Engineer

“I would say we probably have 80 to 90% of engineers today in Sidearm who use it on a daily basis.”

“I think it'll land at a hundred grand per engineer equivalent. I think that's what we'll, I think we'll give each of our best engineers A 100,000 dollars of tokens. And in return, we'll cut the size of our dev teams, 30, 40% effectively.”

“One of the big things that came up was, you know, we see that You know, engineers have 10 or sometimes like hundred extra productivity. But our design team hasn't, right? Because the design process still takes time.”

“I do still think that, and maybe this is thinking about it from like a slightly larger company perspective, but I think you do still need people that have certain responsibilities, right? Because if you have one person that's expected to design, to rally a tea…”

“You can use AI however you want. But in the end of the day, you as a human is held accountable for every decision that your AI made for you. So it is absolutely not acceptable when I come to an engineer and say, hey, why you did, why you implemented this syste…”

“There are people who understand customer problems, People who have taste and people who understand the jagged edge of AI capabilities and are curious about it. And like, those are the three things. If you've got those three, if you're going to be, if you don't…”

“So even if there is some displacement of engineers at some point in the future, I don't know when that is or if it happens, but if it does happen, there's lots and lots of homes for them. Because there's tons of enterprises that never had the capability set or…”

“If you talk to most engineers or even designers, they will remember the great PMs that they've worked with mostly because they've worked with so many bad ones.”

“Hiring so many PMs infantilizers The engineers and the designers who are perfectly capable of making good decisions, but just never had to, because there was always a PM to babysit them.”

“And this is like classic Jevons paradox, which is we lowered the cost of engineering, which means that everybody wants to do more of it, and now finally people can. And so you're gonna see this huge surplus in, in demand For engineers across the economy in ind…”

“When I look at engineers that have been, you know, coding for a long time, you know, like for years or for decades, this is a really, really common failure mode is trying to over specify and it's trying to be overly specific and then, you know, get the model t…”

“Data scientists are still going to be experts at Can we trust this data? Are we interpreting it the right way? What's the data versus judgment that we should be applying here? A product manager is still going to be exceptional at saying, have we really framed …”

“So we have about 80 people worldwide, and about 42, 43 of them are in the U.S., and the rest of them are in India, and engineering-wise, we have about 18, 17, 18 developers, and at least three or four of them are thinking about agent workflows.”

“In a post LLM world, we feel MBAs will definitely have a lot more value especially engineers doing MBA as an MBA is lot more philosophical thinking understanding about business.”

“We move people around every few months. Like if you're an engineer, you're not like I'm an engineer on the client portal. Maybe you work on a client portal for one or two sprints or like a few weeks, maybe a couple months, and then you're going to move on some…”

“We're seeing so many engineers now just get interested in Figma. And as that happens they're starting to really pick it up because you go build something really fast.”

“30 to 50% of engineers on core teams have been forcibly, forcefully reassigned to data labeling.”

“So we're launching a product at the moment, and there's just no engineers on it. It's just a product person engineering it. And people say, oh, should we staff this up? And I said, well, absolutely not. They don't have an idea baked yet. And so it needs to be …”

“Like now, not only engineers with, we also have designers, PMs, everybody on the Clark code team checks in code.”

“Engineers, they're using like Things like plot code, or they're using Microsoft Copilot to increase their productivity to do faster code reviews. That's that, that's the benefits, but at the same time, you're basically giving a full access to your full code ba…”

“I think, so it's starting to exist more and more, but I think it's kind of this like GM or general manager Like role for someone who used to be an engineer, where basically you own end to end an outcome that is not just a shipped feature, but like a business o…”

“The future of software development is where these organizations, instead of having engineers, That build the software. They're going to have engineers that build the factories that build their software.”

“I think it would be ill-advised if they were to try and go to the niche of non-technical people writing code for code sake, because I think that is going to be run by, like, if you're going to need enterprise controls over who has access to what databases and …”

“I actually think engineers are laggards. Not all engineers, but like a lot of engineers are because they're kind of tied to their workflows.”

“Engineers. For sure. Because the models they change all the time, they get better all the time, but if you have really good engineers, you can build a system that exponentially improves, and that's worth a lot more.”

“The other thing I learned early on about the way engineers hate their jobs and hate their bosses is what I call the moral contract. And when I first started working with engineers, these guys, Scott and Kadir, I saw how much the engineers get screwed in these …”

“Common numbers that I hear are anywhere from a thousand an engineer up to 5000 an engineer. I have not heard anywhere in the realm of, like, 50,000 an engineer for a frame of reference.”

“If we get, as we get more productive, we do more things, we're gonna hire more engineers. We're not gonna hire less engineers.”

