My friends have startups, I know a lot of engineers. The startups have been laying off people for months, and many of my engineer friends don't have jobs anymore.
Teams are already ruined. I just don't think the companies are. In many cases this seems like rational reallocation of capital to AI, and in a VC funded ecosystem you're failing at your job if you're not following the math.
I think you must have a very cushy job if you're still armchair speculating about this.
A poster-child startup is one that has a long waitlist of willing future customers, and whose engineering team is scaling the tech up, up, up to keep up with the demand.
Senior engineer looks under the hood, sees 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess with emoji comments everywhere, runs out the door and never looks back.
Senior engineering _consultant_ looks at those 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess and sees $$$: months or years of contracts and likely very dysfunctional management that is willing to pay multiple times the cost of full time employees to keep the burn on a non-payroll line and/or keep the “AI first” story rolling on.
That's not been my experience. Even pre-AI, when I was asked to find a bug in some hacked-together codebase, sticker shock was often the result.
"What do you mean, billing for a week? The guy who created this is an actual software engineer and you're billing just as much as he did!"
I've got a list of small ex-clients who won't get work from me anymore, unless they are happy with "Here's my weekly rate, 1 week minimum".
Hourly rates don't work on a client who considers $200/m to be overpaying for s/ware development services.
If code is your documentation I assume it is hard to divine intent?
It would be really cool if this was the case, I would be singing the praises of these tools finally realizing Stallman's dream of end users who can take control of all the software in their lives for their own benefit. And the huge gains we would see in open source where "man I wish there was a tool that could…" becomes "I'm gonna make a tool that…"
So personally I think it's just a continuation of the belt tightening that was and still is occurring across the economy. I don't think our industry is particularly special on this, everyone is trying to cut headcount right now.
I won't try to speak for anyone other than myself, but my multiplier is definitely over 1.5x, probably higher than 5x.
I choose to sit on my hands in my freed up time so upper management does not catch on to and exploit this fact. Eventually they will though via overzealous coworkers.
So you now complete in a single Monday what used to take you Monday-Friday?
Can you even review that fast? How many LoC per day are you generating?
Day to day is mainly minor feature additions into a stable product so not a huge amount of code churn.
Not to mention, if a team wants to keep a semblance of understanding of what they own & ship… it can be exhausting to have a huge volume of new code coming into the system.
It’s definitely a productivity unlock. For sure. But there are a lot of knock-on effects we’re still figuring out that counteract how much extra “value” we’re shipping
I spend enough time iterating and refining to the point I'm comfortable taking ownership of the outputted code. Perhaps hypocritically, I do mald when people upload code for review that they clearly haven't taken the effort to read through critically.
People with a lower multiplier are either in the minority of developers solving genuinely hard/novel problems or, more likely, they've just not figured out how to tap into AI's potential.
Granted, to your point, a decent chunk of the HN crowd belongs to the former and can't relate to us paycheck stealers.
* coming in with a bias of not wanting it to work
* having too high of an expectation
* giving up too early
* not trying SOTA models
* not taking the effort to communicate intuitive or painfully obvious things
But perhaps it is too dumb to solve the type of problems you guys are working on and no amount of cajoling will help. All I know is "it works for me."
The "I'm gonna make a tool" thing is slowly happening and will probably help Linux, knocking on wood... https://x.com/xpasky/status/2030016470730658181
In other words: Yes it will ruin our team.
I recognize the necessary evil that is Zoom calls and face-to-face time in the larger context of running a business, but I also know what I’m good at and what I’m not. And long, drawn-out “alignment sessions” are not in my wheelhouse. If my PM and design friends are happy to take that bullet for me, I’m happy to let them do so.
As a coder though, I’ll point out this is why the “AI solved coding” shit drives me crazy. You only believe that if you don’t know how to code or you have an agenda.
1. How long they can survive in the job while being mediocre or outright bad at their job.
2. Probability of failing upwards.
Engineering roles tend to filter out bad candidates more early, quickly and the probability of failing upwards is less when compared to PM and managerial roles.
Also, in my experience PM and managerial roles looks like skills based jobs but they tend to select individuals with specific personality types and they are more likely to excel.
