I’m noticing a big divide between engineers who work in computational/library work and product work. And maybe a lot of this is coming from how we have to interact with people and how requirements are formed.
I’m the latter, have been working in product my whole career. My role has been architecture/tech lead for a while. Managing teams has become significantly more difficult. A lot of the implicit forces that hold engineering orgs together are falling apart.
Well-described greenfield work has always been non-existent. Plans starts ambiguously, and then they evolve as the team’s understanding of the problem gets deeper. Now everyone I work with has no interest in the deeper understanding, I feel like I have to “force” people to think. This is a losing battle and I’ve mostly given up on building good product. Customer asks are just fed into Claude and a PR is born. Cohesiveness, maintenance, and complexity are an afterthought.
For example, a customer recently asked for more information on a data table in our product. An engineer fed the request into Claude and generated a stack of 3 PRs totaling 1,200 lines with new endpoints and UI components. All the table needed was a tooltip.
The easiness of getting to a “final product” has totally eroded team collaboration. Before, the engineer would probably ask someone with more understanding of the domain and learn _why_ the tooltip is all they needed. This creates two domain experts. Now, we are ensuring we have none.
I’m the latter, have been working in product my whole career. My role has been architecture/tech lead for a while. Managing teams has become significantly more difficult. A lot of the implicit forces that hold engineering orgs together are falling apart.
Well-described greenfield work has always been non-existent. Plans starts ambiguously, and then they evolve as the team’s understanding of the problem gets deeper. Now everyone I work with has no interest in the deeper understanding, I feel like I have to “force” people to think. This is a losing battle and I’ve mostly given up on building good product. Customer asks are just fed into Claude and a PR is born. Cohesiveness, maintenance, and complexity are an afterthought.
For example, a customer recently asked for more information on a data table in our product. An engineer fed the request into Claude and generated a stack of 3 PRs totaling 1,200 lines with new endpoints and UI components. All the table needed was a tooltip.
The easiness of getting to a “final product” has totally eroded team collaboration. Before, the engineer would probably ask someone with more understanding of the domain and learn _why_ the tooltip is all they needed. This creates two domain experts. Now, we are ensuring we have none.