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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

> So exact in fact that they will need to specify a program in a click and drag interface, or in human language.

This. I started programming in Machine Code, where the "editor" was a pad of graph paper.

I've watched management- and business-focused people sneer at us geeks for my entire career, and watched them drool over the thought of finally getting rid of us.

Hasn't happened yet.

> I'd be surprised if the next step is "Hi, I'm an ideas guy, please give me an app that does Uber, for bicycles, but better."

I get that, from "idea people," on a regular basis. They have nothing but contempt for us "Make It Happen" folks. They treat us as if we grow on trees, and are suckers, to boot.

Inevitably, the above, is followed by something that translates to "Of course, you will do all the work, but I'll get all the money, because the idea is what's really valuable."

If I follow up on it at all, I'll be asked to sign an NDA, and meet in some clandestine place, so they can whisper to me about their AI-powered cheese straightener.

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I agree with your characterization in general. If all someone has is an idea and no relevant experience to back it up, run. I can’t stand people like that.

But there’s one type of ideas person I’m thrilled to work with. Someone with deep and successful experience in sales. The head of sales at my company is also relatively product oriented and boy, he just has a knack for what customers want.

In general, I think many engineers can do some product management. We can figure out basic accounting and finance. But the idea of making a cold call to sell dental software, or chasing down school principals at an education conference is almost as foreign to most software engineers as CS is to most sales folks.

Salesperson + engineer = superpowers

Besides opening your own company does a role exist where you can do both?

DevRel or Sales Engineering roles, maybe?

There’s a role called sales engineer that typically exists in the sales organization but requires a technical background. From the engineering org’s perspective, your SEs are there to make sure sales doesn’t oversell or undersell. At my company your pay is commission-based but with a higher base than sales proper.

Solution Architect is another common title. As someone else mentioned, Developer Relations is at least adjacent though that tends to be less salesy and, depending on the role/company, may be more focused on community aspects than building demos and the like. In any case, at software companies, there are definitely customer-facing roles that are more technical though they may not involve a lot of direct coding. For non-field roles, product management qualifies as well.

I would say an SA (Solution Architect) is very different from an SE (Sales Engineer) in one fundamental way: the SA is focused on delivering value post-contract and the SE is focused on making sure the org is able deliver the value promised by working with sales in the pre-contract phase. In some smaller companies or organization within a company, I can see these roles being performed by the same person but in general that distinction between pre and post sales has been my lived experience.

Where I work, SAs are pretty much technical pre-sales. (There are also chief architects who are somewhat related.) If a customer needs ongoing post-contract support, they can buy a TAM (technical account manager). We don't have sales engineers.

(When I worked for a long-ago hardware company, system engineers (SEs) were pretty much the equivalent of SAs where I am currently.

SA people that I have met so far (30+) can architect and more importantly talk about and market the solution. But the execution is often times lacking. And that is solely because the execution is less important. (If the contract is big enough SA can always lean on product engineers or hire contractors to execute).

Being the engineering contractor to SA organization is daunting to a programmer, but rather rewarding.

Agreed this was my experience with the SA role

In my company, all of our sales people have a technical background. They are not the best engineers in the company, but they could do the job if they had to. More importantly, when faced with technical people, they are not completely clueless.

Agreed. I have a thousand tools mastered to solve any software issue quickly. But people issues can still stump me for days. Both skillsets take dedication and years(decades?) to master.

Wait until managers realize that their jobs are a lot easier to automate away with AI than the jobs of software developers.

What makes you think that’s true?

Human managers (who are good at their jobs) bring a little Bedside Manner, a modicum of compassion to Human Resource Allocation that will soon be seen as a luxury compared to low-cost, fully-automated Human Resource Monitoring & Reinforcement Systems

Good managers shield their reports from a lot of the crap that is inevitable at scale in a large organization. A large company can't just have individuals and small self-managed teams go off and do whatever they feel like. And, yes, if you just cut out all the intermediate layers, the VP with 150 direct reports will simply have to resort to automation based on simplistic metrics. "You didn't produce enough lines of code last week. If that happens again, you will be placed on a performance plan and then terminated if the situation doesn't improve in 2 months."

