Comment by aleqs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aleqs | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

No they can't. Their only skill is in squeezing profits out of existing products and corporate politics. These people are mostly technically illiterate, and they don't understand the tech market/business well either. Even AI will not enable these people to deliver working, quality code.

Writing code is a very specific and highly technical skill, you cannot just will yourself to do it without many hours of study and practice. Doing business strategy + machiavellianism 101, which is realistically what 99% of these people do, is not a very complicated or technical skill at all, the average high schooler understands these things for the most part, and AI can do it better already.

There are thousands of products and companies out there that were once okay, and did pretty well, after which they got taken over by the MBA/marketing people, and now their products are enshittified, stagnated dogshit, they only exist because of existing customers and connections, and they can be easily outcompeted.

To the contrary - good products and businesses die all the time, because they have no executive leadership or marketing plan. Highly intelligent programmers end up starving themselves trying to sell a video game or an innovative algorithm.

Yes, these MBAs will be releasing products and starting businesses that were once relegated to only developers. They'll overpay for cloud hosting, completely fail to innovate, abuse their customer relationship, and make much more money than solo devs ever did. The programming mindset is restrained by unprofitable concepts like "taste" and "respect" and other nonsense principles that the industry long since forfeit to FOSS. The victor will be the contractor, the business grad and the tradespeople. The library maintainers, indie devs and SaaS addicts are going extinct.

The programmer will begin their final phase-out, the one that started when Oracle and Microsoft subcontracted their war crime software to third-world workers.

That's true, you do need marketing, sales, etc. But is there any secret sauce to that beyond having existing connections? Not really. AI does that job better than the 99% at this point.

> Yes, these MBAs will be releasing products and starting businesses that were once relegated to only developers.

Show me a single, actually working, profitable tech company built by a non-technical MBA without the need for developers. Until then it's fantasy. I've watched numerous seemingly high-ranking, very successful MBA/marketing people try - it's a complete joke - they need nerds to babysit them 24/7.

> They'll overpay for cloud hosting, completely fail to innovate, abuse their customer relationship, and make much more money than solo devs ever did.

Cool fantasy I guess

AI/LLMs are an amazing tool and a multiplier, but they are far from perfect - it requires technical understanding to use effectively. An experienced software engineer can leverage it 1000x more effectively than a typical corporate MBA NPC. That's all there really is to it.

Where's the disruption? If experienced engineers can leverage AI "1000x more effectively" than their peers, we should be seeing the consequences. The only thing that's happening is that software is getting cheaper. The high waterline of quality that used to differentiate software products has boiled away. Many professionally-designed programs are being functionally replaced by vibe-coded alternatives. FAANG is barely shipping software any more dignified or advanced than vibe-coded crapware.

Ask yourself this; do you think Apple would rather give up their engineers, or their brand image? Only one of them is replaceable.

The disruption is definitely happening. The main roadblock is that the US tech industry is completely captured by big tech and VCs, who openly collude with each other. But that is temporary and the cracks are starting to show - the aggressive push towards AI regulatory capture is just one obvious sign. Explain to me how DeepSeek, a company with far less access to compute and capital, and starting from behind, is now able to offer LLM inference at roughly 10x the value per dollar of the frontier US AI labs.

> Ask yourself this; do you think Apple would rather give up their engineers, or their brand image? Only one of them is replaceable.

What do you think the 'brand image' is? Is it a pretty design/image, or a cute ad campaign, is it just whatever the marketing/propaganda says? Or is it actual product quality, reliability, efficiency, etc. ? If apple gives up their engineers they have no more brand image at all, and no more products either.

Wait, are you asking "Where's the disruption" when we have a couple folks vibe coding replacements for Adobe's whole stack, as well as things like Autodesk Fusion 360? Are you serious? Then you say things are being "vibe coded" away ... well, what is it? Sounds to be like the moats of the large corps are being dissolved, and that those who can ship working software - will.

"software is getting cheaper" - and easier to make, but it hasn't lifted all of the other constraints. Guess who's well positioned to understand what those constraints are and to work well in this new landscape? Answer: they didn't go to business school.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com