Serguey Asael Shinder – IT Professional

I built my early career on being able to produce.

I could write the code, draft the doc,
turn out the thing that was needed,
faster and cleaner than most.
That was my value, and I knew it.

Then the tools got good at producing.

Really good. Fast, tireless,
able to generate a first version
of almost anything I used to be paid to make.

And for a moment, that felt like the floor
dropping out.

If the doing is cheap now,
what exactly am I for?

The answer came slowly,
by watching what the tools couldn’t do.

They could generate endlessly.
But they had no opinion
about which of it deserved to exist.
Point them at the wrong problem
and they’d solve it beautifully,
and the beautiful solution
would be useless.

That’s when it landed.
The value had moved.
Not to whoever could produce,
but to whoever could judge —
what’s good, what’s worth doing,
which of ten options actually fits.

Taste. Discernment.
Knowing what matters
and what to throw away.
Standing behind a decision
because I could defend it,
not because a model suggested it.

So I stopped competing on output.

I started investing in judgment —
the one part of the work
the tools make more valuable, not less,
because someone still has to decide
what to point them at.

The machine can generate all day.

The deciding is still mine.

And judgment, I finally understood,
is the job now.

– Serguey Asael Shinder