Developer roles also select towards certain personality types but I think its more diverse than we care to admit.
I thought programming was the same thing for a long time but have grown to find out that this is not the case. There are many people who cannot learn programming in a reasonable amount of time and therefore are unable to pick up the skill. It is not universal like car driving.
The thing with being a PM or a designer is that this skill is learnable. Anyone can do it. The reason why these jobs are segregated is because society is under the delusion that these are special skills that require intense training when at most he training is equivalent to learning how to drive.
Some of you may be thinking I’m insane but there are tons of jobs that are like this. The presidency for example. You can be senile and insane and still be president. The country doesn’t blow up just because you’re insane. Or maybe this isn’t a good characterization.
Hmm electrician or plumber is the better comparison. The skill level required to be a PM or designer is equivalent to electrician or plumber. Anyone can pick it up with training. It’s not rocket science folks.
I think both skills can be learned. I also think that people have intrinsic talents that make them better or worse at those skills.
Put another way, anyone can learn to code but some people will never be great at it while others have a natural talent. Same for design.
I’m curious why you think otherwise. What’s the difference in your mind?
Like the moment something doesn’t happen like the tutorial said (error message saying “idk what python is, you mean python3?”), they just give up completely instead of googling it. I really feel like the venn diagram of “people who can code” and “people who can google errors they don’t understand for a couple hours” is nearly a perfect circle.
LLMs can smooth out those little tediums, so maybe more people really will be able to learn programming now. But then again if you don’t have the patience to trudge through the annoying parts, will you have the patience to be confused and struggle, instead of letting Claude do the hard stuff for you? I’ll be interested to see what future self-taught devs look like!
Same can be said for any skill.
Threads like this bother me a bit because it makes programmers seem so smug, like they are this gifted class that is able to wizard the machine where mere mortals cannot.
Its intellectual elitism.
It might work but the moment something fails, llm suggest hacks instead of solution.
Maybe that love, or at least liking something, comes from inherent talent to some degree but all the talent in the world won’t help you if you don’t put in the time.
Design on the other hand especially modern design is easy. It's just text placement, geometric shapes and proper colors that synergize. This isn't like anatomical drawings or oil paintings. It's not just easy, it's obviously easy. What needs to be learned is how to use the tools and do it with speed which does take time and training, but again this is not rocket science, a lot of what looks "good" and "modern" is intuitive and obvious. And modern design is just easy to draw.
I mean look at hacker news. It's pretty clean. I like the aesthetic. I bet a "designer" didn't even touch it.
What you’ve described is “visual design” which is a subset of the design field.
There are many sub-specialties, but at its core design is about problem-solving, communication, and empathy.
There are a lot of bad designers who are great at making things pretty.
A good designer spends more time researching, understanding the problem space, interviewing users, brainstorming, etc., than pushing pixels around.
Also I agree with a lot of what you said. The only difference is I feel anyone can do it. The qualities you attributed to a good designer are trivial to learn. Make no mistake it takes time and effort to do these things and many companies neeed a specialized role where someone is only doing this thing…
But anyone can do it and learn it. And not anyone can learn how to program.
The analogy only illustrates the parent's point. Most licensed drivers have been doing it for years and are still terrible drivers, because they never grasp the intricacies of driving — smoothly accelerating and decelerating, smoothing out corners, anticipating light changes, gauging merge distances and timings, using mirrors well, ensuring cars get by when making a left turn in an intersection, etc, etc
This is not true at all. Most drivers pick this up. You only tend to see this with beginning drivers and it eventually becomes better. The overwhelming majority of people learn how to drive and they learn how to drive quite well.
Why do you think this? Being a designer is ultimately a matter of "good taste" and intuition for HIG (that you learn to systematize and formalize) and not everyone has this to start off with. Lack of good taste is how you get stuff like liquid glass. People can learn to compensate for lack of good intuition, but it's the same as someone without innate mathematical aptitude compensating for intuition by "grinding through the algebra".
