There will only be four jobs

Slop Cannons, SREs, Hot People, and Adults

There are only four jobs.

A few weeks ago I wrote this aside about how companies/jobs/functions are reorienting toward a new organizing principle. Then this week it went tragically/comically viral for no good reason (my linkedin is broken now). So it’s now worth restating the case.

There’s a very real possibility that the only jobs in tech companies are going to be:

1. product eng/vibe coder/PM/slop cannon: self explanatory. This is the high velocity, high tool use generalist. they are obviously not restricted to product and eng roles. Anyone can be commercial and product minded.

2. SREs/infra/security/systems: we’re going to be producing so much STUFF across every org that there’s going to need to be really really good people stitching it together, making it stable, secure, and robust.

3. Adults: sometimes you need a grown up in the room to just say “hey, come on.” They are effectively a much needed governor on an otherwise accelerating organization. You will find them across roles but there are obvious places like legal and finance where you’re NGMI without an adult in charge.

4. Hot people: You will find hot people in roles ranging from sales, to people, to CX. There will always be an important place for those who present an easy UX to the world and are pleasant to be around. Remember, there are many ways to be hot.

First, these are working styles and archetypes, not job descriptions. The latent traits have always cut across job titles and orgs. To ask “what about design” or “where does my job fit” is the wrong question/fails to comprehend what’s going on. The right question is how do you approach your job irrespective of the title.

Second, it’s probably not possible to be all of these. It may not even really be possible to be more than one or two. To be spiky in all things is to be smooth. If you’re saying you’re all four you’re probably a) wrong and/or b) misunderstanding my point.

Third, this new quartet very well may replace the classic trifecta of product/design/eng. That iron triangle was organized around categories of output. When anyone can produce code, designs, and specs, organizing around what you produce is meaningless. Instead the highest velocity teams will organize around how they produce.

The best AI native companies are increasingly recruiting commercially minded engineers regardless of the role. They explicitly want people who are comfortable using tools AND thinking about product AND thinking about customers. The salespeople are shipping (at least internal tools and automations for themselves) and the engineers are relentlessly focused on customer value.

The highest performing companies will have ‘product engineers’ and slop cannons in every role (product/eng, sales, ops, talent, finance, CX, marketing, etc); it is a multi-hyphenate skill set crucial to accelerate each area of the business.

Conversely, there are “SREs” everywhere for those with the eyes to see them. The basic function within their org is the same: to provide scaffolding that lets other people move fast and cleans up behind them. Whether that happens in marketing (QA and copy editing) or engineering is irrelevant, the value to their org, and by extension the company, is the same.

In a world of rapid acceleration and internal decentralization (everyone can autonomously execute everywhere simultaneously), you need adults who can rely on judgement and earned intuition. Sometimes that means saying no with authority to prevent catastrophic errors and acceleration off a cliff. Remember, velocity is a vector (it requires direction) and momentum requires mass (the work needs to matter). Adults can help keep you on the golden path. This is self evident.

You cannot win without hot people. Hot people are the interface layer. Externally they make the thing legible and attractive. Internally they make the org cohere. They’re the reason people want to show up to work and the reason people want to buy from you. Remember, there are many ways to be hot and I will not elaborate on this further.

pictured here: a hot person

I'm not an employment doomer. The biggest companies will get more efficient (lower headcount) but there will be lots more companies and the boundaries of "tech" get fuzzier every year. And to the extent that there are fewer engineers (objectively wrong at this point) it’ll only be because many of them get subsumed into other “non-technical” roles.

Some Stray Notes

• I’m not the first to point this out but the OpenAI/TBPN deal is clear proof of the immense value of hot people. Jordi and Coogan are equivalent to AI engineers.

• The NYT reported on what purports to be a ≈$1B revenue, one person GLP-1 company. It seems to be a fraud and the numbers are probably either fake or misleading. This is what happens when a slop cannon builds a HC company without an adult in the room.

• This is all orthogonal to agency which is important for everyone in every role in a highly performant, accelerating company.

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Slow Security

Super stoked for this: we’re hosting founders, operators, security leaders for a ≈100 person cyber security mini conference in NY next month

We’ll have Anthropic’s head cyber and NatSec policy for a fireside chat along with panels with people building and backing security companies. More to come soon.

Sign up to join us. Space is limited and we want to prioritize builders and buyers.