Hacker News Reader

Comment by consumer451 | Hacker News Reader

I want to add to this, because it's certainly not all doom and gloom for me, yet.

If you are product-driven, life is pretty good, and maybe has never been better? (For the moment)

>If you are product-driven, life is pretty good, and maybe has never been better

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.

Yeah, at Corp, that makes sense. I was thinking more along the lines of scrappy startup silliness. "I am one person and I deal with any and all code to get my product built."

From that POV, has it ever been better, assuming you can rise to the top of an ever more crowded market?

> "I am one person and I deal with code to get my product my built." 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.

> 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.

What is PMM?

Percona Monitoring and Management [0].

...or not. Probably not.

0: https://github.com/percona/pmm

It's probably Product Marketing Manager. So essentially selling the new stuff to new and old clients at scale.

I'm guessing PM mistyped

No it’s Product Marketing Manager. A common title and one part of the holy trinity (PM, EM, PMM) at bigger companies.

Some orgs use PMM for product management and marketing.

> A Product Marketing Manager (PMM) in tech is a strategic bridge between the product, sales, and marketing teams who defines who a product is for and why it matters.

A PMM with a tech background must be worth their weight in unobtainium at this point.

They always had the power.

If you are product-driven why not go into Product Ownership roles? It certainly will be more satisfying compared to prompt "engineering" clerk "career".

Well, my life is currently both, as I am on the smallest possible tech and product team. To me, extrapolating on having done this since Sonnet 3.5 to now, there will be no tech aspect to the job soon enough. There are many hundreds of billions invested in making that a reality, and they are succeeding.

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.

Not sure how long the current subsidized pricing would last. Also, the vast majority of software shops can't afford those subsidized prices anyway.

It’s 10 devs with a small ai budget each vs 1 ex-dev now PM with a large ai budget - the choice is quite obvious for any decision maker who counts time and money

But assuming that one ex-dev with a large AI budget is highly profitable, why wouldn’t you convert the other 9 and give large ai budgets as well?

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.

You need to grow customers or contracts by 10x to fill the new pipeline and that's an impedance mismatch. Easier to let 9 go and hire later, especially since everyone else will be doing the same thing and there'll be a rather large pool of talent.

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.

If an org suddenly has 10x the production capacity for the same price and can’t figure out how to sell it profitably, it is mismanaged and will die. That’s very much the case for a lot of businesses for sure, but there have been filters before (the internet, for instance) and we survived.

Yeah it’s going to be very rough for any knowledge worker unless the governments decide it isn’t ok for the general public to be allowed to use the tech.

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 honestly don’t understand comments like this because in my work, this would be a disaster. And before I get the comments about my harness/skills etc, I’ve tried many tools and harnesses and skills and all that earnestly and in good faith. I find use in it for doing the grunt typing labor, but letting it loose in ways described above have only ended in spending much more time cleaning it up than if I just did the work myself.

I hate to sound pretentious, but I wonder if it’s a difference in complexity of work and problems being solved.

I just reviewed this thread, and thanks for an opening to say something I had realized I missed.

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com