Clearly Apple pays someone tons of money and calls them a designer and pays you nothing because your anti liquid glass opinion is shit to them. Coming here and talking as if your opinion on what "good design" is the end all be all lacks nuance and perspective.
Overall design at it's core is text placement along with media like pictures or graphs. And then putting it along with interactive buttons. It's a form of art, and this art is significantly easier than say figure drawing or painting with realism. The main reason is because the shapes used are simple, no complex shading, no need to really think about how light shines on a complex surface or how clothe interacts with the human body. Just some flat colors some typography, placement of some buttons to transition to other pages and that's it.
People are biased, but all you need to do is stare at the mona lisa, and then at the spotify logo and it's totally obvious that one took skill and the other took just just some thought. Design is easy. Liquid glass ironically is the one modern design trope that would actually take skill to render by hand, but of course we have algorithms doing it so it's more the skill of the programmer than an artist.
> The thing with being a PM or a designer is that this skill is learnable.
This is an absurd take. Everyone looks at the other side and says, "Yeah I could do that". Few can.
For designers, all you need to do is look at the google logo. That's the epitome of skill in design. It's trivial to come up with a multi colored word and have it fit in a sort of clean aesthetic.
For PMs it's much more harder to prove it to you. So I won't go about this useless endeavor. Suffice to say it's not really automatically "absurd". It's more likely you have some sort of identity and connection with being a PM and you're proud of that identity and your attack here is a defense.
If you truly were disagreeing with me in an unbiased way, you wouldn't just call it "absurd".
Factory electrical systems are on another level than your typical 110V AC. But given what I know I would say that the factory electrician sits right at the borderline between comparable to SWE and anyone can learn it.
Companies are finding out the hard way that replacing engineers with AI, is costing them twice as much to fix the problem and having to hire people again.
If I get fired because a company went crazy into AI, things went bad, and they call me back, you sure as hell I am not returning.
Many of my clients are blown away by what our teams can do with 1 senior engineer now.
Anything below enterprise level software should be thinking very hard about what team composition actually needs to look like to achieve good results. It's likely a lot smaller headcount than it used to be.
I think the point of failure now will hinge on the willingness of teams to admit what they don't know. The ones that don't won't be saved by Claude.
Admitting when you don’t know something has always been important; but the ability to build, deploy, and find out has never been greater.
Instead of theorizing about what might work, you can just build it and find out.
Certainly build and deploy faster. You aren't going to learn faster though.
Just like reading math without doing problems doesn't enable to you pass your exam, reading code without writing any of it doesn't allow you to learn at all.
Fail faster yes. Learn faster no. The research out there shows that having the AI doing the work stops the learning process.
That maybe correct for some lessons. Many lessons you have to learn the hard way to really absorb them.
There used to be hundreds of humans doing math by hand. They were computers. The people that managed those armies of humans were management class.
Then came actual silicon computers. The ones that managed those, despite the fact the value, quality, efficiency, productivity of the systems they now managed dwarfed the old human armies, those people were no longer management. They were labor.
AI will bring a similar effect. These front line "managers" who were already greyarea management, will be labelled "labor".
The roles list also leaves out testing, which seems to me to be the second most important thing (after specifying). This may be because non-testers assume that testing is easy or will be done by the AI. But any testing done by AI is not testing at all, because the effect of real testing is to inform a human of the status of the product based on that human’s empirical investigation. When AI “tests” the humans are being asked to trust instead of investigate.
PMs can't develop, since llm development (adding code to whatever the llm initially spat out) still consumes time and effort, but they can now write a PoC without devs and quickly get it up and running without sys ops.
While those roles will still exist, there will be a initial shock in people who once believed they were 'valuable' but the business thinks otherwise and does mass layoffs just like Block, because of let's face it; AI.
The way to still remain relevant is to absorb all three roles and build a startup with Claude Code on your side and move rapidly.
Just how fast can you possibly move? I can take a gander at your good idea, get claude to implement it in less time than it took you, and offer it cheaper as a result.
This isn’t comfortable but now is the time to ship fast and hard. To overstep boundaries and be the person getting attention. In a few months everyone will be so you need to do this now.
Just don’t. Don’t limit yourself. Ask for forgiveness.