future.
Amish R. Shah
Journal of a hands-on consultant
