The world used to be about physical things. Making change was hard and was kept to the C Suite.
Now our world - and our companies are made up of pixels and bytes. Pixels in the images by which we persuade. And bytes in the data which informs everything we do. Change is now easy and made at all sorts of levels in the organisation.
The people in charge of both pixels and bytes are developers. They can set up systems by which these constantly re-iterate and move the organisation forward, hopefully faster than the market.
Marketing is now a technical discipline and systems, not salespeople, drive sales, engagement and loyalty. They make a service easy to find and attractive to engage with. They make buying (whether once or recurring) so simple nothing can go wrong. They generate a sense of pride about the association. And they widen that engagement to more products or services, improvements to the ones you have and to sharing the word to friends, colleagues and everyone else they influence.
As a Developer this is one of the most important things you do. And it isn't just for the Sales or Marketing team - it affects everything you develop, ever. That just so easy user interface, that soft fallover when something goes wrong, that intuitive way back when the user makes a mistake - those things are now the interface between user and company - they are your brand and how the customer perceives your organisation.
We've moved from vertical silos with everyone in their own department throwing rocks at eachother, to a horizontal organisation. As developers we are layer everything else is built on. If we don't do it well, no-one else can as they are building on our foundations.
That means understanding human behaviour has become a core skill for developers. They can no longer say user interface or customer experience is someone else's job. The power of that interface depends on a blend of technology and psychology - getting the psychology right and leveraging the technology to create something with a real Wow factor is a company's new competitive advantage - and that's your job.
We have left the IT Crowd back room and basement developers behind - developer and datascientist are now the core skills for every organisation which aspires to be better than the rest.