> A large company can't just have individuals and small self-managed teams go off and do whatever they feel like.

Right but how much of that is because humans don't scale? With the AI, if it can do a thing well enough it can do it 100 000 times per day.

I think its simply because upper management doesn't trust the people they've hired.

In my mind, having individuals and small self managed teams go off and do whatever they feel drawn to do is exactly how a good company is run. - So long as those teams and individuals talk to (& seek advice) from the rest of the company when their work has impacts outside the team. The book Reinventing Organizations by Laloux talks about this a lot, and how it works in some companies today.

The reason it doesn't happen more is that upper management doesn't trust their employees and they don't feel in control when people just do things.

Literally all of those layers including the VP could be replaced right now.

All those jobs do is push emails rewording other emails to other people pushing email.

I feel like eventually every company will have a single a figurehead that’s fed instructions but believes it’s original thought and is told by the AI what a great idea they just had all day long.

A bit like the Captain from Wall-E.

”Repeat the task, with a more pleasant bedside manner.”

Tell ChatGPT it's a product manager overseeing engineers and providing executive summaries. Create a system that feeds executive emails inquiring about project statuses into ChatGPT and emails the developers asking for updates. Developers reply with jargon-heavy details about tickets for next milestone, ChatGPT writes an executive summary that eliminates jargon and sends to executives.

Not the full job, but it can probably be built right now.

And unlike code, if the model fails it'll be more obvious and less costly.

This is a project managers job not a engineering managers job.

OP said “product manager” which is also wrong. Funny how these three very different roles constantly get mixed up by smart engineers.

It would make things a lot easier if it was all one big AI. Lets refer to it as The company.

Maybe because from the POV of engineers, they all look kind of the same and half of it doesn't make sense.

The bad version of all three look exactly the same. And the bad version of all three are actually worse than nobody at all. Yet, high management is completely convinced those people are essential so they'd rather keep a bad professional there than get rid of them.

Anyway, the good version of those three are completely different, and add a ton of value on very different places. I think they are rare enough that many people don't ever meet one of them.

Titles--bloody titles! The AI doesn't care what its title is.

And no emails are even necessary (it can scan all internal systems and repositories instead).

if GPT or copilot make developer 5-50x more productive then you need just 2 good programmers instead of team of 10-100 person, so out of window goes all formalized agile processes, safes etc so you don't need anymore those managers who are doing communicating, process planning and other big business stuff. Of course this will also affect for developers but I bet less because there is huge need for software developers and mid-size business did not have money to hire team huge team of developers but this will change when you need only two people instead of 40.

There are a lot of tools that have made developers far more productive than that and it has never resulted in reduction of demand.

I don't disagree we just don't know yet. I do think these 2 guys will be overworked as f** and constantly context switching to the point they barely know what they're doing anymore...hope we don't get there.

Funny enough, last week I was talking about Copilot with a colleague. Out loud, I wondered if there was a diminishing return from Copilot. That is, Copilot is great at filling in boilerplate / the obvious, and I get to focus on the more intricate parts of the solution. But can my brain operate at the higher level day after day? Week after week? TBH I have my doubts.

Maybe it's going to be AI enables quality more than quantity?

Same thing is happening with doctors. I read a post from a GP a while back talking about how it used to be that he got a wide mix of acuity/difficulty all day long. Now all the "easy" patients go to the Nurse Practitioner, and all he gets is the difficult ones.

He's still expected to put in the same amount of time, but now he has to expend brain power the entire time.

Sounds like we're both making the case for the 4-Day work week.

If C makes developers 5-50x more effective compared to writing assembly, then you just need two devs instead of a team of 10-100.

Obviously that didn't happen. And people actually made predictions like that once upon a time.

As software becomes cheaper, and the production of software can be done with fewer people, demand has always increased and I don't see any reason that's going to stop.

