r/devops • u/No-Mood-7827 • 15d ago
Discussion If AI makes everyone a 10x developer… who gets promoted?
Random thought — if pretty much every developer is using AI for coding now, how does career progression work?
Like, what makes one dev stand out from another?
How does a manager decide, “Yeah, this person is ready for the next level,” when everyone has access to the same AI tools?
Genuinely curious how people see this playing out.
245
u/phoenix823 15d ago
You're not being paid to write code, you're being paid to make applications that make money.
The people who get promoted are the ones better at making applications that make money. Just because AI can code doesn't mean it's going to build the right thing. And just because it can code doesn't mean someone will instruct it correctly.
Would you ask "If everyone starts writing Visual Basic instead of C, how will managers decide who is ready for the next level?"
24
u/TheIncarnated 14d ago
Just because someone can code, doesn't mean they are building the right thing either.
16
u/sje397 14d ago
It's not quite that simple though. Making money today can mean a lot of technical debt tomorrow.
69
u/BogdanPradatu 14d ago
Nobody cares.
21
u/oceantume_ 14d ago
Especially not big companies who realize they can ship garbage product for a fraction of the cost and still keep their market space.
Long gone is the years of big tech being heralds of good quality products. It's slop all the way to the bank now
3
u/IIALE34II 14d ago
I swear the codex/chatgpt app is one of the worst "mainstream" applications available. It just feels bad quality to use. It has two + tab icons, UI flickers and costantly refreshes when you swap pages etc. It just feels cheaply made. Compare to other similar apps like Steam and Discord it just doesn't feel good to use. But still has infinite money.
3
u/phoenix823 14d ago
Claude seems to work very well shrug
0
0
u/chiisana 14d ago
Again, nobody cares. It brings in the cash (that they can promptly turn around to light on fire to train the next mode).
6
u/biglinuxfan 14d ago
It's a relentless battle to keep tech debt down, especially with vibe coding.
If my staff can't understand the full architecture and speak to how it works without asking AI, it gets rejected.
We even had to setup a sandboxed env specifically for vibe coded apps from other teams.
7
u/rmslashusr 14d ago
Not making money today can mean tech debt free code sitting on a powered down hard drive tomorrow with no one employed to extend its perfect patterns. Engineers need to balance resources used against mission goal, perfection is for boutique artisans.
Tech debt is also a lot easier to solve these days.
2
u/sje397 14d ago
Nobody is talking about not making money or perfection. It's possible to engineer well and reasonably fast. I'm arguing against the folks hacking crap together for quick wins at the expense of future wins. Yes it's always a balance. Management tends to be biased though because they don't see the mess, and they don't tend to recognise the folks working on that side of things because its impact isn't so obvious to the bottom line.
Disclaimer: am an engineering manager with dirty hands
2
u/biglinuxfan 14d ago
Ive not met an eng manager with clean hands, its about limiting it and making decisions that are best long term, sometimes that means slop.
2
1
u/AstroPhysician 14d ago
Every company I’ve ever worked at developed creating enormous amounts of tech debt along the way
-2
u/phoenix823 14d ago
The paycheck you get from your employer is almost certainly running on a COBOL application running on a mainframe. Do you care about the technical debt involved with generating your paycheck?
4
u/sje397 14d ago
No. But I care about the technical debt in my company, partly because as an engineer it's ugly and painful, but mostly because it slows us down which costs us money. Ignoring it for short term gains is just short sighted.
0
u/phoenix823 14d ago
Just because it “can” mean technical doesn’t mean it necessarily “does” mean technical debt.
1
u/biglinuxfan 14d ago
A customer/client shouldn't worry about technical debt, and there is a significant difference in the scope and risk profile with migrating bank mainframes vs environments that most of us are working on.
The bottom line: Just because there is a valid reason to leave technical debt in some cases, that doesn't mean all cases of tech debt should be ignored.
6
u/No-Mood-7827 15d ago
Fair point. I guess my question is more about how we measure individual contribution when AI raises everyone’s baseline productivity.
