“Traditionally, a lot of these decisions flow through engineering managers, PMs, and designers. That becomes increasingly difficult as engineers get faster.
How do you organize a team where engineers can build much faster, without creating bottlenecks around decisions and reviews?
Our bet is to push more ownership to engineers. Rather than adding more layers of management, we want engineers to handle more of the planning, execution, and review themselves.”
My bet was to push more ownership to the PMs and designers.
Engineering’s job is now to make that process sustainable and tackle the items that aren’t directly visible but still matter.
I find it interesting that they’ve opened up PRs to the org, but didn’t land on using the review process to refine a system that guides AI toward writing better and better code. I’m a graybearded “wizard” who is highly technical, and that’s where I landed.
We’ve had a very similar arc, but I’m at the point where I would be more likely to hire an artist for a frontend design position than an engineer:
“Use AI to make the app beautiful. You report to product.”
Engineers are checking the code and fixing architectural and abstraction issues behind the scenes. We’re making tests that keep AI from making the same mistake twice. We’re also figuring out how to run tests at unprecedented scale without slowing these non-technical “devs” down. There are plenty of technical challenges scaling this path that need the traditional engineering brain and a deep knowledge of development. It’s not just 20x productivity, it’s a lot of fun. I’m buried in new and interesting technical challenges these days.
We gave our old Legos to the others, now we’re having fun with our new Legos.
How do you organize a team where engineers can build much faster, without creating bottlenecks around decisions and reviews?
Our bet is to push more ownership to engineers. Rather than adding more layers of management, we want engineers to handle more of the planning, execution, and review themselves.”
My bet was to push more ownership to the PMs and designers.
Engineering’s job is now to make that process sustainable and tackle the items that aren’t directly visible but still matter.
I find it interesting that they’ve opened up PRs to the org, but didn’t land on using the review process to refine a system that guides AI toward writing better and better code. I’m a graybearded “wizard” who is highly technical, and that’s where I landed.
We’ve had a very similar arc, but I’m at the point where I would be more likely to hire an artist for a frontend design position than an engineer:
“Use AI to make the app beautiful. You report to product.”
Engineers are checking the code and fixing architectural and abstraction issues behind the scenes. We’re making tests that keep AI from making the same mistake twice. We’re also figuring out how to run tests at unprecedented scale without slowing these non-technical “devs” down. There are plenty of technical challenges scaling this path that need the traditional engineering brain and a deep knowledge of development. It’s not just 20x productivity, it’s a lot of fun. I’m buried in new and interesting technical challenges these days.
We gave our old Legos to the others, now we’re having fun with our new Legos.