Episode 503: Hardware is hard and my PMs are pushing AI slop code
Summary
Jamison and Dave advise a new CTO from a software background taking over a robotics hardware team on earning respect and effective leadership in an unfamiliar domain, emphasizing transparency and trusting experts. They also tackle the widespread issue of product managers, including the CEO, contributing low-quality AI-generated code, causing engineer stress and workload. The hosts discuss technical guardrails, communicating bottlenecks to leadership, and adapting engineering processes to the evolving AI landscape.Episode description
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:
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I’m a software developer with about 15 years in the industry, and I am soon starting as the CTO of a robotics company with about 50 employees.
Though I have years of experience and an academic background within the field of robotics, I have always been focused on the software side of things. In my new role, I am ultimately responsible for the hardware team as well.
How do I go about earning the respect, and becoming an effective leader, of my new colleagues working in a field in which I am not an expert myself?
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Hi, I’m meowmeow, and I’ve enjoyed your podcast for a long time.
I’m working at a small engineering company which don’t have lots of profit.
Recently, the PMs at my company(including the CEO) have started “vibe coding” directly on our product. They’ve even added PMs to the project planning list as contributors.
Whenever they open a PR, the code is AI-generated and reflects their personal working style. The code quality is fairly low and engineers end up spending a lot of time reviewing and fixing it, even though we’re already under a heavy workload.
Our CEO comes from a product management background. He believes PMs should write code and deploy their own implementations, and that engineers are not fast enough and should simply move faster.
I’ve already been feeling stressed due to the workload, and this situation seems to be making it worse. Engineering leadership doesn’t seem able to push back effectively.
What should I do?