Comment by bigyabai
6 days ago
> you can build a product and/or company from the ground up
The MBAs can. Engineers can write a program, spend 5 years polishing it and convert maybe 2 paying users. The "just start a business" is the "learn to code" advice of the 21st century. It's not a panacea, or a viable path for most engineers to return to the career they had before.
No they can't. Their only skill is in squeezing profits out of existing products and corporate politics. These people are mostly technically illiterate, and they don't understand the tech market/business well either. Even AI will not enable these people to deliver working, quality code.
Writing code is a very specific and highly technical skill, you cannot just will yourself to do it without many hours of study and practice. Doing business strategy + machiavellianism 101, which is realistically what 99% of these people do, is not a very complicated or technical skill at all, the average high schooler understands these things for the most part, and AI can do it better already.
There are thousands of products and companies out there that were once okay, and did pretty well, after which they got taken over by the MBA/marketing people, and now their products are enshittified, stagnated dogshit, they only exist because of existing customers and connections, and they can be easily outcompeted.
To the contrary - good products and businesses die all the time, because they have no executive leadership or marketing plan. Highly intelligent programmers end up starving themselves trying to sell a video game or an innovative algorithm.
Yes, these MBAs will be releasing products and starting businesses that were once relegated to only developers. They'll overpay for cloud hosting, completely fail to innovate, abuse their customer relationship, and make much more money than solo devs ever did. The programming mindset is restrained by unprofitable concepts like "taste" and "respect" and other nonsense principles that the industry long since forfeit to FOSS. The victor will be the contractor, the business grad and the tradespeople. The library maintainers, indie devs and SaaS addicts are going extinct.
The programmer will begin their final phase-out, the one that started when Oracle and Microsoft subcontracted their war crime software to third-world workers.
That's true, you do need marketing, sales, etc. But is there any secret sauce to that beyond having existing connections? Not really. AI does that job better than the 99% at this point.
> Yes, these MBAs will be releasing products and starting businesses that were once relegated to only developers.
Show me a single, actually working, profitable tech company built by a non-technical MBA without the need for developers. Until then it's fantasy. I've watched numerous seemingly high-ranking, very successful MBA/marketing people try - it's a complete joke - they need nerds to babysit them 24/7.
> They'll overpay for cloud hosting, completely fail to innovate, abuse their customer relationship, and make much more money than solo devs ever did.
Cool fantasy I guess
AI/LLMs are an amazing tool and a multiplier, but they are far from perfect - it requires technical understanding to use effectively. An experienced software engineer can leverage it 1000x more effectively than a typical corporate MBA NPC. That's all there really is to it.
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