Comment by aanet
4 days ago
I feel this is not discussed enough. I can attest to this 100%.
Just the past weekend, I was talking with a very senior engineer (~distinguished engineer at a very large tech co) who basically said he's working 8-8-6 (8 am - 8 pm, 6 days/week), "writing code" (more like supervising 8-15 agents) for a product demo in 2 weeks, which otherwise would have taken at least 1 quarter's worth of time with a small team. He's zonked out, fwiw. There are no junior engineers in the team ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, most having been laid off a few months ago.
The toll it takes, and the expectations of AI-driven productivity, have only increased dramatically. At some point, the reality will hit the remaining engg team. Not sure if the company or its leadership realizes, but so far, it's all-AI, all-the-time, human cost of productivity be damned.
If if this person really is a distinguished engineer, then they are part of leadership and it's their responsibility to set realistic expectations. Leadership knows this, they just don't care and won't care until the job market improves.
> more like supervising 8-15 agents
How do they do it? (My own record is 5 agents, but it is not typical). Do they use gastown or something?
I often have 10+ running in parallel. I’m attacking parallel problems that aren’t interdependent. Sometimes adding additional products can bring me up to 15+.
Gotta have really good test harnesses so they can largely fix themselves.
But how do you cover such amount of multi tasking? Could you give an example? I mean what kind of tasks allow such a parallelization?
6 replies →
Honestly, I dont know. I could be mistaken about the exact number of agents - but not wrong about fact of AI-driven workflows which is heavily automated, and goes on for hours.
He's one (small) step from distinguished engineer, with 20+ patents to his name, and is an embedded programmer (largely C/C++) with 30+ years of experience in the field; and I've known him for nearly as long, so I put a lot of credence to his words.
But we don't usually talk work; he's the guitarist in our band :) [I'm the bass] So we mainly chill over music + beer. And lately, it's been less chill ¯\_(ツ)_/¯