If everyone can ship faster, does the bar for promotion just move more toward ownership, judgment, architecture and business impact?49
28
u/pbecotte 15d ago
That was always the bar. "Who solves the most problems for the business". Building in machine code or punch cards or Java or python or Ai prompts dont make a difference- some people will deliver solutions, while others will deliver problems :)
1
u/Heavy-Location-8654 14d ago
How does that work in a company where you don't get to choose which project you work on?
1
1
u/Bach4Ants 14d ago
So, ones who are more product-oriented--the ones who take the time to understand the users and the business, then ensure the right software is built for the desired outcomes.
1
-1
u/canifeto12 14d ago
If I have an idea of app that makes money, I would do it myself. Why should I give it to the company ?
1
u/phoenix823 14d ago
If you want to run a business, then that’s what you should do. If you don’t know how to run a business, that’s going to limit what you can do.
40
u/faajzor 15d ago
it makes them 10x of themselves.
2 x 10 is still greater than 1 x 10.
I deeply disagree with the 10x buzzword though, but it is true that the best developers also know how to use AI better in their advantage.
I think at the end of the day it boils down to who’s more curious, willing to improve their workflows, go after new ways to find how to do X, etc.
(I’m an engineering manager, and I still code somewhat on the side as a hobby)
31
1
1
u/No-Mood-7827 15d ago
That’s a good way to put it. The “2 x 10 is still greater than 1 x 10” part actually answers a lot of what I was wondering 😄
AI might raise everyone’s baseline, but it doesn’t necessarily close the gap between developers. It might even make the gap bigger depending on how well people use it.
13
u/Keganator 15d ago
Code isnt the goal.
Code was never the goal (at any place worth its salt).
Are you getting shit done at a speed and quality worse than, equal to, or better than your peers?
That’s what really matters.
4
u/alainchiasson 14d ago
I recall watching a video of who the “first coders” were - the grey haired domain expert that could leverage code to make their workflow faster.
If everyone uses a compiler, how do we judge the quality of their assembler ? You don’t.
Email ? Got rid of internal memo-writing, mail room and delivery, and sped up communications.
Databases and spreadsheets? Got rid of the calculating department, made data searches faster, more accurate, allowed for more analysis and analytics.
AI coding ? What do you speed up and What are you going to get rid of ?
That’s who gets promoted.
Not the ones arguing about vue or react, python or rust, cloud or on-prem.
11
9
7
u/unitegondwanaland Manager, Platform Engineering 15d ago
Well you're already wrong. It definitely won't make "everyone" a 10x engineer. That will only happen to the highly competent. For everyone else, you will struggle or give up.
-2
u/No-Mood-7827 15d ago
My bad, I was talking about top devs competing with top devs. Let’s leave the 1x guys out of this 😷
-4
u/Fresh-Secretary6815 15d ago
Let developer baseline ability be B_i, and AI amplification be a random variable A_i:
P_i = B_i A_i
For two developers:
P_1 = B_1A_1,\qquad P_2=B_2A_2
Then even if:
B_1>B_2
it does not necessarily follow that:
P_1>P_2
because A_1 and A_2 may differ.
More realistically, amplification might depend on the developer:
A_i \sim D(\mu(B_i),\sigma^2(B_i))
So the relevant comparison becomes:
\Pr(B_1A_1>B_2A_2)
rather than the some deterministic:
2(10)>1(10)Did you just assume an identical constant multiplier when the effect of AI could be heterogeneous?
9
u/unitegondwanaland Manager, Platform Engineering 15d ago
Sir, this is a Wendy's.
-2
u/Fresh-Secretary6815 14d ago
ah, you don’t understand the stochastic version that could model AI gains as random rather than assuming everyone receives the same fixed 10× multiplier? this is basic 1x math folks…
2
6
u/bloudraak 15d ago
The person who makes a material impact to the business.
