I won’t take credit for this insight, but as someone else pointed out, everyone oversimplifies other people’s jobs. To PMs engineers are just code monkeys that they won’t need soon. To engineers, PMs are the guys that manage Jira. Designers are the fussy people that make things look pretty. The reality is all these jobs have intricacies AI absolutely sucks at but those intricacies are lost in the larger discussion.
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.
Instead of engineer vs PM/manager I separate those jobs based on these categories.
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.
No. There are intricacies to every job but these are intricacies that are learnable. It’s like learning how to drive. It’s a skill for sure but anyone can do it after practice.
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’m kinda getting off topic here but anecdotally: I’ve tried to get so many of my friends to learn programming. I love it, and I think a lot of em would love it too. But they hit a hard wall with the patience needed to self learn.
Like the moment something doesn’t happen like the tutorial said (error message saying “idk what python is, you mean python3?”), they just give up completely instead of googling it. I really feel like the venn diagram of “people who can code” and “people who can google errors they don’t understand for a couple hours” is nearly a perfect circle.
LLMs can smooth out those little tediums, so maybe more people really will be able to learn programming now. But then again if you don’t have the patience to trudge through the annoying parts, will you have the patience to be confused and struggle, instead of letting Claude do the hard stuff for you? I’ll be interested to see what future self-taught devs look like!
> It’s like learning how to drive. It’s a skill for sure but anyone can do it after practice.
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
Do people really think like that? I see the other people at my company as human beings solving complex problems whether they are an engineer, a manager, an exec, or HR.
I think the reality is that these tools are good enough that, to some degree, all three of the roles are correct, everyone is now definitely more able to do others' roles, leadership knows this, and even if there's a period of inefficiency or overwork or lower quality output, there's going to be a drive toward collapsing responsibilities. OpenAI saw this early: Member of Technical Staff. The degree to which this negatively impacts the team or company's output is really a function of (1) how drastically leadership does layoffs, (2) how quickly models and agents continue to improve, and (3) how earnestly leadership can admit mistakes and backfill humans when they realize they've over-fired.
As an engineer and a daily if not hourly user of Claude Code, I would never dream I could do the jobs of my product / designer teammates. Not because I don’t have opinions on product or design, but simply because they do me the huge service of attending meetings so I don’t have to.
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 my experience at BigCorp, Inc., "alignment meetings" are for meeting with other teams, not for meeting with your own team. You'd just call that a "team meeting", "feature crew meeting", "leads meeting" (if it's just leads), or something to that effect. In BigCorp, Inc. you traditionally need to have both kinds of meetings somewhat regularly. Not sure how the advent of AI will change that structure.
I don't know why people are talking so theoretically. This was months ago.
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.
If a startup is laying off engineers then it’s dead in the water. That means it’s not growing and focused on cost cutting at the expense of velocity. Thats what a large company does. The issue isn’t AI but the startup fundamentally being broken and this being a last gasp for air before it dies.
If a startup is laying off architect and analyst type people who have a great high level understand of what technology can do and what customers need, people who can normalize requirements and document them effectively, agreed that would be a sign of a last gasp.
PMs and devs though, Claude mostly does their jobs now.
We have yet to hit this phase in the cycle: "Hey we laid off all our engineers 6 months ago and vibe-coded this thing and now it's super buggy and AI can't fix it. Can you (senior engineer consultant) look under the hood and fix it?"
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.
It's fine, I suppose. It's like a puzzle, and you really need to be comfortable with banging your head against a wall trying to make work what is essentially immediately created legacy code by the LLM.
> 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.
I think it's less armchair speculating about the observable outcome, that people are losing their jobs, but the why. AI coding tools aren't making 10x developers, they aren't even making 1.5x developers. They also aren't making "PMs who code" or "designers who code."
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.
Being a generalist is less fun when you don't have specialist colleagues around to teach you new things and take over the tasks that require actual experience, training, intuition, etc.
