What we talked about
David West traces a clear line from his first job in 1968:the year “software engineering” was coined:through today’s AI-fueled hype cycles, arguing that our industry’s chronic unhappiness comes from being cut off from users and meaning. In this candid conversation, he recalls mainframes, 80-column cards, and 24-hour feedback loops that forced upfront thinking, then contrasts that era with modern “vibe coding,” where speed often replaces theory. West contends that most IT failures stem from treating business and technology as separate machines rather than a single complex adaptive system grounded in human integrity, shared context, and story.
Show notes
David West started writing code in 1968 for a bank, when programmers were just domain experts who happened to know COBOL, and debugging meant sorting through a stack of hexadecimal fan-fold paper as thick as your forearm. More than fifty years later, he argues that the profession is structurally unhappy, and that AI is just the latest chapter in a long story of trying to replace human programmers rather than empower them.
What we covered
- When West began in 1968, programmers were bankers or scientists first and code writers second, domain expertise came before technical skill. The separation of software development into its own discipline abandoned that integration entirely, and the outsourcing era made it worse by shipping specifications to teams with no context about the end user or the culture.
- Software developers are “not overwhelmingly happy” as a profession, West argues, because they have no clear sense that what they do means anything. The distance from the end user is so great that most teams never know whether their systems made anyone’s life better, and objectively, he says, those systems often make lives worse.
- The history of software development is a repeated pattern of trying to eliminate the human programmer: from CASE tools in the 1970s and 80s to Rational’s “round-trip engineering” with UML, to offshoring, to AI today. Each iteration treats developers as unreliable and interchangeable rather than as skilled, thinking human beings.
- LLMs cannot provide meaning to language because meaning requires context, cultural, situational, personal, that no model has. West gave the example of the sentence “The man saw the woman in the park with the telescope,” which is grammatically clear but semantically ambiguous in four or five ways. Only context resolves it, and context is precisely what AI lacks. The same applies to code: most code in existence is bad, so a model trained on it cannot exceed the quality of what it has learned from.
- West is writing a book that proposes treating business and IT as a single complex adaptive system rather than two separate machines. The target audience is not the mainstream software development community, which he predicts will hate the book, but conscious capitalists and B corporations already committed to the idea that business should serve people, planet, and purpose alongside profit.
- His prescription for accountability in software teams goes back to Kent Beck’s original Extreme Programming: trust developers to self-organize and self-manage, give them a coach rather than a hierarchy, and expect continuous improvement from both sides. Management didn’t trust developers enough to do this, and developers took refuge in routine rather than principles. Neither half of the equation was ever really implemented.
About David
David West is an author, mentor, consultant, and retired professor whose career in software development began in 1968, the year the discipline was formally named. He has lived through every major wave of computing, from mainframes and expert systems to objects, Agile, and domain-driven design, and is completing his third book, a manifesto proposing a radical rethink of how business and IT should be built together.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-west-6135682
- Website: http://davewest.us
Episode 77 of the PreVetted Podcast.