"Engineering， product， and design are all merging into a 'builder' role"

Yeah… I'm not so sure. This feels like an oversimplification and podcast talking point. Reality is a lot more complex.

Even with 1000 "Member of Technical Staff" titles， someone still has to wake up and care 100x more about Product or Design than anyone else. It is their Main ThingTM

That's not to say MTS titles are universally bad， but I think they're an example of this 'builder' talking point that's become bastardized.

AI and coding agents have made generating code easy and yet… you're in for a world of pain if non-engineers ship a bunch of slop and don't have great engineers to tame the complexity.

The SF hivemind has a tendency to overfit what works at startups for every company. And to be fair， sometimes this is true！ Startups can be a leading indicator for how the industry is changing and often cause disruption.

However， it is going to be incredibly hard to disrupt the extremely human parts of corporate jobs. You really think there's going to be a PM who also does some engineering and design on the side at JPMorgan Chase？

This is true for the simple parts of most jobs， like people wanting to have ownership over something and do good work， move up a career ladder， support their family， get paid well， make an honest living…

And also the hard parts： internal politics， some critical business system that has a bus factor of 1 which has been running for 15 years and isn't documented anywhere because it's that guy's job security. The real world has a lot of this stuff.

It's easy to pontificate about all roles collapsing but it's actually really nice to have a specific person or team who is an expert in one thing that you can work with. I don't expect that to change. Further， I think AI disruption to knowledge work will take decades to play out because it is more fundamental to the human condition （e.g. sociological/organizational） than pure intelligence.