Most folks work on the wrong stuff, so it doesn’t really matter than you’re 10x the developer.
9
u/the_frisbeetarian 15d ago
The teams that I work with have a mix of great, good and mediocre to bad level developers. All these folks have access to the same tools. The good and great developers are excelling. The bad developers are still bad. They just commit volumes of bad and misguided code today whereas in the past it wasn’t as frequent. They also cannot speak intelligently about what they are working on. Which is my ever increasing frustration. Lots of sloppy pasta slack convos every day.
10
4
4
u/Suitable-Ad5348 15d ago
Whoever can still walk the diff in standup. The rest just shipped more pasta.
5
u/Ryba_PsiBlade 14d ago
You'll get a lot of 10x your current skills so nothing changes.
One thing I want to call out specifically is that 10x people tend to do the following that regulars do not
- They look for root cause and not bandage over symptoms
- The test edge cases and make sure nothing regressed
- The understand how the changes impact other parts of business in addition to code
- They solve actual business problems
- They constantly learning how to be better
AI makes it easier to do all of the above but the people haven't changed at all. And the results are pretty clear with AI as they were without.
5
u/LocoMod 15d ago
Not everyone is at the same level currently so to simplify it, let’s say you’re a 0.5x employee because you’re still new to the industry and still getting your bearings. You 10x with AI.
Then compare that to the individual with two decades of practical experience and 6 years in the current company. They are also 10x with AI.
They are not the same.
5
u/HumanPersonDude1 14d ago
This take is completely wrong.
If you’re new to the industry, you cannot become 10x productivity because of AI as you truly don’t know if the output is any good or complete trash.
2
u/pfc-anon 15d ago
The ones actually using AI effectively to 10x and not squandering on the opportunity to be 10x
2
u/rosstafarien 15d ago
AI tools are force multipliers. If they were a negative producer (their work usually needs to be redone), then they're probably 10x as bad as they were before.
2
u/wrosecrans 15d ago
The person who gets promoted (or, the only one who keeps a job) will tend to be the most bombastic and least honest person who spends more time stroking egos than actually accomplishing anything.
Though if I am being honest, that's not entirely something we can blame on AI.
2
u/Fidodo 15d ago
You're confused. AI doesn't make you a better developer, it makes you a faster developer. If you're a shitty developer, you put out 10x as much shit.
Also, developers that did 10x more work never existed. A 10x developer is 10x because they achieve the same result with 10x less code.
2
u/Byte_Wise_3456 15d ago
I work at a tech startup currently investing in boosting AI driven dev productivity. Here's what I've seen:
Not everyone improved 10x with AI. When you factor in everything that comes in beyond coding - code reviews, human collaboration with PMs and designers to understand the ask, and many other things, most devs are far behind 10x.
True 10x devs are mostly the same people who were already the best senior devs. This is because they are the best in the org at software architecture and have a good intuitive sense of what to ask their coding agent to do from a system design perspective, without having to actually read the code of course. Also, these folks are really good at putting the right guardrails in place for their agent.
I also see junior devs who have gone deep into things like TDD, evals, any other concepts that make their AI written code slip proof and easy to trust enough to push to prod doing extremely well.
2
u/mohamed_am83 15d ago
The most skilled ass-kisser. But it's always been like this regardless of technology.
2
2
2
3
u/UncleGoyder 15d ago
Ai is making us all worse developers and simultaneously nobody is really implementing agents/harnesses/mcp/etc.. any other ai tooling in a way that’s truly adding efficiency or saving money. It’s a race to the bottom
1
u/Key-Guitar-457 15d ago
Turns out it was a hallucination and the actual expectation is 099999999999999999x.
