> What happens to the "10X engineer" - the ratio of productivity between the mean and the max engineer? It's quite possible that this grows a lot.
I was thinking about this the other day as relates to the DevOps movement.
The DevOps movement started as a way to accelerate and improve the results of dev<->ops team dynamics. By changing practices and methods, you get acceleration and improvement. That creates "high-performing teams", which is the team form of a 10x engineer. Whether or not you believe in '10x engineers', a high-performing team is real. You really can make your team deploy faster, with fewer bugs. You have to change how you all work to accomplish it, though.
To get good at using AI for coding, you have to do the same thing: continuous improvement, changing workflows, different designs, development of trust through automation and validation. Just like DevOps, this requires learning brand new concepts, and changing how a whole team works. This didn't get adopted widely with DevOps because nobody wanted to learn new things or change how they work. So it's possible people won't adapt to the "better" way of using AI for coding, even if it would produce a 10x result.
If we want this new way of working to stick, it's going to require education, and a change of engineering culture.
This is an interesting thing that I'm contemplating. I also do believe that (perhaps with very few exceptions) there are no "10x engineers" by themselves, but engineers that thrive 10x more in a context or another (like, I'm sure Jeff Dean is an absolutely awesome engineer - but if you took him out of Google and plugged him into IBM - would he have had the same impact?)
With that in mind - I think one very unexplored area is "how to make the mixed AI-human teams successful". Like, I'm fairly convinced AI changes things, but to get to the industrialization of our craft (which is what management seems to want - and, TBH, something that makes sense from an economic pov), I feel that some big changes need to happen, and nobody is talking about that too much. What are the changes that need to happen? How do we change things, if we are to attempt such industrialization?
I was thinking about this the other day as relates to the DevOps movement.
The DevOps movement started as a way to accelerate and improve the results of dev<->ops team dynamics. By changing practices and methods, you get acceleration and improvement. That creates "high-performing teams", which is the team form of a 10x engineer. Whether or not you believe in '10x engineers', a high-performing team is real. You really can make your team deploy faster, with fewer bugs. You have to change how you all work to accomplish it, though.
To get good at using AI for coding, you have to do the same thing: continuous improvement, changing workflows, different designs, development of trust through automation and validation. Just like DevOps, this requires learning brand new concepts, and changing how a whole team works. This didn't get adopted widely with DevOps because nobody wanted to learn new things or change how they work. So it's possible people won't adapt to the "better" way of using AI for coding, even if it would produce a 10x result.
If we want this new way of working to stick, it's going to require education, and a change of engineering culture.