Software Engineering is Dead. Long Live Product Engineering

The essay argues that the collapsing cost of writing code is turning software engineers into product engineers. Coding was always a tool for solving problems, a point Charity Majors made in episode 18. As agents take over writing, reviewing and maintaining code, the work left for people is deciding what to build: talking to customers, mapping out features and choosing the context agents need.

The argument draws on episode 74 with Laurie Voss, who co-founded npm and runs developer relations at Arize, and on his essay “We are all Product Engineers now.” His example is a bakery owner who has no interest in learning to write software and only wants something that does what the bakery needs. Many programs could fit a request to keep track of orders, and someone has to find the one that suits a bakery.

Key points

• Voss compares the role to the systems analyst of the 1960s, who translated business requirements into software requirements without writing software.
• One census counts more than 1,300 open forward deployed engineer postings across 565 companies. Voss cites average total compensation around $240,000.
• Voss expects this kind of role to become most of software engineering over the next decade. Conor’s bet is two to five years.
• Junior engineers once learned judgment from having a senior review the code they wrote. Agents now do the writing and the reviewing. The essay advises newcomers to build in public and asks companies to reinvest in apprenticeships.
• Voss likens the moment to the web in 1997: a bubble is coming, the winners are unknown and there is time to retrain.

Disclosure: The newsletter issue was sponsored by G2i. Inngest, Svix, Walrus Memory and G2i sponsor season four, including episode 74 (4:38). Episode 18 aired in season two, which Galileo sponsored while Conor worked there; its show notes carry a Galileo block.