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Netlify CTO Dana Lawson: Writing code is no longer the job
- shimman 5mo agoLooking at Dana Lawson's career on linked in, it looks like they never spent time being an actual developer. Seems fitting that a completely out of touch elite in the US would make such statements.
- gedy 5mo agoWhen I was younger I used to assume that CTO was like the ultimate experienced engineer, and most every CTO I've dealt with in 25 years has been a needle scratch for that assumption.
- yakshaving_jgt 5mo agoThere are competent CTOs who are not above getting their hands dirty, and there are career politician type CTOs who have no discernible skills beyond projecting an illusion of technical brilliance. I've seen plenty of both, and I'm sure everything in between exists too.
- gedy 5mo ago> career politician type CTOs Good description; that's been the my majority of companies unfortunately.
- smrtinsert 5mo agoHow about product only CTOs who quietly hate engineers because they don't know what they do, and they constantly feel threatened
- dijksterhuis 5mo agoI've known one semi-decent one in a circa 100 people business. Used to be the head of engineering. But he was fully transactional, sell stuff mode most of the time as CTO. CEO actually said one time that he wondered if he'd "ruined" the guy a little by making him CTO. He tried to bail me out of some very deep trouble i got myself in. Didn't end up working out, but he was good folk for sticking his neck out for someone on the engineering team when customers were screaming at him over the phone because of my screw up. Rest of the time, they've been a networking contact of the CEO who has "some tech stuff" on their resume. Last one screwed me over and fucked three years worth of work in one fell swoop (and he admitted he did this for his own gains over slack when challenged on one of my last days at that job). still not over that one.
- Traubenfuchs 5mo agoA CTO once asked me: Why do we have a test and staging environment? Could we propose removing them as cost savings initiative? During a time when cost savings where the number 1 priority. What a tiring world.
- FireBeyond 5mo ago"Everybody has a test environment. Some are fortunate enough to have a separate production environment."
- uxhacker 5mo agoI wonder how many people saying similar things have the same background, but having said that she was VP of Engineering at GitHub, and VP of Engineering at Heptio.
- bbgm 5mo agoAnd started their career as a sysadmin. I don't know Dana at all, but some of the best kernel and networking people I've met got their start as sysadmins.
- shimman 5mo agoGood thing there is nothing in their career that actually signals they were a good network engineer and not just another do-nothing corpo elitist that wants to collect their bag while fucking over society.
- shimman 5mo agoTheir time at GitHub doesn't inspire confidence, especially when their decisions likely lead to GitHub's current problems when they have a history of hiring nonqualified people.
- frogperson 5mo agoDont use the word 'elite' when describing people like this, it implies they are the best at something, which in my experience has never been the case, unless you count bullshitting and gaslighting.
- shimman 5mo agoNo, elite refers to a class of people in the United States. Go study some labor history rather than going all orwell on words you disagree with.
- signatoremo 5mo agoPetty personal attack. A technical manager who manages developers should know very well the job of their reports. "Out of touch elite"? a MAGA-like populism view in a place where MAGA is (rightly) looked down on.
- surgical_fire 5mo ago> A technical manager who manages developers I was managed by a fair share of those that had absolutely no fucking idea of how I did my job.
- shimman 5mo agoIt is a personal attack, that's why I made it. These people have a massive influence in society, they literally dictate the direction of technology in the country. They deserve scorn and public shaming. Do you think the direction of technology in the US is good? Do you think technology is consolidated in the US? Do you think qualified people should be making these decisions and not vanity plate chasers?
- glimshe 5mo agoBeing a Chief Technology Officer is no longer the job. We now need an end-to-end AI orchestrator for the corporation in the Chief Agentic Officer role. Dana Lawson is now obsolete and must be let go.
- wnevets 5mo agoIt sure is convenient AI isn't capable of doing the c-suite's job
- smrtinsert 5mo agoThe brutal reality being its probably most capable in that domain. They'll freely admit they're not "the never the smartest guy in the room" and their decision record proves it
- ramon156 5mo agoThe higher up the ladder, the more incompetent they become IMO. If you're in the seat, no one will force you out. They'll leave, but they can't make you leave.
- ValentineC 5mo ago
- sublinear 5mo agoWas it ever "the job" at a place like Netlify? Who cares?
- Igrom 5mo agoIt was never the job as long as the profession was called "software engineer" and not "coder".
- milch 5mo agoWeirdly I find myself writing more code lately, not less. A lot of it is AI assisted but a lot of it also isn't. I find that where previously the management chain wanted things meticulously planned out, and we had to have 17 meetings with different stakeholders and principal engineers to approve the system design.
