As my company experiments with AI-heavy programming, I don’t feel like my job’s going away, but as a “full stack” programmer who’s also good at and comfortable managing a task board, walking “stakeholders” and SMEs through requirements-gathering, et c., I am increasingly wondering why our “teams” still have a couple non-programmers doing that stuff. Dedicated QA, for that matter—all that test-writing and test-data-generating and stuff is so fast now. It’d speed things up if one or two programmers just did the whole thing.

But maybe my particular skill set where all those roles were only really out of reach for me for time-constraint reasons is less common than I think… I dunno, though, between people who’d moved up into managing projects but can drive an LLM pretty competently for programming (ex programmers) and versatile can-talk-to-people seasoned programmers, it’s all the other roles that look increasingly like they’re slowing productivity, rather than increasing it, now.

Someone on a call the other day tentatively brought up that they were noticing it was taking longer to get all the paperwork right for a bug fix or even mid-sized feature than it was to actually write and test the fix, by the time they looped in some variety of person in a jira-wrangler role. It’s clear those jira-wranglers are gonna have to fight to keep their jobs (I don’t really know how they’re gonna do it, I feel apprehensive on their behalf in every meeting now)

In my experience, those roles never existed to begin with in well run teams and companies. Some companies drive product managers into this role, but that was always a bad use of their time. Even with AI tools, I still don't feel like I have the skills to do the job of a good product manager, which requires the kind of vision and business acumen that I am just not as good at as the best PMs I've worked with.