If you are product-driven, life is pretty good, and maybe has never been better? (For the moment)
It has certainly been better for junior devs, mid devs, anyone looking for zirp era salary growth and supply demand ratios. For a senior code-adverse coaster looking forward to see his static salary get eaten by inflation, life has indeed never been better.
From that POV, has it ever been better, assuming you can rise to the top of an ever more crowded market?
Building a product is easier now, same way making a photograph is easier now. Making a reliable and high income living out of it though, it looks increasingly uncertain.
In a world with abundant music and photography, just saying that you made your music using Reason/ProTools or you made your photograph with a Leica isn't enough. I believe the same will happen with software. Sales, product design, customer service and operational aspects like uptime will matter more than the software itself. Ironically, this is the kind of stuff the HN type highly dislikes.
Agreed. It's not even a new thing. They tried to teach me/us long ago, starting by putting it into words we might more easily understand, such as "Customer Development" lol.
When I realized that it was the sales guys that will have the power in the mid-term new world, I got genuinely upset. However, maybe they always had the power and I just didn't want to accept reality.
Now, I believe the most desired hire in the near future will be the PMM.
...or not. Probably not.
A PMM with a tech background must be worth their weight in unobtainium at this point.
Until ~9 months ago, I spent most of my time being a "prompt engineer." Today I join a meeting, ten minutes later I receive the transcript. Then, I run a custom skill in my project, and I get Jira epics and stories to triage that are nearly perfect. Then, I run the second skill orchestration skill... some babysitting... and ~85% of the time that is all I need to do. Docs, code, unit and e2e, great UX... all there after every meeting, and basically two commands on my part.
I see two to three to maybe five years before anything I have to offer, in any capacity, is completely cut out of the picture.
I honestly don't understand how everyone is not on this same page. The labs are going to eat it all. The only reason I see for them to talk about "pausing," is because they finally realized that they are going to collapse the entire service economy around themselves at this rate: aka, the USA.
It’s actually rough today with astra and fable, it’s just not been diffused enough. Tech workers like us see the writing on the wall, but a lot of others are blissfully ignorant.
I guess if the company has no opportunities for growth so they only need exactly as much output as one team? But that sounds like a company that’s doomed anyway, regardless of ai.
How you identify talent in this new world is a different kind of a problem which I don't think people figured out still and won't for quite a while.
I hate to sound pretentious, but I wonder if it’s a difference in complexity of work and problems being solved.
> I hate to sound pretentious, but I wonder if it’s a difference in complexity of work and problems being solved.
It is about complexity, at least for me. I am working on b2b SaaS.
There are times where even using LLM assistance, I spend weeks or months working on a tough problem.
However, the <show product get feedback> loop is now nearly entire automated, when it does not involve some actually complex problem, which are most of the meetings.
As soon as you care about multiple things that are sometimes in tension, this kind of syllogism collapses.
Is that a fair summary?
> a direct and meaningful impact on the quality and availability of our services.
You:
> user-facing delivery is sameish
I don’t see how you can think that is a fair summary or a good-faith argument.
Just because it can be measured doesn’t mean it matters.
Right, but that is not what was said, so “summarising” it in that manner is not a good faith representation of their argument.
Engineers are happier because they can spend more time on that extra round of polish that was just filed into low-priority "fix when time" Linear tickets.
QA is happier because the stupid bulk operations are handled with AI and they can focus on the hard to find stuff that tickles the QA mind in a special way =)
Same stuff, but with better (in-house) tooling and (most) people are happier. The Code Artesans aren't, but it's mostly their problem and they'll find companies that only do fully manual programming for specific niches.
Not op but no.
I would say internal morale and productivity has improved. We have explicit policy guidance and a general collective distaste of pasting AI responses which is what usually sours me on interactions with people that are fully gargling the kool-aid. My CI experience has gone down from ~1.5 hours to less than five minutes and I can actually run our entire platform locally on my laptop again. My personal experience has improved at least.
Externally, you're probably right that we're not really capturing user sentiment well about how our company's changes are impacting them. I can concretely say that there were several customers that were disappointed that our public change log notes have been about the same length. They were expecting us to go through our feature backlog faster because we we're starting to use AI.
On the other hand, we have had fewer outages, reached our fifth 9 over the past four months which is a new company record in the 11 years its been tracked. We have had fewer support tickets, our customer retention rate is the highest it has ever been in the company's history, and we're growing our internal teams. Based on the evidence I have available to me, I would say that we're healthier than before both from a user sentiment perspective and an internal morale perspective.
Our QA, formerly a fairly frequent blocker of all our releases, are doing more in-depth reviews and catching issues earlier in our release process. They have become unblocked to the point they are actively chasing down work that starts to slip.
We have cleaned up and tuned both our security alerts and operations logs and improved our tenant isolation in our service in a way that makes customer and formal audits SIGNIFICANTLY easier.
We're setting ourselves up for faster human development of the hard-things. Our development environment and infrastructure are faster, cleaner, more auditable processes, and cheaper overall to operate.
These fixes mostly don't show up in our product change logs, and definitely don't fall into "new features". It would largely be invisible to the outside world, but our costs are going down (though to be fair, not offsetting the spend on AI to date), internal productivity has improved, operational incidents are down, and customer satisfaction is up.