Things Software Developers Think They Don'T Need To Care About, But Can Impact Their Job
InfoQ, Wednesday, December 31st, 2025
Holly Cummins gave a keynote at Goto Copenhagen where she urged developers to care about overlooked issues that shape their work. She warned of unintended consequences of design decisions, promoted systems thinking and statistical literacy, stressed mastering concurrency as hardware evolves beyond Moore's Law, and mentioned the impact of AI on the job market.
As software developers, we have some unique challenges, because we have to work with both computers and people. But many of our challenges are common to a whole bunch of fields, as Cummins explained:
"How can we make decisions in a complex world? How can we be sure that well-intentioned decisions won't have unintended consequences?"
Cummins mentioned the cobra problem. The colonial Indian government decided the cobra population should be reduced, and decided the solution was to pay a generous bounty for every cobra carcass it received.