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some variation of this is what im expecting. jevon's paradox is going to push a ton of people who dont think of themselves as SWEs into weird hybrid pseudo-SWE roles, but the <p50 SWE who just writes java and doesn't bring any product or business insights to the table is turbo-fucked

yeah if you think of yourself as a machine that translates JIRA tickets into CRUD code, you are fuuuuucked

People started saying this recently and uh. That is how I learned that this is a genre of person that exists?

While there are definitely people content to do exactly this, it's usually more of a systems problem: it's generally easier for The Business if you have a whole lot of people functioning like this. For some engineers, that's all they've ever known.

A lot of the time, it happens accidentally and then becomes a pattern. And even in places where you do have agency, a lot of enterprise software really isn't that creative _and_ your business partners do a really shitty job of communicating your business impact back to you.

I've been doing this for [mumble] years now, and it wasn't until my last job at Carvana where our business partners would identify a problem with a dollar amount attached, ie. we spend $30M on fuel because too many of our vehicles are being delivered with a full tank of gas, and we promise half.

What can we do to enforce the half-tank rule, because we think that'll save us $7.5M ARR. We came up with a dumb, simple solution (gotta upload a picture of the fuel gauge before delivery) and they measured the outcome: $10M ARR. That was literally the first time I had information like that. Ever.