Engineering

“A lot of times engineering, again, to move quickly, they don't put in even the tracking that I need to know how many people did the first thing, but didn't do the second thing or didn't do the third thing. And then not just the tracking, but now how do I targe…”

“I think all of us are in a place where we, we're getting to the spot where it's realizing, okay, for real engineering work per employee, you're looking at probably five grand a month. Like, that's probably where we're gonna shake out here.”

“I have found that PMs, designers, data scientists are able to get farther in the product development life cycle before engineering really needs to be front of the line in unlocking things than was true a couple years ago.”

“And now since the engineering is less of the bottleneck, it's more the question of what is the right thing to build?”

“Say, for example, engineering and from very tier four or tier five sort of places, which are not going to get into an AI sort of the same world not going to prepare them for that. They are going to have an issue”

“This is like what people say, oh, engineering is dead or design is dead. All of that I think is a lie because we had never had more need for experienced incredible engineers that are going to push the boundary of what's possible to create with software, to ena…”

“I think that in a world where engineering is commoditized, and design for the most part is commoditized, the most important thing becomes excellent QA, we can talk about later, and customer acquisition.”

“And that to me, I think is very absent right now from most of the discourse in software, which is, it's all about how many tokens can we spend and how many features can we ship? I'm like, okay, but where's the engineering part? And the engineering part is the,…”

“We started seven months ago and we are now about 30 people in the team. Growing about one to two people every week and scaling across engineering product research and go to market.”

“Meanwhile, I think a lot of people going into product might be coming from design, might be coming from data science, might be coming from engineering because the ones that have judgment, the ones that can talk, the ones that want to stay current, they might b…”

“Engineering gets split into the engineering manager type person who's writing the prompts, and the technician is doing the verification.”

“80% of this work, I think can be automated with AI. I still believe you need the last 20%. So there still has to be a manager of these agents who's telling you, Okay. Do this. Don't do this. but outside of that, 80% of the work is still getting done fa…”

“There's definitely product managers who I think they're, they don't know enough about the technical side, which can be fine, but like can't really appreciate the pain engineering is going through and like what on call is like because like they've never really …”

“I think it's going to be a lot of the roles that are adjacent to engineering. So yeah, it could be like product managers. It could be design, could be data science. It is going to expand to pretty much any kind of work that you can do on a computer because the…”

“One thing I've seen is that if you have An engineering identity that's based on that, like a value based ranking of difficulty or skill, like the specific types of engineering that are considered, you know, impressive or high status can actually be like less h…”

“Every category that I know of outside of engineering and product is at existential risk of shrinking seats.”

“The PM design and engineering jobs in their most coarse grained forms, not in their like, really find detailed forms, but in their core screen forms as roles are all converging.”

“There's like a power law of who gives value in terms of engineering. There's some people who do so much that keep the company alive in any good successful big company. And there's a long tail of people who basically do nothing.”

“Engineering can exist by itself. Like if you give some kind of system, a goal of like making me a material that I can make a space elevator out of, you could be not participating in the beginning, the process of the middle, the process, and you just come by th…”

“As soon as we had the interview ready to ship, we started, we said everybody in engineering, including all the managers are going to have to go through this interview. And so we re-interviewed everybody internally.”

“I think over time that boundary has blurred quite a lot because we're working on these very large systems now. Research really looks like engineering and vice versa.”

“I also think marketing is not that complicated. I mean, it's not like engineering where, you know, our VP of engineering, he has so much deep, deep, deep knowledge in the domain. I just don't believe it's that way for marketing. I think people overly complex i…”

“In the vast majority of projects, when you go to final investment decision and you have plus or -10% estimates, you're only maybe 30% of the way through your engineering. 70%, you still have to go do.”

“Because again, such a high marginal cost to engineering, what you end up doing is you only really design something one pass through. There's no sort of iteration. There's no optimization of design. And that leads you to a spot where you kind of make early deci…”

“If you're experienced, you know how, why not to do something, or how not to do something. Whereas if you're naive, and you're a young engineer, you're disqualified, or you're still training, you don't have that negativity towards certain things. And often it's…”

“We don't charge hourly. Like, we have a fundamental belief that service businesses are going to move away from hourly work, and we think it's starting with engineering.”

“If you interpret Henry Kaiser, Howard Hughes, Elon Musk, they decide that their circle of competence is not rockets or roads or what have you, but is engineering, and that engineering competence can be broadly applied to many potential domains.”

“And I think that speaks to how these roles are going to evolve in the future. The lines are going to be blurred between whether you're in legal or in risk or in engineering and design even.”

“I am very optimistic that generative AI is going to like, you know, really lift design In the world and make it one day equal to engineering. I think that, I don't think that's a crazy thing one day.”

“I think engineering is over. I think we're going to be orchestrators of information, not engineers. I think those will be solved problems. Anything where there is a non subjective outcome, AI will tackle that and solve that problem.”