Reminds me of this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox but the situation with software is a bit different.

I recall seeing a video in which a senior vice president of Symbolics (yes, the Lisp machine people) claimed that their aim was to put the largest software projects within reach of a small team, and everything smaller would be feasible by a single person.

Had Lisp machines (as an idea) remained viable, we might've come close! But managers just love having large teams to command, and we've invented process and ceremony to fill up the spare time necessary to do the work of ten programmers with a hundred, as well as rejecting technologies like Lisp and Smalltalk that give individual programmers tremendous leverage over the problem space.

Should AI actually make people more productive, instead of being an endless generator of messes for fleshbags to clean up, I imagine some successor of Scrum to come along to tie up most of staff programmers' work days with meetings. Hell, that may happen anyway.

I learn in a different topic on HN that with a sophisticated chat bot lurkers dare ask support questions. As many developers I've often asked people how to do things. Before asking I try to find answers in google (as asking questions easily googled is lame) but if the chat channel is busy and I've already asked for help in the last 30 minutes I do more google searches. Each next question feels more expensive. Technically I apparently prefer to ask google first. If there is a chat bot fit for the question I should logically go "bother" that before asking humans for help.

Asking a human manager for anything is many orders of magnitude more frightening. It's not that I don't have questions! I have many, of which a lot are dumb questions, questions that I should be able to figure out without help.

Say i'm pondering taking a day off, with the human I would make up my mind, pick the day and ask for the day off. With a bot I would ask which day would be ideal before making up my mind. A human manager would think you've gone insane if you asked 20 such questions. You either want a day off, you don't or you say nothing.

I might like a different brand of coffee while we are trying to meet the deadline. I'm sure that question is going to go down well with an overworked human manager.

I don't think in 40-ish years I have ever asked a manager what's a good day or week for me to take off. I probably have certain constraints and I can look at my calendar. And have a general sense for good and less-good periods.

There are questions that should be asked but wont be and ones that could be asked but shouldn't be. It depends a lot on the persons, their relationship and the context where the lines are but if its just a bot you can ask anything. The answers would somewhat depend on your role but they wont depend on who you are or how few or how many questions you've used up in the last hour, today, this week, this month and this year. Humans are like that, we are like: I've never asked for anything! as if its an important metric.

Purely out of curiosity I one time ask for a risk analysis report my employer is legally obligated to maintain and share with me (but didn't have). Safe to say the response involved a lot of emergent behavior.

With people asking a question is never just asking a question.

Like with any job there is a sub set of tasks better done by a machine.

This! And tbh, compared with the "bad manager type" (Dilbert type) that won't feel worse :D

The economy is so good at generating value that it is somehow possible for large portions of participants to create zero or negative value.

In Bullshit Jobs Graeber terms our current system as "managerial feudalism". It's not capitalism in the same way Adam Smith or Marx envisioned, we don't have firms brutally competing to generate the most value at the lowest cost. Instead we have a system of rent extraction largely done by a small number of powerful players. You don't need to be efficient to extract rent, so you end up with a court, or org chart in modern terms, of useless hangers on that mostly serve to demonstrate your wealth and power.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy

I never realised Bullshit jobs was written by an actual academic.

It's not a new idea.

This seems overly pessimistic (unsurprising given that it’s written by an eventual fascist). Egalitarian societies do exist, but they take work to maintain. The Mondragon corporation functions as a cooperative despite its large size. I know less about it’s day to day organizing that I’d like to unfortunately, would be very interested to learn more.

It's something to be aware of.

I think it's an underestimated aspect of why CEO's get paid the big bucks.

They're paid money to not let this stupidity happen.

I've been thinking that AI managers is the real killer app for AI. There are challenges, but none seem insurmountable even with the present base tech.

I kinda wonder if it would not be so bad, if a company asked chatGPT “prompt the engineers for status updates occasionally, then take their responses and produce high-level summaries for department heads” or whatever.

