| > The current AI hype might not actually pose a real threat to engineers but the fact that most of our colleagues do not understand the value that we bring is a serious problem that we need to address. > We need to start meeting our colleagues where they are and explain what we do in ways that make sense to them. The goal is not to turn them into engineers but to help them get a high level understanding of what it takes to build a software product. See, why stop at software engineers? Because coding is text based? There is a whole class of IT middle managers in non-tech companies making good money due to "responsibility" and "team supervision". How about they start explaining the value that they bring? If it is not more than the usual - check a list of incoming jobs to be done submitted by other departments - assign the jobs to be done to someone on their team, mostly the person who worked in the same area before - ask every person (daily/weekly) for status updates and an estimated completion date for the jobs assigned - ask if the job was done sufficiently and can be reported as completed - report the weekly/monthly completion rate and hours spent to their supervisor. - every now and then review contractor bids for open RFPs then the current state of LLMs can do this just fine. Is there a good reason not to eliminate most of the little kingdoms in a large org and instead invest the money saved into more AI supervision, better QA and a lot more marketing? |