Having been an engineer and then a founder (and CEO), neither can be automated. Both require organizational work to be effective, and developer productivity is so profitable in an outsized way that you'd always just hire more if you could, even if they were all 10x as productive (maybe this changes at some scale).
I'd have loved for an AI to assist with a few things as a CEO but we would have probably just shipped faster and it would have created even more pressure for board communication, customer calls, design partnerships, legal discussions, compliance, etc.
The idea that AI is coming after leadership is truly laughable. The idea that it's coming after some engineering jobs is a bit more likely to me, but I think many will actually be more valuable.
> Having been an engineer and then a founder (and CEO), neither can be automated
Can it be fully hands-off? No. But I think, as will all things, their both subject to the rise of the "technician"s. A mechanic doesn't change your brakes or flush your oil, a technician does. You don't see a doctor, you see a nurse practitioner and an MD just signs off. All the work that used to be done by someone with schooling to learn how to do it is just done by a technician that learned how to use the tools without the critical thinking of the expert, but with an expert somewhere available if needed.
There's a scene in Breaking Bad, where after having shadowed Walter White as he ran a cook - one of the henchmen makes a batch insisting that it's just following a recipe (to which Walt describes all the things that could go wrong if the operator didn't understand the nuances).
American's can't help but try to automate our jobs away. We create systems, recipes, toolkits etc trying to minimize the amount of actual thinking required to do anything. Honestly, I think that's one of the reasons software quality has gone down across the board. We're already so many abstractions removed from doing the actual work, that most developers don't even know how to debug the systems beyond the highest layer. I've seen the rise of bootstrap devs, and jQuery devs, and react devs, and now it's vibe coders and harness engineers or whatever the latest things are. My examples are dev centric because that's my chosen role, but just look to say Amazon and their use of AI for performance evals and terminations. It effects management less technical jobs too.
> Can it be fully hands-off? No. But I think, as will all things, their both subject to the rise of the "technician"s. A mechanic doesn't change your brakes or flush your oil, a technician does. You don't see a doctor, you see a nurse practitioner and an MD just signs off. All the work that used to be done by someone with schooling to learn how to do it is just done by a technician that learned how to use the tools without the critical thinking of the expert, but with an expert somewhere available if needed.
This already describes how CEOs work though. CEOs aren't experts in every part of the company, they sign off on things and delegate, and manage communications etc. There's very little additional room to delegate because the role already is extremely delegation heavy.
> developer productivity is so profitable in an outsized way that you'd always just hire more if you could, even if they were all 10x as productive (maybe this changes at some scale).
Definitely. Software is a digital arms race between companies so they’ll just keep expanding. I’m sure at some scale that breaks down but we are far from that point. My lumberyard, a few miles away from one of ASML’s US facilities, still runs its POS and inventory tracking on old DOS machines. In a decade they could probably make more money selling them as antiques.
I'd have loved for an AI to assist with a few things as a CEO but we would have probably just shipped faster and it would have created even more pressure for board communication, customer calls, design partnerships, legal discussions, compliance, etc.
The idea that AI is coming after leadership is truly laughable. The idea that it's coming after some engineering jobs is a bit more likely to me, but I think many will actually be more valuable.