"Engineers sometimes exhibit an arrogance that they can do everyone else’s job,"
This rings so many bells that it feels like some Buddhist festival. Apply the same approach to QA, Operations, and anything outside the actual product development: when this arrogance was shared between bosses and developers, all good on their side. Now with the AI, the arrogance is staying only on the bosses' side, and we have developers freaking out.
Its also a fucking annoying sentiment for us as engineers. I dont want to do everyone else's job
A good QA actually does the work that product managers should but don't, in terms of understanding actual users and checking the feature delivered matches actual user ask.
But I've worked at places with a whole spectrum of coverage in roles spanning Product Mgrs, Project Mgrs, BAs, QAs, production support level 1, production support level 2, etc. The one constant is whatever is missing or understaffed just ends up getting done by engineers.
Testing, on-call, Jira managing, requirements gathering with users, analysis, etc... all falls on to engineering. Then management gets even more wound up about dev productivity/velocity, etc.
But, as someone who’s agile and adaptable, I can do any job. That doesn’t mean I can do them all simultaneously. It doesn’t mean I can be the full-time loan officer and the full-time app developer.
Can I do your job? Yep. Can I also, at the same time, be the engineer that optimizes the IT systems? No - one of these jobs will suffer.
Give me the chance to understand your job, and I’ll replace as much of it as possible with code to do the same thing. But what it won’t do is have good judgement. It will make decisions on actual data - accurate data, erroneous data, it doesn’t care.
I think this is an interesting place to put “AI” - can it take input in the form of data and historical decisions, and come to a new decision from recent data? The same decision a human would?
Thank you for embodying and exemplifying the point, albeit ironically.
Aside: it has become an interesting personal experiment to stop being obviously ironic and see how people read what I’ve written. The voting is telling.
I didn't "vote" but there aren't many clues in your comment suggesting it's satire. It is a mainstream presentation of a mainstream point of view, how would anybody distinguish between you believing it earnestly and you mocking it?