Ever since my retirement from DA, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the meta aspects of building products and software.
Two common themes I see
Engineers who conflate their POCs on LinkedIn with shipping:
"I'm so much more productive with AI!" - engineer
"That's awesome, but JIRA doesn't seem to reflect this." - manager
Leaders who conflate LinkedIn POCs with productivity:
"I saw someone rewrote an entire app with AI. You can do the same, right?" - manager
"Uh, yeah... I just need to throw out all governance we've put in place." - engineer
My boss had a more balanced take. To paraphrase:
"I hear from everyone that we're more productive with AI, and leadership is asking more from us than ever before, but I also hear that everything is more chaotic."
It's the chaos that I'm particularly interested in. More specifically, reducing this feeling of chaos. I'm still collecting some thoughts, but I made a poll on Mastodon to see how engineers view what would make them more productive...
My somewhat obvious hunch is that engineers struggle more from the process around building software, not from the building itself. The question is, how do we fix it?