The End of Product Engineers is Here | Laurie Voss

As I continue to look for work in this poisoned industry, I've tried to pay attention to what folks in the space are saying about it and determine if I really need to consider stepping out. Laurie's interview highlights quite a few things that I found poignant:

• "only white guys can afford not to go to college": I never went to college because my family didn't understand it (non-English, uneducated immigrants) and because of how my high school life went, I was immediately written off. Software engineering as a trade saved me in some capacity.
• "the thing we found in senior engineering has become central to the job": this means that there's no longer any space for on-the-job training of the skills that would have normally skilled people up; there's negative incentive to have folks become articulate into these roles
• "we don't know who the big players are": the AI vendors. They literally are the biggest players; operating like Stripe when it comes to understanding which smaller businesses are rising or falling since we're submitting all of our information (the new data/product) over to them.

There's a very different perspective that folks who are invested in this industry's bubble not happening within the next five years versus those who might be a bit more like me, who doesn't completely mind the death of the role (at least in its capital hoarding way) but is concerned about the lever that's been released in favor of letting statistical models drive business decisions.

It is a lot easier to be optimistic about generative AI when you're:

• comfortably employed
• have sonority that allows them to move through interviews faster
• have already been in the industry for at least twenty years (or ten)

This makes them ignorant to the day-to-day^[1] that they never have to engage in; making these optimistic stances reductive. What's more likely to happen is what's happening now: increased ramps on layoff cycles as technologists are submitting their knowledge to machines that'll produce a lot more closed source technologies (there's no point of contributing to the commons - there's less of a competitive advantage if you can throw Jev, Muse and Gemini at the monster of a codebase). This is even mentioned in the podcast - the rise of "(generated) personalized software".

I suggest you read more of Laurie's stances so you can see the gap (or rather the executive perspective) in how this is and how this works in real life (no matter what Markdown files scanning spreadsheets show you):

• https://seldo.com/posts/do-ai-enabled-companies-need-fewer-people/
• https://seldo.com/posts/ai-has-torched-the-market-for-junior-programmers/
• https://seldo.com/posts/we-are-all-product-engineers-now/

Then come up, watch that video and tell me how much money, thought and concern is actually being put into junior software development (none), employment stability (none) and the durability of the career path that is software engineering (very little). Feeding into the hype is no different that investing in the wet labs!