[phil21]

> So what do you / your team do?

This is so funny to me, because I know it's asked in earnest but seems so obvious to me:

They get actual work done.

Programming isn't work. That's just a means to an end. A tool to get the actual job done.

At least in most orgs. Obviously there are exceptions - but the vast economy is not a bunch of software companies. It's companies doing things to build a physical product, and software is a relatively new annoying side quest/cost center.

[tikhonj]

It's interesting how people view software as a distraction and an annoying side quest/cost center, but never apply that to, say, 90% of what management does. None of that "directly" makes money either!

That tells us a lot more about the leadership and management philosophies at modern companies than anything fundamental about what kind of work actually matters.

[unknownfuture]

Eh it's nothing new. Outsourcing comes from the same spirit.

Perversely I find myself increasingly blaming the growth of product management divorced from engineering as the source of some of this.

Everyone wants to be the next Jobs, but somehow they missed that it was the marriage of high quality design and high quality engineering that got Apple where they are today.

Rather, the lesson they learned is that PMF and UX and yadda yadda yadda are all that matter and coding is just a means to an end.

It'll be interesting to see how many companies discover that you can't achieve those ends if you build on a broken foundation.

[dzhiurgis]

> annoying side quest

Face it - it's because developers are annoying princesses. Just read your comment again.

My entitled friend was whining AI will start monitoring his work and he won't be able to slack as much as he does now. Basically he'll have to work like everyone else. FFS.

[Ferret7446]

Everyone except management knows that management is a distraction, including the shareholders and board when the org is getting too bloated and the numbers aren't looking good.

Which is a perfect parallel to coders who don't realize that coding is a distraction. When your job depends on you not understanding something, etc

[blanched]

I think programming is work, but I get your point :). And yes, of course - I'm mostly just curious how peoples roles at various companies are evolving as they hand off more and more to AI.

[phil21]

Fair, work was the wrong word to use.

I meant - create useful work product. For most companies software is a means to an end. The programmer writing code isn’t useful, it’s the end result. A lot of small to midsize companies employ a couple software guys out of necessity, and the results are usually middling at best. It’s a problem IT in general has really failed to solve very well.

I say this as someone who has picked up and put down “programming” as I needed it. It’s never been something I’ve gotten any satisfaction out of by doing, but I get huge satisfaction out of the resulting product or workflow automation or whatnot.

For my uses, if I could replace my programming and IT time with a robot I would - since me being in that role just slows down delivery to the end user. One of my first hires as a small startup was a programmer - specifically because I knew I rather sucked at it and what a pro could get done in a day took me a week. This is why AI for the low value/less complicated automation tasks is extremely compelling to me.

I’d immediately have 20 other things to work on to soak up the time savings!