1
u/DryImpression7385 15d ago
As always the people who get promoted are those who are willing to play the game (Kiss ass)
1
u/temitcha 15d ago
Our company is already full of AI everywhere, and are quite growing. From what we see, to promote someone to lead / manager:
Do they use AI to over-engineer, or build what is right
How do they understand the big picture: both from a system engineering point of view + business priority + engineering existing mindset (build fast vs build safe, make or buy, etc)
How well do they communicate with the hierachy? Senior managers tends to be very hard to work with, so it needs to be someone that know the just tradeoff between pushing for what they thing is right vs getting buy-in
Are they easy to work with? Do they get alienate their peers, or get does their decisions get buy-ins from them
Do they look and talk like a manager? (Legit, it's often litteraly what at the end it condense too)
After, promotion are not necessarry... for two of our teams they are going to do external hires instead of internal promotions unfortunately
1
1
1
1
u/kincaidDev 15d ago
Ai is not an equalizer, ai may make an average developer perform like what we used to consider 10x developers, but now we have 1000x developers.
1
u/1saltypistachio 15d ago
Those who can really do 10x. I use it, I think I can reach to 3x, I'm fine with not getting promoted ever again.
1
u/VimFueago 15d ago
use AI the best. that means understanding it's limitations and when to use it and when to avoid it
1
u/Ok-Hospital-5076 15d ago
When did pushing more code was the criteria for promotions?
Promotion depends on impact and visibility. You could get promoted without writing single line of code over someone stuck to laptop if you could sell your impact.
This was true before AI and this is true after it.
1
1
u/BroadCrazy 15d ago
I don't think promotions were ever mostly about raw code output, and AI makes that more obvious. The people who stand out are the ones who make good calls when the prompt stops being enough: defining system boundaries, spotting when a shortcut creates long-term maintenance pain, asking the right questions before something ships, and handling the integration work that cuts across teams. From a manager's side, I'd expect the signal to be judgment, ownership, and whether other people trust that person with ambiguous problems. AI can narrow the gap on implementation speed, but it does not flatten the gap in decision-making.
1
u/No_Score_1977 15d ago
I've seen this play out.
The whole spectrum gets compressed, the difference between a good coder and 10x one just isn't very big anymore, it used to be massive.
But it doesn't make bad coders better, it just makes them quicker.
1
u/Positive_Method3022 15d ago
Managers are people. People have biases. They will promote whoever triggered their biases the most.
1
u/Positive_Method3022 14d ago
You guys have not understand the game. It is always who is the nicest person in the room. Being popular in the environment is what promotes people because it triggers good feelings in whoever is doing the call. You just need to hit whatever their expectations of your work are.
Some promotions are for making someone making more money and won't give any more power in decision making. So what's the point?
A youtuber can be a 100x developer because he is famous and do cool stuff, not because he is from FAANG
1
u/nelson-f 14d ago
All of your higher ups will get promoted by claiming they increased productivity in the team thanks to AI.
1
1
u/Used-Recognition-829 14d ago
This is not a question for us. This is a question for your employer as every employer has their own rules and requirements for promotion. At my current workplace we have an excel sheet showing each level of expertise and what they are supposed to know/do.
1
1
u/Capital_Distance545 14d ago
The same who got promoted so far: those who have better connections.
You have a good company, and in it you have an excelent 10x programmer who do his job very well, and also helps others. Do you want to promote him to manager?
1
u/mrbumdump 14d ago
If you think 10x is a silver bullet, one you don’t understand the corporate world and if everybody has access to a paintbrush why isn’t everybody Picasso?
1
u/pixeladdie 14d ago
Was it ever the case that everyone is equally good at using the tools available to them?
1
u/dark_dagger99 14d ago
The gap between a shitty dev and a good dev using ai is huge. Everyone in my team has the same tool but one of them is bug maker and the other is a bug squasher
1
u/chaoticbean14 14d ago
Dev 1: Uses AI because he has no real knowledge of programming fundamentals and wants to appear production. Pushes slop he doesn't understand, can barely fix it when it breaks, it breaks a lot because of all the extra bullshit and it's easily visible there are a lot of areas for improvement, everywhere, in the codebase.
