90% of Eng leadership roles hiring now are one two two shitty options:
1) Please fix our company that is dying in the AI era. All of our good people have left. Please come in and do the AI transformation. You’ll be unable to hire anyone good. You’ll have absolutely no chance. And we can pay you the same as a Staff Engineer at Google. But there is major upside if you literally fix everything.
2) Please make our wayyyy overvalued AI startup actually do real AI stuff. We never had a real Eng leader on the team. We raised at $1B valuation on $1M revenue with a ChatGPT wrapper. We never had a real CTO or Eng leader, just a 25 year old cofounder named Dave who was the only one of us who knew how to launch an EC2 instance. We can pay you the same as a Staff Engineer at Google, but there’s major upside if you literally fix everything.
The “indie hacker” product type is dying and the reason are coding agents
The products you are building sit right in a spot that is not winnable anymore:
Your product is not valuable enough that Claude + MCP cannot replace it and you do not have the capacity to create a huge, vertically or horizontally integrated product scope that would drive value and retain people
On the other hand, everyone can now vibe code an 80% version of your product themselves
The only two remaining categories are the foundation model labs themselves entering the application layer and VC funded startups because they have the money to hire teams that can out engineer the vibe coders (for some time)
This is also only true for the years in which applications matter at all, afterwards everything will go to voice input into a model wrapper directly and then from there to agents which can do everything, so applications will then become fully irrelevant
@mocointel The thing is that "normal" feels like "nightmare" when you play with strangers and have no way to pick a specific Equipment that is matched to the others