Hacker News Reader

Comment by bicx | Hacker News Reader

In a bear market in a bloated company, maybe. We’re still actively hiring at my startup, even with going all-in on AI across the company. My PM is currently shipping major features (with my review) faster and with higher-quality code than any engineer did last year.

View on HN

>My PM is currently shipping major features (with my review) faster and with higher-quality code than any engineer did last year

That's... not a good look for your engineers?

It’s hard to compare, honestly. Last year, my PM didn’t have the AI tools to do any of this, and engineers were spread thin. Now, the PM (with a specialized Claude Code environment) has the enthusiasm of a new software engineer and the product instincts of a senior PM.

This is how it will go at least in the near term. Engineers will be phased out slowly by product/project management that will prompt the tool instead of the tech lead for the changes they want.

And in the longer term those people will also get deprecated.

> In a bear market in a bloated company, maybe

Then any company that was staffed at levels needed prior to the arrival of current-level LLM coding assistants is bloated.

If the company was person-hour starved before, a significant amount of that demand is being satisfied by LLMs now.

It all depends on where the company is in the arc of its technology and business development, and where it was when powerful coding agents became viable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com