The research in this post is interesting, especially as it relates to where the software development bottlenecks are in the age of AI:

If writing code isn’t the bottleneck, what is? The task-breakdown surveys point at things like meetings or debugging. This just leads to more questions: what are developers doing in those meetings and why can’t it be done by AI? Won’t debugging get automated as capabilities improve? To understand the real bottlenecks, we have to get qualitative, and dig into software engineers’ own understanding of what it is they do that resists automation. When we did this analysis, it revealed three things as the real bottlenecks (1) deciding and specifying what to build, (2) verifying and being accountable for what is delivered, and (3) the deep human understanding — of the codebase, the business, and the environment — required to carry out both of these.

This essay by Garrett Bucks about what’s going on at Cornell really got to me. I highlighted too many quotes, but here’s one that particularly stood out:

I’m writing this in the middle of the night. A few minutes ago, my nine-year-old daughter woke up and called out for me. She’s sick, and needed tissues and medicine. Of course I leapt to my feet. I’d do anything for her and her brother, such that they get to grow up enveloped in love and care forever and ever. We all would, us parents. At least that’s the story we tell ourselves. In practice, we accept a world where precious little is expected of men, and women are asked to fend for themselves. Boys will be boys, and girls will be given rape whistles and a laundry list of rules to follow.

This article is a very good representation of how I see the PM landscape right now as well:

After a brief period where PMs were expected to become engineers themselves, the engineering team is moving back to owning most implementation mechanics. PM increasingly owns what should happen, why, the principles governing a product’s behavior, and how success should be evaluated. There are debates around communicating that vision between PRD’s vs. prototypes, but that debate hides the fact that the eval is becoming the core product artifact. The initial strategy doc or PRD is re-emerging as an artifact for agents as well as humans to understand what we intended to build. The eval defines whether we did or not.

Aaron Horwath implements AI for a living, and in a good essay for Noema he asks why so many knowledge workers are losing faith in their careers:

In coffee shops and in the low-lit corners of bars, professionals are sharing dreams of “disappearing” or “living on a farm somewhere” or “going off the grid.” These aren’t fantastical daydreams; they are visions of escape shared in a tone that betrays an underlying existential angst, a fundamental doubt about work and careerism inspired by a seemingly increasingly common experience: waking up one morning at an existential precipice, struck with a sudden sense that knowledge work is, and perhaps always has been, pointless.

It’s definitely worth reading the whole thing if you find yourself in the same situation. He mentions two concepts that feel super relevant right now:

• Workism is Derek Thompson’s term for the way work has become the place we look for the meaning that earlier generations got from religion.
• The spectacle comes from the French theorist Guy Debord’s 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle. It’s his word for modern life lived secondhand, like watching other people travel on YouTube.

Horwath sees workism as a small version of the spectacle, where work only has to look important. He argues that as AI agents do more and more of the work, it gets even harder to keep pretending it matters.

His conclusion:

But perhaps the most powerful action of all is simply to maintain an awareness (and remind others) that Workism is a spectacle. For most employees, we owe it to each other to remind one another that this work is not, in the grand scheme of things, all that important. It is illusory. No one has ever died over a spreadsheet. The world does not wait with bated breath for product launches. A marketing campaign will not change the world. Almost no one will remember all the work we do. But they might remember the types of people we were, the relationships we had and how we treated the people we worked with.

I really need that last sentence to be true, because I’ve pretty much banked my whole career on it.

All 21 of these “new etiquette rules” from Joan Westenberg are great and I endorse the entire post. Two that especially stood out for me:

Don’t make your convenience somebody else’s administration. A seven-minute voice note may save you time but only by taking seven minutes from its recipient.

And:

Don’t join in a punishment because it has attracted a crowd. An algorithm will regularly show you a stranger and invite you to help destroy them. It will offer one clip, sentence, or accusation, then encourage immediate certainty. Refuse the pleasure of acting as judge, jury, and eager member of the crowd.