Kelsey Hightower on What’s Next for Developers After GenAI
BERLIN — The emergence of generative AI means that writing code while forgoing empathy and ignoring customer service will no longer be a career option, according to Kelsey Hightower.
Hightower retired in 2023 as a distinguished engineer at Google. His high-profile tech career saw him carve out key roles at Puppet and most famously at Google, where he was instrumental in popularizing Kubernetes.
In an interview with The New Stack and during a “fireside chat” on Sept. 11 with Mark Boost, co-founder and CEO of the cloud services company Civo, at its Navigate conference here, Hightower discussed the future of developer work, open source software, generative AI, Kubernetes and how he’s managing his retirement.
For decades, Hightower told Boost, “If you were a developer, you could have gotten really far in your career with no empathy, no customer service, lack of communication, living in the basement. You hate people, but you love computers. You could have got paid well. That’s over.”
Now, instead of just focusing on code, he said, developers must focus on what the customer or user really needs, which means also thinking about UX, customer service, and accessibility.
This inevitably means disruption to traditional tech career paths.
But, Hightower told The New Stack, “We study the other developers, and we say, this is how good I can be. If I look at it and I see that some developers are having a hard time finding a job, I’m the type of person to ask ‘why?’ What skill sets would change my fortune?”
The focus has shifted to customers, he said. “So, you almost want to pick an industry. You probably want to understand human interaction and design — and there’s so many tools from people like Apple and Google that have UX frameworks to help you do human-centric design. And your job is to turn that into software.”
‘More Opportunity Than Ever’
While developer jobs might change, there is likely going to be plenty of work for people with coding skills, Hightower told TNS.
For instance, McDonald’s might offer a digital experience to their customers, but millions of restaurants or small chains don’t. “And so, imagine the opportunity it is for more developers to start helping them,” he said, adding “It’s more opportunity than ever, in my opinion.”
That has implications for the cloud infrastructure part of the equation, he said. Cloud services firm Civo used the conference to unveil its own Flexcore “cloud in a box” that customers could run in their own data center or in a hosted facility to allow them to run Kubernetes while preserving data sovereignty or privacy.
“If you were a developer, you could have gotten really far in your career with no empathy, no customer service, lack of communication, living in the basement. You hate people, but you love computers. You could have got paid well. That’s over.”
— Kelsey Hightower
“The reason is people want to customize it to their own needs,” Hightower told us. “As someone who’s worked at a cloud provider, it’s really hard to have a singular control plane that works for 10,000 customers.”
“We’re at a point now where we’ve kind of reached the plateau of everybody wanting to do everything the same, and now that next generation is saying ‘no, no, no, no, this will be personalized.’”
He was similarly sanguine about the broader societal impact of large language models (LLMs) and AI, suggesting that ultimately, society will set the rules — rather than the other way round — and those rules will evolve, regardless of what Big Tech might want.
The Future of Open Source
Open source, in some form at least, is clearly critical to this vision. But change is necessary here to both maintain a diverse array of projects AND allow founders and maintainers to move on when the time is right.
The cloud native world, at least, is dominated by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which Hightower said was increasingly “closer to Netflix” in its role in the ecosystem — in a good way.
While Netflix makes a few movies itself, he continued, “they give a home to a lot of creators, and a distribution channel.” In the same way, the CNCF nurtures projects, but also gives them a distribution channel and provides a mechanism for users to find them.
By contrast, he said, finding software on “GitHub is hard. They have a discovery problem.”
If this meant multiple projects doing similar things, that wasn’t a problem. And, he continued, it gives maintainers a framework for moving on from projects. “If you’re a maintainer, you’re not signing up for a lifetime commitment. And that’s what it feels like sometimes, right?”
In his fireside chat with Boost, Hightower dug into two of the biggest problems with open source software: funding the projects and maintainers, and ensuring security.
Right now, anyone can set up a GitHub account, choose a “cat picture” for their profile avatar, and start potentially contributing to key projects, he told the audience.
But will that always be the case? As anxieties about the security of open source software grow, “Will we need a professional license in the future to write software?” Hightower asked the Civo Navigate audience. “Who are you? Have you taken the oath that you should do no harm to the software projects?”
This might sound extreme. But he continued, governments will inevitably start thinking about the impact of LLMs, as they begin using them to create applications to help their citizens with medical needs, make credit decisions, or interpret the meaning of legislation or policies, “I believe that software will become even more political than just the open source license.”
And there’s still a broader problem of supporting maintainers of open source software that organizations around the world use every day. He told the audience: “I was very surprised how many people would cut a $100 million check to a cloud provider but not send $10 to an open source project.”
“If you want the future to exist, you need to be willing to pay for it,” he continued. “That could be in the form of contributions, educating others, or cutting that check for $10.”
“Will we need a professional license in the future to write software? Who are you? Have you taken the oath that you should do no harm to the software projects?”
— Kelsey Hightower
In his conversation with TNS, Hightower expanded on the topic of open source projects and their funding. Sponsorship is important, including at the government level, he told us.
But “I want to be very clear,“ he said. “This would be more of a, ‘we use Postgres, we would like to pay full-time citizens to work solely on Postgres to make sure that it’s sustainable.’”
But he doesn’t think it should evolve into techno nationalism. He cited the example of the internet itself: “The internet only works because countries agreed to let the traffic pass. At any moment, any country can cut off internet flows in and out of their country.”
Meanwhile, he said, “The Swiss government recently said a lot of the new software going forward needs to be open source. That means they’re willing to contribute back, and they’re willing to pick companies that are backed by open source. So that’s a good start.”
Retirement Update: Lots of DIY
When Hightower announced his retirement from Google last year, he said he’d spent 25 years learning how to work, and “I hope to spend the rest of my life learning how to live.”
In Berlin, he offered an update on how he’s getting on with that project. “I’m getting way better, and it comes from practice,” he told TNS. “I think for me, it’s more of a saying yes to everything, all the things I was too busy for.”
After years on the road, he has been taking a really close look at home. “I have plumbing, I have electricity, and for the most part, I never knew how any of that stuff really worked,” he said. He’s been rolling up his sleeves to investigate it. “I decided to buy all the tools and do it myself.”
That extends to watching competitions where people compete against each other doing electrical installations. “I just want to know how it all works … And can I do it, too.”
One project Hightower was less concerned about was Kubernetes. “Kubernetes is such a small piece of the puzzle that it’s just a tool in your toolbox and you use it when you need it,” he told The New Stack.
“We’re at a point now where we’ve kind of reached the plateau of everybody wanting to do everything the same, and now that next generation is saying ‘no, no, no, no, this will be personalized.’”
— Kelsey Hightower
“And now I think it’s time for that next generation of people who come and finish it — and that’s the thing that makes things stable.”
This important work carries on long after the hype cycle has ended, he said. “Once we understand how Kubernetes works, what it can and can’t do, what is there really to talk about? We want to move on to the thing we don’t understand.”
And that’s perhaps the biggest lesson Hightower has to offer: Seeing the job through and knowing when to step back and hand it over to the next generation. Whether the job in question is configuration management, container orchestration, or running electrical lines and cutting drywall.
