Thread

1. 827a · 1790613119 · focus · HN ↗

   The future of engineering is product management. I don't believe there is any world left for people whose primary responsibility is opening pull requests; and we're seeing the angst against this happen from both directions. Engineers hate it. Leadership feels they don't need them. The truth is somewhere in the hazy middle; we're just in an uncanny valley right now where neither side can take the leap to cross the valley: the agents aren't good enough yet, and the bigger problem is that there's no job title or corpus of experience leadership can look to and say "Yeah that's the person we need in this role".

   The labs saw this early, and thus many roles at the labs are "Member of Technical Staff". That's the future for every software team. You're not a software engineer anymore, but you're also not a PM, nor a designer. Think horizontal slices, not vertical: Every human's responsibility is to leverage AI to be an expert on everything necessary to deliver some vertical slice of the business.

   1. glouwbug · 1790613633 · focus · HN ↗

      Wouldn't engineering then be the safest place to be? Engineers have always been embedding loose requirements into runtime law. They (supposedly) understand the business model better than most and have the technical know how to validate that

      1. 827a · 1790615284 · focus · HN ↗

         Yes I think that's correct. But I'm worried less about safety and more about fit. Articles like this convince me that there are some engineers who will struggle to adapt to a world of "no one knows what's going on". Engineers have always had the benefit of making abstraction concrete, through the systemization of abstract business requirements into concrete code that the team would build a shared understanding of over time. But that doesn't seem to be where the industry is trending.

         PMs have always lived in the world of dealing with hazy abstraction in both directions: Unclear requirements coming in, turned into unclear system capability whom they have to rely on the engineers to parse. This is where Engineers will have to get comfortable living now: Unclear requirements coming in, unclear code coming out. Its clear that many engineers aren't ready for this, and I don't blame us; it SUCKS. If I had ten dollars for every time I've heard a PM say "no one has any idea what's going on" over the past fifteen years, I wouldn't have to work anymore.

         Engineers are probably still the role most suited to adapt to this new world, as you say, but I think people are still vastly underestimating how much they will be personally impacted by the changing industry. If you hate your job now, for reasons like those the article communicates, you'll hate it ten times more in a year.

   2. whstl · 1790616054 · focus · HN ↗

      > The future of engineering is product management

      Product Managers have been claiming this for years now, but put an AI in front of them and they also just start asking it to do their product management job for them.

      Worst ones I witnessed were just using it to hallucinate tickets. I saw one even fired because of that. Endless mountains of text going absolutely nowhere, both me and the CPO thought we were going insane from reading so much Claude-ish.

      Best one I know used Copilot to code a "Notion to Jira" exporter so it copies requests from business people into Jira. Automated their own work, did nothing else other than monitoring the Python script daily and running ceremonies.

      They can pontificate all they want about taste but: modern apps are all copycats of others, work badly, monetization strategies are spaghetti against the wall...

      Product management will be replaced by AI way sooner than engineers.

      1. 827a · 1790639345 · focus · HN ↗

         Reading comprehension check: I never said product managers would be the new engineers: I said that engineering is becoming product management.

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