I’m mainly concerned about communication worsening. If a former engineer, designer and PM all want to do the same job now, the results will be fine, excellent, even, but only if they communicate and build together better than they used to. People who only communicated along the lines provided by the design of their role or organization have new skills to learn.
This naturally seems to indicate smaller teams will become more normal.
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.
I wonder if this could go down similar way some SaaS systems went to lower barrier to customisation so less technical users could do it. For example, having to interface with some ServiceNow instances I often find major flaws with db schema design - similar data in multiple places, lack of constraints, etc. Basically one big mess you are now stuck with that could have been avoided if a db expert was in charge of data model design.
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.
It already has. Those jobs PM, designer and engineer are all affected and there will not be a need for too many of them for a product feature and will be reduced over time.
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.
I think you're probably still going to need all of those people, just less of them to accomplish the same amount of work. It's the nature of LLMs that they will always need oversight. Having 20 or even 100 of them agree on something is never going to be 100% accurate -- it can't, the randomness and hallucinations are part of the secret sauce. There will always be a need for people to verify what they do. That said, it was the exact same when people were doing the work.
You need to be sociopathic aggressive right now. We are in a few month window here where execs are very confused even if they parrot their group chat talking points to sound smart and ahead of it. They are all behind and they know it.
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.
I won’t take credit for this insight, but as someone else pointed out, everyone oversimplifies other people’s jobs. To PMs engineers are just code monkeys that they won’t need soon. To engineers, PMs are the guys that manage Jira. Designers are the fussy people that make things look pretty. The reality is all these jobs have intricacies AI absolutely sucks at but those intricacies are lost in the larger discussion.
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.
Instead of engineer vs PM/manager I separate those jobs based on these categories.
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.
And for people who never liked it in the first place and just wanted a quick buck.
You can't pay Claude with equity though
which doesn't make sense because the quick buck train is gonna stop. But then again, maybe there wasn't any sense in them in the first place.
No. There are intricacies to every job but these are intricacies that are learnable. It’s like learning how to drive. It’s a skill for sure but anyone can do it after practice.
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.
Huh as someone who has a career doing both design and engineering I disagree with this take.
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?
I’m kinda getting off topic here but anecdotally: I’ve tried to get so many of my friends to learn programming. I love it, and I think a lot of em would love it too. But they hit a hard wall with the patience needed to self learn.
Like the moment something doesn’t happen like the tutorial said (error message saying “idk what python is, you mean python3?”), they just give up completely instead of googling it. I really feel like the venn diagram of “people who can code” and “people who can google errors they don’t understand for a couple hours” is nearly a perfect circle.
LLMs can smooth out those little tediums, so maybe more people really will be able to learn programming now. But then again if you don’t have the patience to trudge through the annoying parts, will you have the patience to be confused and struggle, instead of letting Claude do the hard stuff for you? I’ll be interested to see what future self-taught devs look like!
> It’s like learning how to drive. It’s a skill for sure but anyone can do it after practice.
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
One of the more ignorant comments I've read on HN which is saying something.
> I thought programming was the same thing for a long time but have grown to find out that this is not the case.
> 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.
Do people really think like that? I see the other people at my company as human beings solving complex problems whether they are an engineer, a manager, an exec, or HR.
I think the reality is that these tools are good enough that, to some degree, all three of the roles are correct, everyone is now definitely more able to do others' roles, leadership knows this, and even if there's a period of inefficiency or overwork or lower quality output, there's going to be a drive toward collapsing responsibilities. OpenAI saw this early: Member of Technical Staff. The degree to which this negatively impacts the team or company's output is really a function of (1) how drastically leadership does layoffs, (2) how quickly models and agents continue to improve, and (3) how earnestly leadership can admit mistakes and backfill humans when they realize they've over-fired.
In other words: Yes it will ruin our team.
As an engineer and a daily if not hourly user of Claude Code, I would never dream I could do the jobs of my product / designer teammates. Not because I don’t have opinions on product or design, but simply because they do me the huge service of attending meetings so I don’t have to.
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.
When the product marketer, product manager, and designer are the same person there is no alignment meeting.
