[xenotux]

Coding as such is seldom a bottleneck to begin with. How many times have you been in a conversation along the lines of "we have every detail of the product figured out, but we need another month for the coders to finish writing the code"?

The bottlenecks are almost always elsewhere. Design, quality assurance and debugging, art assets, localizations, hiring, performance management, you name it. And to be fair, AI can streamline some of that.

[crazygringo]

> How many times...

Literally all the time? Every single month?

I am struggling to understand your perspective. In my existence, the bottleneck is always the coding.

The development team has a backlog that could keep them busy for years. Meanwhile, everyone else -- QA, localization, whatever -- operates at whatever pace the code gets delivered.

Never in my entire life have I been in the situation where the engineering manager said, "well folks, localization is backed up so we've got no more code we need to write. Go home and check in next week to see if we have any work?"

The only exception I can think of might be videogames where the bottleneck is the art and then maybe the testing loop. But gaming isn't representative of software development generally at all.

[boredtofears]

A fully curated backlog with complete specifications that is kept up to date with current changes in the product/industry? I've never had the privilege of working in an environment like that.

[dietr1ch]

Your "coding team" there isn't actually coding most of the time. Sitting down to type isn't the bottleneck, but the work that needs to happen so you can sit down and type what needs to be typed.

[mrbombastic]

I find it is either coding or design but yeah not sure where the perspective of the GP come from, that has not been my experience. I have actually vented with other devs about too many brainstorming meetings, ideas of what to do we are never short on. Maybe where I agree slightly is the devil is in the maintenance, ai can maybe? help with that but i think you will quickly reach a saturation point where you have more than you can manage.

[Syntaf]

I had a period of time at my last job where the product org was so dysfunctional engineers did in fact run out of work.

Initially I didn’t mind it because my team focused on technical debt, but it pretty quickly turned sour. Having to scrape up “work” for the team of 6 engineers each morning to appear productive to management was dreadful

[nitwit005]

This story feels inconsistent. Where did the backlog come from?

The developers would have to help with the requirements and planning all the code changes. That implies a huge amount of non-coding work was done by the developers.

[moi2388]

You have a full backlog with all requirements clear? The edge cases are known? I’m calling bullshit.

[sitkack]

> quality assurance and debugging

Saying the quiet part out loud. What kind of engineering org outsources this? 80% of engineering is confirming your design works, otherwise it is just LARPing.

[another_twist]

My thoughts exactly. Most of my coding is actually writing the tests or coming up with a proper harness to check behaviour of the code. Then of course there's other stuff like operations playbook if you are introducing new infrastructure. I have usually worked in environments where ops, q/a, design, code was the full job. First time I worked with explicit SREs it was a bit weird to give people specific commands to run without an overview of the system.

[Kerrick]

Every time I hear somebody say a phrase like “art assets” I am humbled, reminded that not all programmers have the same experiences or work in the same environments as I do. I don’t usually think about art assets being a blocking part of the workflow because I work on enterprise information systems.

[crystal_revenge]

> quality assurance and debugging

This is still part of “coding”. It doesn’t make any sense to say you’ve “finished coding” when the program doesn’t actually work as required.

I’ve been aghast to see developers present an unequivocally broken product and try to argue making it not visibly broken is “scope creep”.

I mean, that’s why we argue so much about the best ways to write code: we want to reduce the incidence of bugs and make it easier to correct unexpected errors.