On their side, the engineers might even ask it “summarize my tickets and come up with an optimistic, business-friendly high level storyline.”

stop "prompting" me and pay attention. I do SO much communication with what I'm working yet it's not enough and I also need to do YOUR job for you. And manage your kanban. And compile all the things I've done at the end of my term. Can't wait for AI to replace you, you are useless.

The only time I see synergies is when we talk about what task to take on next and why.

Indeed. And ChatGPT already can babysit burnout engineers.

(which has been major time sink of engineering managers that I know).

> If your managers could specify what they need in a manner that no-code tools, or now AI, can generate the code they want, they will have to be extremely exact in their language. So exact in fact that they will need to specify a program in a click and drag interface, or in human language.

This is also one of the main reasons why all programming jobs were not outsourced to India.

Couldn't agree more with this sentiment. And to expand on it - the great outsourcing events we saw in the mid-2000s didn't work out for many of the things outside of programming: IT consulting in general, support and operations, call centers and things like design and architecture. The barrier was not always technical, but often a misunderstanding of how BaU works in the <parent_country> vs offshore and/or what the ask/expectations were. There's a lot of waste that happens when needing to be overly explicit and still having the message misinterpreted, interpreted too literally or simply failure to understand.

> This is also one of the main reasons why all programming jobs were not outsourced to India.

There's a whole industry here in America that re-shores programming contracts. They know they can't underbid Indian/foreign body shops so they just wait a few months and call back the companies who went with cheaper programmers. If the company is still around it's generally a complete re-write.

Great point. A lot of folks forget that not all programming jobs can/should be outsourced. There's value in outsourcing but specifications and contexts change that.

This hits deep and resonates beyond tech. This “ideas” versus “make things happen” divide is also prevalent in science and art.

Ye, often the "creator", the "head" gets credited with everything a whole team come up with. Sure, picking the good and directing it to consistent whole is important but they would be nothing without people that produced that in the first place.

Yeah it seems natural to divide the credit evenly, just as midfielders and strikers and coaches get equal credit for winning a game.

PhD students and postdocs are mostly fungible, though. PIs are not, if only by the virtue of their position in the system.

The same reason why menial workers earn so little relative to how hard they work.

It would appear that both credit and money flow to those who enable things to happen rather than those who execute.

Interestingly, that's probably another area where a language model could be put into service. Consider, every workman with access to say GPT-6 now has an expert lawyer, MBA, secretary, manager, etc. at his beck and call. What happens when every individual can navigate the system as well as an entire team of professionals? I'm imagining headless corporations where the only humans involved are those engaged in physical interface with the world.

That sounds like a playfield leveller but most likely won’t happen. But it surely would be nice

I think the claim that PhDs and postdocs are fungible is what enables credit to be concentrated to the PI.

In top places though, it’s often the case that trainees have an idea, get shut down by PI, trainee demonstrates project can work, then PI changes mind.

Also in science, the usual progress of a project is often PI has an idea, trainees explores the idea, finds an even better idea, PI says great now write the paper.

But I agree with you in the sense that PIs act as the “quality control” or “selection process” whereby ideas get culled and refined. And their scientific taste is non fungible.

re: idea people

True. And once their product hits the market, if it ever gets there, they don't thrive.

Prior to launch they are sooooo in love with their idea that they are meticulous about features all the while thinking they're smarter than the market.

They don't understand and appreciate the value of execution. Ideas are easy. Execution - because it involves people as well as adapting to change - is 10x harder.

Yes, those people exist. Unfortunately, that bias will ultimately undermine them, but they'll never admit it.

One of the things that I'm fairly good at, is walking people from "Crazy Idea That Will Never Work," through to "Finished Product That People Want."

It tends to be a very long process, and often involves a lot of "trial balloons." I just went through that, in the last couple of years. The project we're realizing, looks absolutely nothing at all like what the CEO originally dreamed up, but everyone that has seen it, loves it.

The trick is to not start off by saying "It'll never work." That slams doors shut, right away.

It's more like, "OK, so let's walk through what we'll need to do, to make it work."