“In my experience, I think that design is most successful at impacting what ships at the end if design is considered phase zero of the engineering process rather than a byproduct or a part of the product process.”

“That's how it worked at Apple the whole time under Steve. Design always reported to engineering, you know, they're there. Now I think it's structured a little bit differently, but design has always been part of engineering at Apple.”

“Engineering used to be a scarce resource. I don't think that's the case anymore. Not to mention, I mean, AI is making everyone be even more capable than ever.”

“When there's a lot of solutioning all the way down to detail without engineering involved, usually that's a painful recipe, you know, and then it's kind of like, no, we can't do that.”

“Few great things have been created by committee, you know? And so if engineering is an order taking organization for product you can sometimes make meaningful things, but rarely will you create extremely well-crafted breakthrough products. Those tend to be sma…”

“I think the AI world, the ML world is still very much research heavy. And that's as it should be because ML is very much in a research phase. But as we move this entire field into production, I think that ratio inverts into becoming more engineering heavy.”

“Engineering done successfully really is all about the details. And you don't necessarily have to understand all of those details, but when you act like they don't matter, and you don't care about them, and it's just like, I don't care, just like tell me when y…”

“And when you're just getting started with a new product, the people that should be doing that are the people who are building it, right? That's an engineer. That's a designer. That's a salesperson or a support person. They're the front line of the smallest loo…”

“The first is I believe that analytics should have a seat at the table, just like engineering and product and sort of the business folks, the operators. For me, analytics is a business impact driving function and not purely a service function.”

“Probably everyone's learning to do a bit more of everyone else's job in this current moment. That said, I definitely think there's still immense value in product, immense value in design, immense value in engineering, and so I think those roles will continue t…”

“The more you're doing it with like, just junk you have lying around the house, the more it resonates with people. Cause it's like, ah, why didn't I think of that? That's so clever. I can actually do that.”

“I do think you have to be technical. To do, do a role like this. I think a lot of people look at my professional background and think that I use my like broad leadership skills and the leverage of a great SVP to keep engineering team going. But no, actually I …”

“I think the companies that adopt AI the best, it is going to be engineering driven, I think, rather than, like, operations driven or anything else.”

“The second thing you need in those early days is you need people who communicate exceptionally well because they're the ones who are going to be your feedback loop to product, engineering, and even leadership to help you understand what is it that you need to …”

“I've always said that the health of an organization, one simple heuristic is how close there's engineering and marketing.”

“I would make sure that you have engineering and design ideally report To the founder, product-led person. I would not have design under product unless you have an extremely good reason the product person kind of is a designer.”

“I think there's literally founders who think cool, but it's going to kind of Contract out the engineering or kind of bring in some con, you know, an upside firm to do this. This is a hugely horrible, bad idea. If you're trying to build software as to not, and …”

“I got an engineer. He's amazing. And I got a designer and he's amazing. We don't really need product people. Like who are these folks? We know what we should do here. That's also a disaster. So like, I'm just picking one of the many sort of. Initial conditions…”

“Consumery software, which means you're building a software for regular humans. I would argue you have equal parts engineering, design, and product. Products there to tell the story of the customer and to influence, like, to think like the customer, to think si…”

“I think a lot of the good product ideas, most of the good product ideas actually come up from engineering.”

“You know, this idea that if you just have the right benchmarks, like DCs won't judge you for spending too much in engineering, but it doesn't actually help you get to the right place. It just helps you get your board to be less angry at you.”

“The most valuable thing as an executive you can do is educate like the other execs on how engineering works, not kind of protecting engineering from visibility from anyone else.”

“I think a lot of the focus shifts to creativity. Really? The thing that we've been trying to do with the front-end cloud, it accelerates, which is work on your product, work on the user interface, work on the thing that touches another human being and gives th…”

“And actually it's one of the few teams where all of these things report, well, not all of them, but most of those functions report into one place. So engineering and design actually all report up into the design organization when they work on the website.”

“Front end is the most important thing that your company has, because that's where you meet your customer. That's where you can accelerate your website to drive more conversion, more signups, more sales.”

“One of the things that's really different about software engineering than other types of engineering is the fungibility. Problems can take two days or they can take two years. And the fundamental difference is the excitement and clarity you have around the sol…”

“Growth does not mean one thing. As we've talked through, you have to understand the different types of growth systems out there, the ones that work with what types of businesses, and then how do you map talent metrics in other things to those systems. And so I…”

“Now I would say, actually, nowadays it's probably easiest to buy in tech Ironically, engineering, because there's so many fantastic agencies that do it. As long as you've got a very good, strong product desire, you can basically hire people to do that for you.”

“Engineering involves applied systems design. It has a discipline of systems design that is just vastly, like, we're not talking about slightly ahead. We're talking about a hundred years ahead in, in, in, to everything else. It is not a contest when you hold it…”

“It's called Accelerate. It's a book about engineering and DevOps, but it's very readable by any non-technical people. And that's the first book that gave me the answer on how to measure engineering in a tech company, because that's actually one of the hardest …”