In hindsight, remote working is an obvious stepping stone to offshoring, which itself is an inevitable milestone toward full automation. It is the work we do in in-person collaboration which will keep the moat high against AI disintermediation.

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lan321 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Doubt. The meaningful work in person is organisational, and it's only marginally better onsite due to whiteboard > Excalidraw. Who does what, how it'll all interact, architecture, etc. If an LLM can code the difficult bits and doesn't fall apart once the project isn't a brand new proof of concept, it'll surely be able to pick the correct pattern and tooling and/or power through the mediocre/bad decision.

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RaftPeople 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> The meaningful work in person is organisational

And also gaining information about the domain from the business and the business requirements for the system or feature.

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mensetmanusman 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The invisible hand will provide the answer!

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deadbabe 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Have you used a whiteboard recently? It sucks. Writing anything significant takes forever, there’s no undo or redo, difficult to save and version. There’s just no way it’s better.

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lan321 3 days ago | parent [-]

It takes forever to make a beautiful diagram, but the usual flow is that you have your presentation for the base idea, and then when the questions come, you can all grab a marker and start making a mess on the boards around the room. We also have one in the dev room, which is nice for smaller topics.

It's not meant to be the actual documentation, and it makes sense to me since you don't want to write the actual documentation during the discussion with multiple highly paid devs and managers. Just take a photo at the end, and it's saved for when you make the documentation.

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scarface_74 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I do the same with Lucid App shared on Zoom. I have the base diagram in Lucid and I start making changes during the meeting and adding sticky notes docs.

> It's not meant to be the actual documentation, and it makes sense to me since you don't want to write the actual documentation during the discussion with multiple highly paid devs and managers. Just take a photo at the end, and it's saved for when you make the documentation.

This is 2025, over Zoom, we use Gong, it records, transcribes and summarizes the action items and key discussion points. No need to take notes.

My diagrams are already in Lucid with notes

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deadbabe 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That just sounds like office theatre.

	▲	lan321 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		We have some of that, but it's not the whiteboards. The dev one gets used multiple times a day in a room with only developers. No management, no power structure around. It's my general experience, also in prior workplaces, that sometimes a little drawing can tell a lot, and there's no quicker way to start it than to walk 3 meters and grab a marker. Same for getting attention towards a particular part of the board. On Excalidraw, it's difficult to coordinate people dynamically. On a whiteboard, people just point to the parts they're talking about while talking instinctively, so you don't get person A arguing with person B about Y while B thinks they are talking about D which is pretty close to Y as a topic.

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scarface_74 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

While I agree with remote work to offshoring. I’m not sure about the next step.

I would have been hard pressed to find a decent paying remote work as a fully hands on keyboard developer. My one competitive advantage is that I am in the US and can fly out to a customer’s site and talk to people who control budgets and I’m a better than average English communicator.

In person collobaration though is over rated. I’ve led mid six figure cross organization implementations for the last five years sitting at my desk at home with no pants on using Zoom, a shared Lucid App document and shared Google Docs.

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khuey 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> remote working is an obvious stepping stone to offshoring

This I largely agree with. If your tech job can be done from Bozeman instead of the Bay Area there's a decent chance it can be done from Bangalore.

> which itself is an inevitable milestone toward full automation

But IMHO this doesn't follow at all. Plenty of factory work (e.g. sewing) was offshored decades ago but is still done by humans (in Bangladesh or wherever) rather than robots. I don't see why the fact that a job can move from the Bay Area to Bozeman to Bangalore inherently means it can be replaced with AI.

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tomohawk 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]