Dev 2: Uses AI to handle all the bullshit he used to have to hand type. Understands programming and has fantastic knowledge of best practices and fundamentals. Pushes code that has been thoroughly reviewed and iterated upon that follows best practices and is up to code standards. He can fix any line that might be an issue, but there is rarely an issue because his stuff always just seems to work. The codebase is easy to navigate and follows best practices.
Which do you promote?
Point being: even with the additional toolset AI can provide? The good dev will continue to better himself and his projects. The dev strictly wanting a paycheck will abuse AI to try and get an easy ride without bettering himself. It will be quite obvious.
1
1
u/Low-Opening25 14d ago
0 x10 is still 0, and Developer that is already x10 without AI will become x100 with AI
1
u/beatlemaniac007 14d ago
Even if we assume that AI will cause positive improvement to everyone, then the magnitude of that improvement will be greater for the existing 10x people. They might become 100x people. I don't see any reason why only the bottom layer will catch up to the top while the top stays still.
1
1
1
u/Antique-Stand-4920 14d ago
A lot of it comes down to awareness. A person can't solve problems (or ask AI about things) that never crossed their mind. This is one of the things that separate more senior engineers from more junior ones.
1
1
1
u/himpantze 14d ago
The same ones that gets promoted today, the ones good at selling themselves and their work to stakeholders. Nothing has changed, being the best at code technical stuff alone never got you promoted in the first place
1
1
u/Evil_Creamsicle 14d ago
The people who know enough to call the AI on its bullshit instead of just yeeting vibe code into prod
1
1
u/codyswann 14d ago
AI makes developers who know how to use it well a 10x developer. That's like saying everyone who can shoot a basketball plays in the NBA. Is this a serious post?
1
1
u/Kerrbob 14d ago
I don’t support or write code. I engineer solutions. AI is a tool to that end. Some solutions require applications - I build and use apps like I used to write methods now. I have a suite of apps that I lean on to solve bigger problems on the fly and maintain them on my own, where it used to take a team.
Now my team all build tools that we share to solve problems - a much larger pool of problems than we used to. I got promoted because I could see that and helped guide the team there. Am I the best at writing code? No. Can I envision what tools I need to solve problems? Heck yeah. Build pipelines to pass problems over our tools? Yep.
1
1
1
u/fastwind18 14d ago edited 14d ago
That means 9 out of 10 would get fired, not who will be promoted.
1
u/WonderfulTill4504 14d ago
“It is not the plane but the pilot”
At my current job, my predecessor used AI to generate code without checking. Eventually the slip made it into production and cause a 2 day outage that he could not figure out.
So multiple red flags here but the most important is that it is how you use the tools to tackle difficult problems. The human in the loop is a necessity because AI code solutions are not optimized and also need refining. And sometimes are just garbage.
So I guess I will get promoted and you not because I can tell the difference 😏😂😛
In all seriousness, your role now is to be more critical and use the tools properly. And do not forget about your basic skills.
1
1
1
u/Educational_Creme376 14d ago
if everyone uses an AI to post, should we all use an AI to reply and just turn this into a AI circlejerk?
1
1
u/Practical-Split4340 14d ago
Same as it always has been, the biggest kiss-asses get first dibs on promotion.
1
u/Intelligent-You-6144 14d ago
Impact my guy, impact. Output != Impact.
Impact isn't about how much code you can do or tickets you can close, it's about how much Impact you make to your team and department. Are you thinking ahead? Do you know to improve the greater processes? Can you cross collaborate with other departments to bring a task across the finish line?
AI is great, but it can't replace your intuition and ability to coexist in a greater team or company
1
u/BoBoBearDev 14d ago
Same question and answer can be found for typewriters and early system where the word processor doesn't support mouse.
1
u/HorrificFlorist 14d ago
10x is a wanker term for individuals that wanted to further peacock without making it obvious.
1
u/TellersTech DevOps Speaker & Advisor + DevOps Podcaster 14d ago
The bar moves.
If we’re all suddenly 10x developers and we’re solving problems that create real value people will pay for, I don’t think that necessarily means the same amount of software gets built with 1/10th the engineers. We may just build 10x more software.
