Deprofessionalisation

I was in a very demotivating university tutorial yesterday.

We're learning about Education Standards. ATAR scores.1 How most schools reconfigure their entire senior syllabus to optimise for university entrance exams.

Teachers are expected to teach specifically for a good ATAR result. Test performance becomes competitive – not only for students, but for schools, and the broader community. ATAR results affect real-estate prices!

I stayed after class and spoke to a lecturer about it. He agreed. More and more teachers are becoming "standards" experts, while content knowledge experts are being driven out of the field. There's less creativity, less inquiry, less intuition, less spontaneity, less nuance, less fun.

Australian teachers are expected to be "Classroom Managers" and "Content Delivery Agents". Data Entry Clerks with an interactive whiteboard.

My lecturer described this as the "Deprofessionalisation" of teachers.2

Reflecting on this, deprofessionalisation is the reason I'm becoming more and more disillusioned software engineering.

A friend of mine shared a screencast in a group chat today that demonstrated the use of AI chatbots and agents to build a piece of software without writing any code. Compared to programming, the process involved less creativity, less inquiry, less intuition, less spontaneity, less nuance, and far less fun.3

Vibe coding is exciting4, empowering, and useful. but man, if it doesn't suck the joy out of software engineering.

  1. Australian Tertiary Admission Rank ↩︎

  2. Challenging the Deprofessionalisation of Teaching and Teachers – great read! ↩︎

  3. Also, more bugs, more vulnerabilities, more opaque failures, more regressions, more dependencies, more resources… ↩︎

  4. It's exciting the first time. Maybe the second, too. But once the novelty wears thin, vibe coding quickly becomes an exercise in frustration. ↩︎