- dijksterhuis 5mo agoA CTO who doesn't understand what "the job" was. Classic.
- kirykl 5mo agoI wonder if code quality goes up if you include “as a rockstar ninja” in your prompt
- xnx 5mo agoA little terrified to speculate what a coding agent that stuck to this persona would produce (a $550/month multi-region AWS multi-region Webpack/Mongo/React stack ... for one user)
- lampe3 5mo agojust last week we moved away from netlify to our own solution on AWS. Services like netlify who are a layer on top of AWS are no longer needed.
- smrtinsert 5mo agoLittle late to the thought leadership circus. What's next, limp LinkedIn posts only her sycophants like?
- 100ms 5mo agoNetlify CTO in 6-18 months: that vibe project that caused me to say writing code is no longer the job got so unmaintainable that I hired a team of 3 to take it over. They're rewriting it by hand because tokens are too expensive now. Nobody could have seen this coming
- bwfan123 5mo ago> I hired a team of 3 to take it over There are large areas of software where the quality of code is measured by the mental model of its human maintainers. For these areas, LLMs are a net negative because their use degrades the mental model of the human maintainers.
- jauntywundrkind 5mo agoPersonally I really think LLMs help radically decrease the bus factor, by making it vastly easier to understand code and systems. Even just reading the code, their ability to ingest colossal amounts & answer questions in incredibly useful. Once you hook them up to observability, DAP (debug anything protocol), a repl, devtools... their ability to augment and accelerate practitioners is amazing. There can be a lot of oral history that is lost, for sure, that helps illuminate why things are built the way they are, what the intent was. I've always favored a written culture, that has artifacts that help explain the past. Engineers move projects, move companies: trusting the mental model to live in people's heads has a lot of risk and downsides to it.
- abnercoimbre 5mo agoDana should’ve repeated the lie before companies started blowing past their annual AI budget and began to panic.
- whynotmaybe 5mo ago[dead]
- il-b 5mo agoStill, she gets her bonus for reducing the headcount
- analogpixel 5mo ago> a billion new applications written by 2029 So we will have a billion new hello world, stock checker, Calendar, Todo apps, and ...? Just because you have a way to write code fast, doesn't mean you are going to come up with billions of new ideas of what to do with that code, and to be mean about it, most people don't think they are creative enough to come up with ideas and are just fine watching sports all day on tv. The apple app store currently has 2,362,917 (https://42matters.com/ios-apple-app-store-statistics-and-trends#available-apps-count https://42matters.com/ios-apple-app-store-statistics-and-tre...) apps in the app store, and a lot of those are the same thing, so 0.236% of a billion. but to be fair, with Cluade I've written at least 10 apps I use every day. If everyone in the world (8.3 billion people) would do this, then we might get close to that billion new apps.
- tdhz77 5mo agoA billion applications by 2029 sounds great to me. I consider MySpace to be part of the peak Web 1.0. MIDI sounds and pot leafs floating on the page. It really whipped the llamas ass. Let’s do that again.
- tengbretson 5mo agoI'm not even sure if I disagree with the conclusion, but I feel pretty safe disregarding the words spoken in front of a slide profoundly declaring "UX + DX = AX"
- philippemnoel 5mo agoWriting code was never the job. Writing code was always a means to the job. This is why people hire "software engineers", not merely "programmers".
- sys_64738 5mo agoSounds like a total chump. Why do these individuals spew these utterances voluntarily? I'm guessing it is something driven from an internal company decision so this individual now has to evangelize it as gospel to the naysayers.
- techblueberry 5mo agoI don’t think she’s entirely wrong, but a lot of this is basically repackaged ideas of yesteryear. We’ve been trying to do the hands off autoremediated, guardrails on code quality platform for a while now. It turns out it’s really hard. A lot of the AI hyping sounds like the cloud and serverless hyping. I remember I had a VP of engineering at a company a while ago I got into a fight with about cloud. Their argument was that cloud economics were such that on-premise was dead dead. My argument was that it could still be considered an engineering question. And while im not saying on-prem is winning; It’s not a forgone conclusion as 37signals has discovered.
- orev 5mo agoI think a lot of developers (e.g. the HN crowd) aren’t aware that pretty much all non-IT businesses people, from receptionists to the C-suite, really do think that what IT people do is take their (business people’s) brilliant, fully formed ideas, and just convert them into “computer language” so the computer does them by magic. There’s no understanding (or desire to) that almost the whole job (of development) is trying to figure out all the assumptions, corner cases, logic conflicts, etc. that are embedded in their “requirements”. This is why IT is always seen as just an overhead cost to cut as much as possible: because you’re not perceived as actually knowing anything about the business, only as a rote translator which can be done by anyone.