That will often result in changes being made, by the "idea person," as the plans are laid. We will also try to create test harnesses and prototypes. These often end up, with the idea person going "Hmm...it seemed like a good idea, but it doesn't work the way I wanted."

It's slow and painful, but works.

I love this approach. What is your current role that allows you to do that?

Quite a few companies have innovation incubators/teams, and this is inline with how I have seen them work.

In the project I’m on, I’m basically the CTO (sort of meaningless, as I’m the only front end programmer, and also do most of the backend).

I could be a lot more of a pain in the butt than I am, as I have a lot of leverage, but one of my goals is to help others on the team (including a young CEO) to learn how to make ship software.

If I were working on my own, I probably would have shipped, eighteen months ago.

No one is making a dime. It’s a nonprofit effort.

Yes. They have a want. The key is to nail down the need. But they have to be willing.

Most all problems I see are just resource limited in some respect (occasionally its something humanity just doesn't know how to do yet, that's where the edges of science are). It's not something brand new that's never been done or explored, some prior work typically exists.

When someone says "can we..." or spills their idea they've often identified a real need but they often don't seem to do any sort of analysis further than identifying a demand signal. Chances are, you're not the first person to observe the problem and an opportunity to capitalize on it and there may be good reason no one has yet (its economically infeasible given current understanding, resources, and value people see in it).

The trick is to hold their hand and walk them through a feasibility analysis. Given infinite time and money, I'm confident I can arrive at pretty much any solution or at least a useful approximation that's an improvement on where we currently stand, so we start there and walk backwards. How much time do we really have, how much money do we really have. What's your appetite for risk within those bounds. Let's start talking about some tradeoffs of what you want to see and what I think we might be able to actually achieve.

When someone says "can we..." or spills their idea they've often identified a real need but they often don't seem to do any sort of analysis further than identifying a demand signal.

In my experience, they've identified a want. Either their want or a want they think the market has.

It's not until further analysis do they / you / we get to root need(s). This is why (allegedly) so many "IT projects" fail. The client got what they wanted...not what they needed.

> It's more like, "OK, so let's walk through what we'll need to do, to make it work."

Socratic Software development is the way to go.

It's the usual: "I have a great idea for a Startup, now I just need the money to hire some Developers to implement it...". The Winklevoss twins for example come to mind...

And the way to get back at PHB is to form a tech lead software company and hire 0 people with MBAs.

Is that truly fair though. I have no exposure to MBAs and it may be all the negative talk about them is based on the conspicuously bad ones. I'm speaking as an IT person with very little experience of running a business, and it may be that a good MBA could be a great asset. I genuinely don't know.

I'm reminded of reading about a Lisp machine company that ran into the ground because it was managed by techies. Their tech may have been great but their marketing and business skills were very arguably what killed the company.

I don't have an MBA, but I studied intercultural management as my Masters, and I am writing my PhD right now in management. To be honest it is quite zen like, with the degree you can understand how you can manage engineers by not trying to manage them. Other type of people mostly need closer alignment. I know a lot of stuff of how to make a company more profitable, and generally a nicer place to work. Management is actually quite like engineering, more of a craft than an exact science. The science helps you to have names for things, and a lot of times I really know how to fix people stuff.

MBAs are HN’s favorite punching bags. They are the only stereotype that it’s still ok to blanket-generalize about and dunk on here.

Some MBAs are dumbasses. Some are brilliant business people. Some of them actually have tech skills and have been writing software longer than you’ve been alive. This is true for many degrees.

I don’t know how some of the anti-MBA commenters think it works: A smart software engineer goes off to business school, gets an MBA in addition to his undergrad technical degree/experience, and now… what? He’s somehow dumber? How does that work? Only on HN.

Because the promise of the MBA program was that you could be air-dropped into an industry that you had zero experience in, and your MBA education would automatically make you the smartest in the room. You (supposedly) didn't need that industry experience, applying MBA principles would be enough. And it destroyed enough companies that they developed a not-undeserved reputation.

