Engineering

For over a decade, my dopamine (from work) came from a very predictable place: shipping new things. As a manager, those direct rewards will simply disappear, leaving you feeling unfulfilled for weeks (months in my case).

This hit home. And yes you too one day will be on a red team/warroom call remembering your glory days of diving deep figuring out the problem and feeling the accolades. Being a manager is a lot more pointing the spotlight than basking in it, rightfully so. As a manager suddenly results and rettenion matter most. Well Matheus puts it as ‘Shipping’ and ‘Happy’ which are results and retention oriented!

While some believe no-code or “vibe coding” tools (where users prompt agents to write software) might eliminate the need for technical expertise, Dohmke disagrees. He sees these tools as accelerators, not replacements. “The idea that AI without any coding skills lets you build a billion-dollar business is mistaken — because if that were true, everyone would be doing it.”

I feel this, for ever reddit post I read about someone POWERing through AI Development I think. Show me the money. I think I noted this elsewhere before. The great geniuses who invited Java and C# aren’t the ones who brough Applications to life. Try as I might, even my best simplest vibe-coding experiments reach the 95% threashold of compeltion. Sure right now businesses are shy about hiring, but I think this is more driven by over supply in the market of qualified engineers and global competition. The world is flat.

The expectations have sped up rapidly. One engineer said that building a feature for the website used to take a few weeks; now it must frequently be done within a few days. He said this is possible only by using A.I. to help automate the coding and by cutting down on meetings with colleagues to solicit feedback and explore alternative ideas.

Lots of ink spilled on the productivity of AI. But one very strong fact remains, if you were copy/pasting from stack overflow before, copy/pasting from LLMs is just more efficient. Besides how many unique apps are built everyday? Execution is the diffrientiator.

Every couple of days a new article pops up about how engineers are X% more productive, and how company Y laid off hundreds of developers because they are not needed anymore. … Also, if you are working on a completely fresh codebase, or on a PoC - the gains can be huge. I was able to build in the last 2 months something that would have taken me a year previously.

IF YOU WANT TO CHANGE THE WORLD, GO INTO BUSINESS

Fun read on the history of computer programming and 40 years. Fun tidbit, businesses change the world, not software.

_{Quote Citation: Charity, “THOUGHTS ON MOTIVATION AND MY 40-YEAR CAREER”, July 9, 2025, https://charity.wtf/2025/07/09/thoughts-on-motivation-and-my-40-year-career/}

I have found that AI-generated code is often sloppy, unnecessarily complex, and a lot of the time, just plain wrong. For me, AI code generation is akin to mindlessly copy-pasting code snippets from Stack Overflow, and we all know how that goes. It usually takes me longer to understand AI generated code than write my own.

You can’t off load understanding. Using AI to generate entire projects isn’t the solution. Using it as a rapid lookup tool, much more promising. Interesting that DORA metrics seem to indicate negative impact on delivery stability. Which if you’re releasing code you don’t understand seems a given.

Engineers got used to those cushy jobs, and became the most spoiled profession out there. We work from a nice office (or your home), solve interesting problems, and get paid in the top 10% of our country to do it.

I once told a friend that SWE is unlike any other field. You don’t have to chase certificates or slog 10 years in the pits. What other career can you say ‘No I don’t know the tech stack and I don’t know the industry and I don’t know the product’ and hear back ‘You’re Hired’?