From craft to service
What digitalisation does to the very idea of a profession.
A profession once meant more than a way to earn a living. It meant belonging to a community with its own standards and a long apprenticeship. The doctor, the lawyer, the engineer, the guild master: each answered to the client and to his own guild at the same time. Digitalisation is quietly rewiring this and turning craft into service. I notice it in myself. Over seven years in software the word "profession" has been all but pushed out of my vocabulary by the phrase "stream of tasks", and I did not catch the moment it happened.
Craft and its autonomy
Craft had autonomy. The master decided for himself what good work was, because the criterion lived inside the community; the client did not set it. Hence the dignity of the profession: you could refuse to do a thing badly, invoking a standard higher than the client's momentary wish. The client wanted it cheaper and faster, the master answered that this is not how it is done, and that was an obligation to a guild the client had no access to.
What matters is that the standard was external to any one person and internal to the community. The young were taught to hold a line set before them and kept after them. The line outlived the particular commission. It was the thing you could lean on when the client pushed.
Service and its metric
Service works differently. Here the criterion of good work is the client's satisfaction, expressed as a score. The platform measures the customer's reaction, and quality by an internal standard does not interest it. Five stars weigh more than a professional judgement about what was done right. The master's autonomy gives way to accountability to a rating.
This changes the sense of self. The professional stopped working when the work was good by his own measure. The service provider works as long as the client is satisfied. And a client can be unhappy with good work and quite happy with bad, and both cases close with the same green tick on a dashboard.
The profession, broken into tasks
Platforms do one more thing: they take the profession apart into separate tasks. A whole vocation with a long training breaks into discrete operations, each of which can be ordered, measured, and handed to whoever is cheaper. The profession as a whole dissolves and a stream of tasks is left. This is convenient and efficient. And it strips work of the coherence out of which both mastery and dignity grew.
There is a quiet consequence to this splitting: no one is responsible for the whole any more. Every ticket is closed, every metric is green, and the system in its entirety belongs only to whoever gets woken at night.
The flag that burned for a year
An example from my own practice. We were building out Unleash, a feature-flag platform the bank uses to roll out experiments and gradual releases. A flag is a switch: a piece of code lives behind an on/off condition and can be changed without a deploy. A lovely tool (I defended it at review myself). For an A/B test of one screen flow we set up a flag, the experiment ran, the winning variant was locked in. And the flag stayed.
It burned for almost a year. A branch of code behind a switched-off condition that no one touched and no one deleted. In the tracker everything was closed: the experiment ticket, done; the rollout ticket, done; the metric computed and mailed round. The tasks that made up this story were done flawlessly, each one on its own. It is just that none of them read as "clean up after yourself". Cleanup does not fit in a ticket: it is a property of relating to the work as a whole, and there is no whole in a ticket system.
The flag turned up during an incident. Something went sideways at night and the on-call engineer spent half an hour working out why a request was going down a dead branch that someone long gone from the team had set up a year earlier. Formally no one was at fault. Everyone had closed their task.
An objection to myself
Here I have to pull myself up short, because it is easy to fall into nostalgia for a guild I never lived in. The objection is simple: was the old craft not also a closed caste? Guilds held the line, and they held prices too, kept outsiders out, dressed plain monopoly in professional ethics. The splitting into tasks, the ratings, the open platforms: that is democratisation as well, a person with no diploma and no connections gets the job because he does it well and fast, and guild ceremony has nothing to do with it.
All true. I do not want to go back behind the blank guild wall, and this is not a pose, I am one of the people the old guild would most likely have left marinating on the doorstep for extra years. But the platform glues open access and the destruction of the standard into one thing, and these are different things. The barrier fell, and that is good. The worse part is elsewhere: along with the barrier the external line vanished, only the client's score is left, and it measures satisfaction rather than mastery. Access was opened into a room without walls, where there is nothing to lean on but the stars in your profile.
Does this concern engineers
Directly. Software went down this road faster than most: tasks in a tracker, estimates in story points, productivity metrics, individual chunks outsourced. The engineer is more and more the executor of a stream of tickets, less and less the master of the whole. To resist this does not mean giving up the tools; I still count the tracker and the flags as a good. It means holding in your head the difference between "close the task" and "do it well", between the client's satisfaction and professional judgement. At review that is the moment when an approval unblocks a person and moves the team's metric, and the question "are we going to clean up after ourselves?" moves nothing and irritates everyone.
A profession is also the right to decide for yourself what good work is. Digitalisation quietly takes that right, not by seizing it but by simply ceasing to ask about it. It can be reclaimed only deliberately, and I am not fully sure we will want to: accountability to a rating is easier than responsibility for the whole, and you rarely get woken at night.