Now, if you already had relevant experience, then went and took the MBA course, and were able to identify when to lean on which, great! But, of course, part of that education is telling you that you don't NEED that experience in the first place, and if it and MBA principles disagreed, you should rely on the MBA principles.

So, if you took the course truly to heart, then, well, yes, you would be somewhat "dumber", so long as you define that as "unable to make correct decisions."

Having been a software engineer and gone on to do a MBA, none of what was taught for the degree reflected the attitude that you're describing. At no time did anyone tell us to ignore our prior experience - rather we were told that that our prior experience plus a business education would be valuable to future employers (which it is).

There was no expectation of being "air dropped" into an industry, and in fact, industry recruiters looked for candidates who already had prior experience when picking students for interviews and hiring. The students who had no relevant experience for the industry they were recruiting for (e.g. ex-Peace Corps or mgmt consultant looking to transition to tech or industry in general) were the ones who struggled to find roles. Your assumptions about what an MBA education entails are incredibly far off the mark.

I have an MBA and a CS degree so responses like this make me chuckle. I generally don't bother to engage with those with an MBA-phobia who haven't done it themselves.

> I've watched management- and business-focused people sneer at us geeks for my entire career, and watched them drool over the thought of finally getting rid of us. [...] They have nothing but contempt for us "Make It Happen" folks. They treat us as if we grow on trees, and are suckers, to boot.

I've met my fair share as well. Jobs copycats too!

The trick is always to ask them how much they can raise, and do so assuming they raised successfully in the past and that they know VCs.

Either the conversation gets really interesting, or they clam up real quick!

> The trick is always to ask them how much they can raise, and do so assuming they raised successfully in the past and that they know VCs.

They don't need to have the ability to raise anything in a B2B setting, if they can answer the alternative question:

"How many customers have you personally signed up for previous software sales".

I'll happily partner with someone who has profitably sold B2B software - having a list of existing contacts in existing companies as well as solid experience going through the entire sales channel is, to me, just as valuable as extracting money from VCs, because I'd rather have the money from customers than money from VCs.

Tell me more about this cheese straightener… that sounds amazing. Where do I prepay?

I wonder what straightening it provides.

Like when the brick of cheese comes out of the freezer with an obvious bend?

Or like when I don’t make a nice square cut and my sandwich is cheesier in some spots than others?

When you grate the cheese, it often curls a bit. My patent-application-indefinitely-pending cheese straightener uncurls it.

It was a George Carlin joke. Don't remember exactly which monologue, but he was talking about how you can generate a need with advertising.

To some level I agree - but at some point there is also much on the "business side" that cannot be easily dealt with. Like having connection or some kind of relation with people who will buy the stuff or would have people who would be interested in buying stuff you make.

Yes there are these "idea people" who don't have any clue about business side and don't have any clue about technical side and in the end don't even have the right connections or business network. But they think they can make it because they have an idea(TM). These could basically play lottery and outcome would be the same they might make it but chances are 1:1000000 at best.

Then there are these business people who have the right connections and have understanding of niche/business they are in .. that need technical help to execute their idea and these are worth their weight in gold.

> I get that, from "idea people," on a regular basis. They have nothing but contempt for us "Make It Happen" folks.

I met a pair of such idea guys once, they ran their own idea company. Their specialty was brand consulting and online marketing, but if that involved something as menial as web development they'd help with that too. The thing that made me bristle was whenever they talked about the feasibility of software solutions for their ideas, they said "Oh, we'll run that through the machine." You know, as if their software team was just a big machine that ingested ideas and spit out code.

Their idea company is no longer around. One of them decided that he'd rather design hiking boots than anything computer related; the other is a head of UI design at Apple.

> I get that, from "idea people," on a regular basis. They have nothing but contempt for us "Make It Happen" folks. They treat us as if we grow on trees, and are suckers, to boot.

Ideas are like assholes ... everybody has one and they're usually full of shit.

This is the most amazing comment I’ve read in a while.

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