I think you are reading what you want to read and not what I said, so yes it is you. The most productive, valuable people with developer titles in my organizations are not the ones who write the cleanest, most beautiful, most perfect code. They do all of the other parts of the job well and write solid code.
Following the introduction of AI tools, many of the people in my organization who most effectively learned to use those tools are people who previously chose to move to manager and SA roles.
Not only are these not contradictory, they fit quite well together. People who do the things around coding well, but maybe have to work hard at writing the actual code, are better at using the AI tools than exceptional coders. For my organization, the former are generally more valuable than the latter without AI, and that is increasing as a result of AI.
> I am not saying you shouldn't do that, but it feels to me like rating road construction workers on the number of potholes fixed, even though it's very possible that the potholes are caused by the sloppy work to begin with.
Not if your measurement includes quality testing the pothole repairs, which mine does, as I explicitly called out. I work in industries with extensive, long testing cycles, we are (imperfectly, of course) able to measure productivity based on things which make it through those cycles.
You are trying very hard to find ways to ignore what I am saying. It is fine if you don’t want to believe me, but these things have been true based on our observations:
A. Great “coders” have a much harder time picking up AI dev tools and using them effectively, and when they see how others use them they will admit that isn’t how they use them. They will revert to their previous habits and give up on the tools.
B. The productivity gains for the people who are good at using the tools, as measured by velocity with a minimum bar for quality (with substantial QA), are very high.
C. We have measured these things to thoroughly understand the ROI and we are accelerating our investment in AI coding tools as a result.
Some caveats I am absolutely willing to make - we are not working on bleeding edge tech doing things no one has ever done before.
We failed to effectively use AI many times before we started to get it right.
There are developers who are slower with the AI code tools than without it.
