"The dumbest move in tech right now: laying off developers because of AI."
"Let's be real about the state of software today. Most products are, at best, 'good enough' -- unintuitive, buggy, and frustrating to use. Whether it's consumer apps, enterprise software, or, even worse, developer tools, the experience is far from perfect despite all the claims about user-centric design, delightful experiences, empathy for the user, blah blah."
"As a product manager, I've lived with the same painful reality for years: engineering is always the critical bottleneck. That new feature your users keep asking for -- the one you know would drive revenue? Still marked as 'coming soon.' That brilliant UX improvement that could increase adoption or engagement? 'Definitely next quarter... probably.' That bug driving your users crazy? 'We'll triage it right after this sprint -- promise.'"
"This isn't a criticism of developers -- quite the opposite. It's simple math: there are roughly 29 million software developers worldwide serving over 5.4 billion internet users. That's one developer for every 186 users, each with unique requirements and preferences, all increasingly dependent on software for every aspect of their lives."
"Now, with AI-assisted coding, we have an unprecedented opportunity to invest more (artificial) resources to dramatically improve software quality and user experience. Yet headlines are filled with executives viewing these emerging AI capabilities primarily as cost-cutting measures -- a chance to achieve current output with fewer developers. This mindset fundamentally misunderstands AI's true potential, which isn't to maintain the status quo (of low quality products), but to amplify output by an order of magnitude."
Unfortunately, this is written with the belief that "AI transforms each developer into a 10x developer." Maybe it will some day. But right now, AI 10xs some tasks, and whether a developer can go 10x faster depends on what tasks their job consists of. What's clear, though, is that most non-programmers (managers, the public, etc) believe AI tools 10x developer productivity (or at least 5x it), and pretty much all developers now are "AI tools" developers trying to 10x their productivity with AI. It seems like over the last year, resistance to AI tools vanished and at this point, all developers are on board. That's how it seems subjectively -- will be interesting to see an actual poll and see how close we are to 100%.
The dumbest move in tech right now: laying off developers because of AI
#solidstatelife #ai #genai #llms #technologicalunemployment
The Dumbest Move in Tech Right Now: Laying Off Developers Because of AI
AI-assisted coding doesn’t mean fewer developers—it means more ambitious, higher-quality productsPaolo Perazzo (Products for Humans)
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