“In the case of large customers that have scaled with us, even though it has started small, one thing that we have done is we've kept close. Like we would create a Slack channel between The customer and the folks on the customer side, the users on the customer …”

“I think people who have true agency and they understand that the world around them is malleable will do great. And the folks who stick to what, tell me really, what does it mean to be a PM? What does it mean to be a designer? And like, what's my job as an engi…”

“And I think in that you start to see more of a bimodal distribution of engineers, right? You start to see like, wow, there's this subset of people that they really get it. Like they're all in and they've clearly invested the hours needed to learn these tools a…”

“Definitely in the vibe coding era, there are a crop of engineers that they don't think about hardware at all, and we don't have that luxury.”

“If you think about what's happening with AI native or engineers today, they have to be really imaginative. They have to be product people. They don't have to know how to write code, but they have to be able to audit code”

“I think all of the roles are merging. PMs are doing some engineering work, engineers are doing PM work, designers are PMing and also landing code.”

“I think that if you have an engineering team of 50 people building things for your customers and you're like, Hey, I want to be the 51st because that's how I get leveraged. I'm like, eh, it's kind of a cheap knockoff of an engineer.”

“Whether you talk about someone who used to be a PM or someone who used to be a designer or called an engineer, the skill is more like being a CEO now, which is what are we building and why? And to be a successful engineer, that trait's critical to be a success…”

“In this world of engineers are mini PMs that the engineer who is like highly product minded is a unicorn is an absolute unicorn. I think the same thing is true for PMs where it's like, okay, now, you know, this, in this ratio of the designers really stressed a…”

“For us at Cognition, for example, our engineers don't type code anymore.”

“And I'm, I think that every engineer is going to have a hundred agents.”

“I found that product, product leaders, engineers, designers some of the more tend to be more introverted and thoughtful types negotiate more poorly than the obnoxious marketers and revenue leaders and the more extroverted types.”

“He'll do like a 12, 14 hour stretch where he'll do design reviews with, but the way that he does it, he does five minutes per engineer. Right. And so he does five to six divided by five. It's been way too long in this podcast. How much is that? 12? He can do 1…”

“I always laugh when, you know, people say, you don't need to be an engineer. Don't do computer science. I actually think like that is like still one of the most protected job categories because things are only getting more technical. Things are only going to g…”

“I believe we will need more engineers than ever.”

“Both engineers and PMs, 70% of people said they are enjoying their job more. And about 10% said they're enjoying their job less. Designers, interestingly, Only 55% said they're enjoying their job more, and 20% said they're enjoying their job less.”

“We're gonna enter this weird world where the best VCs are gonna make money like we've never seen before, right, and the best engineers, and then, you know, the middle is gonna have no jobs.”

“I think when you go to the AI websites, I think the different AI companies have the personalities of the engineers that are Programming them. And I think you see that bias in the information you're given.”

“So I think that the future engineer and the future developer and the future product builder here, it's not going to be what you build as much as what you do. If that kind of makes sense, because it's going to be so easy to build anything and everything to pair…”

“The hardest thing to do is to find something that somebody actually wants to use, right? Like that's the hard problem. If I have something that I vibe coded and I launch it, and if it crashes under the weight of 50,000 people beating my door down because it's …”

“Most engineers that I've met, In my now, 25 years of playing in that world, is they don't understand the why of the people that do what I used to do.”

“You're going to soon see the plot code, codex, and other tools actually review the code itself before engineers commit.”

“The number of designers and product managers related to the number of engineers, when I was growing up in product, it used to be, one to three or one to 10. It's going to one to 20 now.”

“The typical thing an engineer does is, is go work on the product because it's fun and you know how, and it's kind of why you're doing this in the first place and all that. It's exactly the wrong thing to do because the limiting factor here is, can you find cus…”

“I think titles are going to collapse and responsibilities are going to collapse and everyone's just going to be building.”

“Every engineer is just gonna own more code. Period. And be parachuted in and be expected to ramp up and be productive and also fix bugs. And if you're on, you know, pager duty or whatever to just because I mean, everyone's going to try to be more efficient and…”

“The AI lifecycle both Pre-deployment and post-deployment is very different as compared to a traditional software life cycle. And so, so a lot of old contracts and handoffs between traditional roles, like say PMs and engineers and data folks has now been broken…”

“I think engineers who are unwilling to elevate their identity from what they were to what it needs to be in the moment often leads to sort of plateaus in companies growth.”

“Prompt is really asking question. The best questions are not asked by mathematician. They're asked by philosophers. So if you are a economics person or a liberal arts person, maybe you can ask better question than the engineer.”

“TechForce is basically, ah, a ambitious project to recruit at least a thousand engineers into government.”

“More. I just think the definition of, like, what is an engineer even will broaden, but I think we, if an engineer is somebody who builds things, and I would kind of argue that that's the beauty of engineering. That's what I love in engineering. I think that is…”

“I think every engineer would need to learn the skills of being an engineering manager because you'll have a set of agents, if not humans working with you to be able to sort of deal with code that from a size and a scale perspective is exponential compared to w…”