[kixxauth]

It makes me wonder if large engineering organizations are going to splinter. The coordination costs are getting, proportionally, much larger than they used to.

When I left my corporate engineering job wayyyyy back in March, there were engineers and engineering leaders going off and getting a lot done, individually or in small teams. But project management and QA couldn't keep up with it. Managers resorted to turning their tokens loose on Jira just to try to make sense of it all (which, ironically made them the first to hit their token goals on the dashboard every week, and brought Jira to it's knees).

And, even worse, the junior engineers had no idea what was going on or how to get involved in anything.

The result was an increasingly chaotic mess.

[jon-wood]

My take on this, which is almost entirely pulled out of my rear end because I last worked in a large company before the rise of agents, is that we’ll see a move from vertical teams of specialists who get pulled into projects to build a mobile app or handle infrastructure. Instead there’ll be a much stronger focus on teams of generalists, or combined teams of specialists from different fields, working on a feature or product end to end.

Coordination has in my experience always been the big bottleneck in getting anything done, it’s just not hurt so much because everyone expected a feature that could have been done in a fortnight to take months.

[nathanielks]

> Instead there’ll be a much stronger focus on teams of generalists, or combined teams of specialists from different fields, working on a feature or product end to end.

> Coordination has in my experience always been the big bottleneck in getting anything done

I work at a large enterprise you've heard of. They're currently re-organizing the product area to remove currently-static two pizza teams into an amorphous blob of feature-oriented teams. Once the feature is complete, the team is dissolved and the engineers re-enter the pool, tasked with new features.

All that to say, I think you're right on the money with your assessment.

[NewLogic]

Where does the feature go for long term ownership? That throws you build it you own it out the window. We are going to get more time for documentation and handover right, right? Engineers are famous for generating good documentation.

[materielle]

There’s going to be lots of documentation. It will be AI generated and no human will ever read it. But there will be a lot of it.

[jon-wood]

Some places I've worked in the past had a rotating support team who were tasked with dealing with bugs/small feature requests/incidents for a period. I'm not sure that's the right answer because nobody wants to be on the team that's just doing scutwork even if its just for a month or two but it is an option.

[nathanielks]

All fantastic questions I wish we had an answer for

[LeftHandPath]

Claude with Jira is the first time I've applied AI and felt like it was truly saving me time. The UI and search tools are so clunky, it feels much better to say "Find jira tickets like xyz" and read through their titles/summaries in the command prompt.

I am not sure if that's a good thing for Claude, or an indictment of Jira.