Drive and ownership matter more than ever now that AI is here

How a company actually runs#

The CEO reports to investors. Department heads report to the CEO. Team leads report to department heads. The whole thing exists to keep making money.

Every department has a job, and whoever runs it is accountable for it. Engineering spends the company’s money building the product, and has to make sure it works and stays up. Marketing brings in customers. Support takes the heat when customers are angry.

Different jobs, same rule: somebody has to answer for it.

AI doesn’t take the responsibility off anyone#

I’ve pushed back on the “AI will replace job X” argument a lot, in earlier posts and on here.

Think about it this way. As a solo founder, sure, you can hand everything to AI, because you’re the only one on the hook. If AI ships a bug, you lose the money. If the AI support bot makes customers give up, you lose the customers.

But at some point the business grows. You no longer have time to run the AI yourself, or you’re sick of cleaning up after it. That’s when you start hiring. You need people to solve problems for you and to own the outcome.

And I doubt you’d put up with someone on your team telling you, “AI did that, blame the AI.”

Drive#

Over the past few years I’ve watched a lot of programmers who only ship tickets. They never think about how the business works, and never bother to ask why the product is designed the way it is. Those people are going to get left behind.

And engineers do need to care about the business. Every piece of tech has to land in a business somewhere. Even Kubernetes and cloud computing, as technical as they get, have customers: ops teams and developers. In the end they serve a business too.

If you have drive, AI gives you a huge edge, whether you’re at a company or on your own. It’s knocked down a lot of the walls around money, people and tools. One person can now do what used to take a team.

There are plenty of solo founder stories out there, so I’ll use my own workplace instead. Before AI and now, the best engineers I’ve worked with all had drive. They went outside their lane, learned how the business makes money and where the product and the business hurt, and used that to build better things. That’s what makes them hard to replace.

Jobs and headcount#

I don’t think any role goes away completely. Headcount will shrink, though, because most people don’t want to own things or go outside their lane. Someone who does both will do well in any industry, in any role.