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.
SWEs will be fine, all these small VC-funded startups building another CRUD app will not.
6 years ago it was “you need that many engineers, lol, I can build a clone this weekend.”
Now it’s “you need many engineers, trust me bro.”
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.
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.
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
Here in Europe this is not a thing, I've been hearing about such cases mostly from the US where it's clear that there is a recession going - I don't know why this is not blatantly obvious to everyone who does not view reality as whatever is said by the talking heads on TV.
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.
In other words: Yes it will ruin our team.
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?
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
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".
> 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.
In which country is this?
Most PM and designers would fail the (simple) math to be a qualified electrician in any EU conutry :) (in this comparison I would actually grade designers to be "business oriented people" like PM, not technical oriented people, though lot of designers use technical tools)
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
The entire company is hell, it made that switch overnight and never looked back at the devs that have to endure all this bullshit.
Luckily I found another company that treats devs as humans. I've convinced one other employee at $EX_COMPANY to make the switch, with success! I'm planning to find everyone there a proper job that doesn't make u feel like you're under surveillance.
I am truly astonished someone said this. My experience with AI has been the opposite. It can knock up something reasonable given the right prompting. It can generate a lot of code. It will hit deliver whatever goal you have, but it won't do it in the simplest neatest way, it won't have context about how you way to grow the codebase in the future.
The inevitable result of this is that it produces much more complexity to do a given thing than a senior engineer will. This is a big problem, because their performance degrades as their context window fills. So you will reach a point where the AI has coded you into a corner, it has created such complexity that it can't understand what is going on without filling its context window, at which point it can't do anything and you're left with a massive stinking pile of slop that's too big for you to work on and too complex for it to unpick.
The only way of sustainably using AI to accelerate your productivity is to be the specialist who can give guidance on structure and approach so that the codebase doesn't spiral.
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.
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.
No team needed.
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.