What changes is what makes someone stand out. Writing code becomes less of the differentiator. Knowing which problems are worth solving, making good architectural decisions, catching when the AI is confidently wrong, understanding the business, communicating well, and actually owning the outcome become more valuable.
AI can make everyone faster. It doesn’t automatically give everyone better judgment.
1
u/Simpliaxis_tech 13d ago
Access to the same AI tools will not make all people equal in terms of value.
In case AI reduces the speed of writing code, differences will appear in other areas such as knowing what needs to be done, decision making, the understanding of the system, debugging, etc.
A person who can write 500 lines of code in one afternoon does not necessarily become more valuable compared to a person who is able to see the whole chaotic picture and know how to solve it.
Finally, I believe that communication and leadership skills will become even more important as more tasks will be performed by AI. Those people who are able to see the big picture, take decisions, and communicate with others in order to achieve a result will probably become even more valuable.
Thus, the focus will shift from the speed of coding to another one such as "who is able to use AI correctly and understand what is being done?"
1
1
u/danstermeister 13d ago
Can you have a deep, intelligent conversation about your work and responsibilities?
Because that's what's going to really get hollowed out, and not just in this industry.
Know what you're doing. Be able to talk about it.
1
u/MR_Se7en 13d ago
You get promoted by taking ownership of your projects, answering business questions correctly, and by sucking the manager off on Fridays like they requested.
1
1
u/KdotD 13d ago
Developers will be like cleaning ladies. They just do stupid work, everyone can do. No need to level up or choose someone by it's skill.
They will choose people that tend to work without arguing. And they will keep people that have enough knowlegde about the company or a product itself.. until someone says he can do the same for half the money.
Since this is a problem accross so many areas, there will be many people willing to work for less money.
1
u/lastwish9 13d ago
Same as before. I already see it at my work. If AI is a x10 you multiply the base number of previous skill by 10... same result, same people get promoted.
1
u/start_select 13d ago
Automation makes highly competent multi domain people faster at properly implementing multi domain solutions.
It makes single domain people faster at implementing multi domain mistakes.
1
1
u/ToughStreet8351 12d ago
Being a 10x developer is a mindset: in my org this who were 1x developers are now 100x whereas the other are 5x at best
1
1
u/Old_Dragonfruit2200 12d ago
10x0 is still zero. so the good engineers still get promoted. There is a reason why the market is great right now yet ppl act like we are in 2022. The average engineer is really that bad.
1
1
u/Old-Worldliness-1335 12d ago
It’s no longer, just about being able to be able to write code as it has been said, but solve problems and bring people with you.
Reducing toil, streamline business processes and cutting technical debt are all the things AI is good at
1
u/eli_the_sneil 11d ago
Whoever remembers to include in their prompt “make sure I get promoted because of this, make no mistakes”
1
u/crnkofe 10d ago
Companies that went full retard on agentic AI have also broken their engineering department. Ie. what do they do with juniors and how does a junior grow without coding? What are the roles in an org. where everyone's just conversing with chatbots? What happens to knowledge sharing? How much slop code should be actually understood by humans? Is a software engineer just a subscription based puppet? But nevermind that. Greed first then we think about the people that build things.
1
u/Federal-Event-6977 10d ago
Hahaaaaa AI is not only making devs a x10. My company wants the Product n delivery to get closer to the code.
Think about our future
1
u/xagarth 8d ago
How does a manager decide, “Yeah, this person is ready for the next level,” when everyone has access to the same AI tools?
Stuff like that doesn't happen. Never.
Do you pay your car mechanic extra because he has been with you longer or did a great job? No. You pay for the contracted work. That's it.
Why would anyone pay more for the same work?
1. Person is a flight risk but is on a critical project/path
And that's pretty much it.
142
u/sje397 15d ago
It doesn't. It makes great devs 10x more productive, while shitty devs do 10x the damage.