In 1966, J Paul Getty became the world’s richest man. But he couldn’t put his finger on what made him so successful.1

The difference between a successful businessman and one possibly not so successful is that maybe 37 different qualities are required for a great success, and [if] a man has 35 of those qualities, he makes a more modest success. But just what those two missing qualities might be, I don’t know.

I suspect there’s something to that. There isn’t one thing that leads us to success. And it’s not just a matter of how successful you are. A set of unknown qualities guides our life paths. We all benefit from the luck, traits, and skills that make us who we are.

That idea got me thinking about the changes the software development field is going through. I suspect there are a set of qualities that most developers share. Of course every developer is unique. While we may share a set of overlapping qualities, we are not just developers. We are people. So imagine that most developers have twenty common properties. You and I might have those twenty in common, but still have a hundred that differ. Of our twenty common qualities, we likely share more than enablers for success. We also share qualities that make us want to be developers and make it possible for us to become developers. For example, before becoming developers we may share curiosity and computer access.

AI is dramatically changing the nature of our work. We hear a lot about the need to adapt, but what will happen longer term? If the nature of the work changes, then it’s possible that the set of common properties will change too. Imagine that only eighteen of our common properties remain relevant and two new common properties are introduced. If we look at the pool of non-developers, this shift changes the subset of the population that will choose to be developers in the future. Remember that this goes beyond who is capable of being a developer. This is also considering who wants to be a developer.

We would not see the impact immediately because most existing developers entered the field based on the old property set. However, as new people join the field and others retire, we could see a signicant generational change. Over time, the industry changes signicantly not just because the technology changed, but because the humans who make up the industry changed. For example, imagine if the new set of qualities is highly correlated with loving cargo pants. Cargo pants are irrelevant to being a developer, but you still see a population change where a strong majority of people wear cargo pants every day. Who knows? One day cargo pants could become mandatory in the office. While this is a silly example, it illustrates the possibility of a shift that is unpredictable. It’s insufficient to make predictions about AI. You also need to know all of the correlated qualities.

Like J Paul Getty, I don’t think we know what the underlying qualities for developers are in the past, present, or the future. We may have inklings of several, but we don’t know the complete set. And we certainly don’t know all correlated, but unnecessary traits that come along for the ride. Over time, maybe we will find AI has created a largely changed work place not directly because of AI capabilities, but because the people we eat lunch with each day will have changed.

  1. BBC, ‘I never had the feeling that I was flush in cash’: How J Paul Getty became the world’s richest man, July 6 2026, retrieved July 24 2026. ↩