Thread · HN Continuity

I think for most things by far, product is king. If you're in a deep tech space, then no. Perhaps if you're making rockets, or compilers. But most other things become "make some engineering judgements about what we need to build, based on what the business side is asking for".

Now, it was already like that to an extent. To be crude, the job was "decide what needs to be made, and make it". People would be on various splits between the two, typically on the "make it" end if they were junior.

Initially, I thought about what effect this would have on hiring. Perhaps we would get a lot more people who were not so great at implementation, since we are hiring for judgement?

Let's consider Berkson's paradox.

Let's say that there's a correlation between implementation skill and engineering judgement, eg r=0.5, a rugby-ball shaped cloud that points up and to the right. The basis for this being that you maybe learn good judgement from implementing things, something like that.

Before AI, selection on the sum scores (judgement + implementation) would give you a set of engineers whose correlation was deflated from the underlying correlation. It could even go negative (in fact it would if the underlying correlation was zero, but we assumed it was positive). This is the original Berkson's paradox, selection makes the correlation coefficient lower. There would be less of a connection between someone's (who had been hired) judgement and implementation skill than 0.5, it would tend downwards, possibly landing at zero.

Now, let us imagine that AI means the implementation side becomes less important. We will veer towards hiring people based on engineering judgement, rather than coding skill. Suppose we add a parameter on (judgement + lambda * implementation).

What actually happens is, if lambda tends towards zero, we are selecting on a line that is only judgement. But that means actually, the deflating effect of the selection is lowered, and we get a correlation between our variables that is closer to the underlying set (it won't necessarily be all the way back, since we restrict the range).

So then actually, somehow, people we hire who are good at judgement will also be good at implementation. Somewhat unexpected.