Product managers is not just about making product features. It’s a job that requires lots of human interaction, and this part is notoriously complicated for engineers. Article states that a person coding the feature can build a product intuition, and that’s true, product is not sorcery, but from my experience most engineers are just not interested in that. That may change, of course, if engineers will be pressured by economic situation, but until that they’re happy when someone else is interacting with users and stakeholders.
PMs ultimately take bets. Some to many will fail and if they are great a few will pay off in an excessive way. I have yet to see anything in the AI field that make better bets than my best PMs (I manage 50 of them) but as soon as I do the whole calculus changes. I joke with them about it. They also joke back it could happen to me (which it absolutely could). We live in interesting times.
Is it really that grim? AI helps a lot and is great at certain well defined tasks, but the “AI team” at my small org launched a new product very fast and very buggy. Customers were pissed. They had to go back to reading the code and applying some thinking and care to get a working product out. Still faster don’t get me wrong but there’s still a lot of tradeoffs to be made that AI can’t really do alone. Like there’s no objective correct answer.
IMO if developers are “cooked” like you stated (would be nice to have more data tho) then certainly plenty of other white collar jobs are in even worse position. They are in a bit better position than many other corporate jobs when it comes to transfer of skills and learning new profession.
> Code spitters are cooked, let's be honest here and accept the fate so everyone can move on.
I'm guessing "code spitters" here means people who consider their job to be manually writing code based on requirements produced by others.
Personally, I think the role of "developer" has already expanded way beyond that. If you're a technology expert who understand what is and is not possible to build, how it can be built, how to prompt that thing into existence, verify that the implementation is good, then get that implementation safely into production, you're not "cooked" at all.
The Product Manager profession has been made completely redundant in AI powered org. Everybody can look at numbers, plan features, and push for them. All the AI redundancies are focused on eliminating middle management.
There is absolutely no place for PM. I say this as someone who has been in PM leadership and built product orgs several times over the last 20 years.
This seems like a very doomer take. Hard to take this assessment seriously with absolutely no data or numbers to back this up. Especially since devs certainly don’t seem like they are going to be “cooked”.
IMO anyone who feels safe from what is going to happen (already happening, really) in the labor market over the next decade is ignorant or is heavily in denial.
I'm not saying we're surely all doomed here, but there are going to be a lot of changes that none of us can imagine every aspect of, and they are going to happen at a surprising speed, and there are a vast number of cascading impacts that people aren't thinking much about.
eg. if you're in the trades, yes you're safer than a knowledge worker for now, but if all the knowledge workers get wiped out you're both going to have vastly decreased demand for your work (far less individuals will have the disposable income to hire you, companies will have less need for facilities to house employees, so you'll also see a retrenchment on the corporate side) and you'll start getting a labor supply glut as the knowledge workers all desperately attempt to retrain for the 'safe' jobs. And this is just the short term problem, without getting into the robotics threat.
If we don't get ahead of this problem politically (spoiler alert: we won't, at least in the US, it is unclear if we even have a functioning democracy), things are going to get very messy for virtually everyone who relies on labor income.
Is this just domain dependent?
> Code spitters are cooked, let's be honest here and accept the fate so everyone can move on.
I'm guessing "code spitters" here means people who consider their job to be manually writing code based on requirements produced by others.
Personally, I think the role of "developer" has already expanded way beyond that. If you're a technology expert who understand what is and is not possible to build, how it can be built, how to prompt that thing into existence, verify that the implementation is good, then get that implementation safely into production, you're not "cooked" at all.
There is absolutely no place for PM. I say this as someone who has been in PM leadership and built product orgs several times over the last 20 years.
I'm not saying we're surely all doomed here, but there are going to be a lot of changes that none of us can imagine every aspect of, and they are going to happen at a surprising speed, and there are a vast number of cascading impacts that people aren't thinking much about.
eg. if you're in the trades, yes you're safer than a knowledge worker for now, but if all the knowledge workers get wiped out you're both going to have vastly decreased demand for your work (far less individuals will have the disposable income to hire you, companies will have less need for facilities to house employees, so you'll also see a retrenchment on the corporate side) and you'll start getting a labor supply glut as the knowledge workers all desperately attempt to retrain for the 'safe' jobs. And this is just the short term problem, without getting into the robotics threat.
If we don't get ahead of this problem politically (spoiler alert: we won't, at least in the US, it is unclear if we even have a functioning democracy), things are going to get very messy for virtually everyone who relies on labor income.