In my experience at BigCorp, Inc., "alignment meetings" are for meeting with other teams, not for meeting with your own team. You'd just call that a "team meeting", "feature crew meeting", "leads meeting" (if it's just leads), or something to that effect. In BigCorp, Inc. you traditionally need to have both kinds of meetings somewhat regularly. Not sure how the advent of AI will change that structure.
The final frontier: a warm body.
I don't know why people are talking so theoretically. This was months ago.
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.
If a startup is laying off engineers then it’s dead in the water. That means it’s not growing and focused on cost cutting at the expense of velocity. Thats what a large company does. The issue isn’t AI but the startup fundamentally being broken and this being a last gasp for air before it dies.
If a startup is laying off architect and analyst type people who have a great high level understand of what technology can do and what customers need, people who can normalize requirements and document them effectively, agreed that would be a sign of a last gasp.
PMs and devs though, Claude mostly does their jobs now.
We have yet to hit this phase in the cycle: "Hey we laid off all our engineers 6 months ago and vibe-coded this thing and now it's super buggy and AI can't fix it. Can you (senior engineer consultant) look under the hood and fix it?"
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.
I clean up vibe code as a senior engineer consultant, it's quite lucrative actually. I specifically offer this service because I know how to do it.
I've been thinking of jumping into this sooner rather than later because I see this becoming a Thing eventually. Are you enjoying it?
It's fine, I suppose. It's like a puzzle, and you really need to be comfortable with banging your head against a wall trying to make work what is essentially immediately created legacy code by the LLM.
> 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.
If that’s how this works out then perhaps Accenture will be okay after all.
Well in 2 years AI will have so advanced that none of this matters.
I think it's less armchair speculating about the observable outcome, that people are losing their jobs, but the why. AI coding tools aren't making 10x developers, they aren't even making 1.5x developers. They also aren't making "PMs who code" or "designers who code."
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.
> they aren't even making 1.5x developers
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.
It’s not hard to 5x your productivity when you were close to zero to start with.
Being a generalist is less fun when you don't have specialist colleagues around to teach you new things and take over the tasks that require actual experience, training, intuition, etc.
I’m mainly concerned about communication worsening. If a former engineer, designer and PM all want to do the same job now, the results will be fine, excellent, even, but only if they communicate and build together better than they used to. People who only communicated along the lines provided by the design of their role or organization have new skills to learn.
One phrase stuck with me from this: "they'll start to absorb lessons that it took their colleagues decades to learn."
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.
What’s changed now, with AI, is that you can have compressed learning cycles. Folks can build, deploy, and learn faster now than ever before.
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.
> Folks can build, deploy, and learn faster now than ever before
Fail faster yes. Learn faster no. The research out there shows that having the AI doing the work stops the learning process.
> absorb lessons
That maybe correct for some lessons. Many lessons you have to learn the hard way to really absorb them.
This naturally seems to indicate smaller teams will become more normal.
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.
I definitely think teams will be getting smaller, and will become even more outcome oriented.
XP is still a good method to practice, but now with AI.
I wonder if this could go down similar way some SaaS systems went to lower barrier to customisation so less technical users could do it. For example, having to interface with some ServiceNow instances I often find major flaws with db schema design - similar data in multiple places, lack of constraints, etc. Basically one big mess you are now stuck with that could have been avoided if a db expert was in charge of data model design.
I think it will enhance everyone.
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.
It already has. Those jobs PM, designer and engineer are all affected and there will not be a need for too many of them for a product feature and will be reduced over time.
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.
I think you're probably still going to need all of those people, just less of them to accomplish the same amount of work. It's the nature of LLMs that they will always need oversight. Having 20 or even 100 of them agree on something is never going to be 100% accurate -- it can't, the randomness and hallucinations are part of the secret sauce. There will always be a need for people to verify what they do. That said, it was the exact same when people were doing the work.
You need to be sociopathic aggressive right now. We are in a few month window here where execs are very confused even if they parrot their group chat talking points to sound smart and ahead of it. They are all behind and they know it.
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.