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 justin․searls․co
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 Monday, Jul 7, 2025 [36]
 
 Full-breadth Developers
 
 The software industry is at an inflection point unlike anything in its brief
 history. Generative AI is all anyone can talk about. It has rendered entire
 product categories obsolete and upended the job market. With any economic
 change of this magnitude, there are bound to be winners and losers. So far, it
 sure looks like full-breadth developers—people with both technical and product
 capabilities—stand to gain as clear winners.
 
 What makes me so sure? Because over the past few months, the engineers I know
 with a lick of product or business sense have been absolutely scorching through
 backlogs at a dizzying pace. It may not map to any particular splashy
 innovation or announcement, but everyone agrees generative coding tools crossed
 a significant capability threshold recently. It's what led me to write this. In
 just two days, I've completed two months worth of work on [37]Posse Party.
 
 I did it by providing an exacting vision for the app, by maintaining stringent
 technical standards, and by letting [38]Claude Code do the rest. If you're able
 to cram critical thinking, good taste, and strong technical chops into a single
 brain, these tools hold the potential to unlock incredible productivity. But I
 don't see how it could scale to multiple people. If you were to split me into
 two separate humans—Product Justin and Programmer Justin—and ask them to work
 the same backlog, it would have taken weeks instead of days. The communication
 cost would simply be too high.
 
 [39]We can't all be winners
 
 When I step back and look around, however, most of the companies and workers I
 see are currently on track to wind up as losers when all is said and done.
 
 In recent decades, businesses have not only failed to cultivate full-breadth
 developers, they've trained a generation into believing product and engineering
 roles should be strictly segregated. To suggest a single person might drive
 both product design and technical execution would sound absurd to many people.
 Even for companies who realize inter-disciplinary developers are the new key to
 success, their outmoded job descriptions and salary bands are failing to
 recruit and retain them.
 
 There is an urgency to this moment. Up until a few months ago, the best
 developers played the violin. Today, [40]they play the orchestra.
 
 [41]Google screwed up
 
 I've been obsessed with this issue my entire career, so pardon me if I betray
 any feelings of schadenfreude as I recount the following story.
 
 I managed to pass a phone screen with Google in 2007 before graduating college.
 This earned me an all-expense paid trip for an in-person interview at the
 vaunted [42]Googleplex. I went on to experience complete ego collapse as I
 utterly flunked their interview process. Among many deeply embarrassing
 memories of the trip was a group session with a Big Deal Engineer who was
 introduced as the inventor of [43]BigTable. ([44]Jeff Dean, probably? Unsure.)
 At some point he said, "one of the great things about Google is that
 engineering is one career path and product is its own totally separate career
 path."
 
 I had just paid a premium to study computer science at a liberal arts school
 and had the audacity to want to use those non-technical skills, so I bristled
 at this comment. And, being constitutionally unable to keep my mouth shut, I
 raised my hand to ask, "but what if I play a hybrid class? What if I think it's
 critical for everyone to engage with both technology and product?"
 
 The dude looked me dead in the eyes and told me I wasn't cut out for Google.
 
 The recruiter broke a long awkward silence by walking us to the cafeteria for
 lunch. She suggested I try [45]the ice cream sandwiches. I had lost my appetite
 for some reason.
 
 In the years since, an increasing number of companies around the world have
 adopted Silicon Valley's trademark dual-ladder career system. Tech people sit
 over here. Idea guys go over there.
 
 [46]What separates people
 
 Back to winners and losers.
 
 Some have discarded everything they know in favor of an "AI first" workflow.
 Others decry generative AI as a fleeting boondoggle like crypto. It's caused me
 to broach the topic with trepidation—as if I were asking someone their
 politics. I've spent the last few months noodling over why it's so hard to
 guess how a programmer will feel about AI, because people's reactions seem to
 cut across roles and skill levels. What factors predict whether someone is an
 overzealous AI booster or a radicalized AI skeptic?
 
 Then I was reminded of that day at Google. And I realized that developers I
 know who've embraced AI tend to be more creative, more results-oriented, and
 have good product taste. Meanwhile, AI dissenters are more likely to code for
 the sake of coding, expect to be handed crystal-clear requirements, or
 otherwise want the job to conform to a routine 9-to-5 grind. The former group
 feels unchained by these tools, whereas the latter group just as often feels
 threatened by them.
 
 When I take stock of who is thriving and who is struggling right now, a
 person's willingness to play both sides of the ball has been the best predictor
 for success.
 
  Role  Engineer Product Full-breadth
 Junior ❌        ❌       ✅
 Senior ❌        ❌       ✅
 
 Breaking down the patterns that keep repeating as I talk to people about AI:
 
   • Junior engineers, as is often remarked, don't have a prayer of sufficiently
     evaluating the quality of an LLM's work. When the AI hallucinates or makes
     mistakes, novice programmers are more likely to learn the wrong thing than
     to spot the error. This would be less of a risk if they had the permission
     to decelerate to a snail's pace in order to learn everything as they go,
     but in this climate nobody has the patience. I've heard from a number of
     senior engineers that the overnight surge in junior developer productivity
     (as in "lines of code") has brought organization-wide productivity (as in
     "working software") to a halt—consumed with review and remediation of
     low-quality AI slop. This is but one factor contributing to the sense that
     lowering hiring standards was a mistake, so it's no wonder that juniors
     have been first on the chopping block
 
   • Senior engineers who earnestly adopt AI tools have no problem learning how
     to coax LLMs into generating "good enough" code at a much faster pace than
     they could ever write themselves. So, if they're adopting AI, what's the
     problem? The issue is that the productivity boon is becoming so great that
     companies won't need as many senior engineers as they once did. Agents work
     relentlessly, and tooling is converging on a vision of senior engineers as
     cattle ranchers, steering entire herds of AI agents. How is a
     highly-compensated programmer supposed to compete with a stable of agents
     that can produce an order of magnitude more code at an acceptable level of
     quality for a fraction of the price?
 
   • Junior product people are, in my experience, largely unable to translate
     amorphous real-world problems into well-considered software solutions. And
     communicating those solutions with the necessary precision to bring those
     solutions to life? Unlikely. Still, many are having success with app
     creation platforms that provide the necessary primitives and guardrails.
     But those tools always have a low capability ceiling (just as with any
     low-code/no-code platform). Regardless, is this even a role worth hiring?
     If I wanted mediocre product direction, I'd ask ChatGPT
 
   • Senior product people are among the most excited I've seen about coding
     agents—and why shouldn't they be? They're finally free of the tyranny of
     nerds telling them everything is impossible. And they're building stuff!
     Reddit is lousy with posts showing off half-baked apps built in half a day.
     Unfortunately, without routinely inspecting the underlying code, anything
     larger than a toy app is doomed to collapse under its own weight. The fact
     LLMs are so agreeable and unwilling to push back often collides with the
     blue-sky optimism of product people, which can result in each party leading
     the other in circles of irrational exuberance. Things may change in the
     future, but for now there's no way to build great software without also
     understanding how it works
 
 Hybrid-class operators, meanwhile, seem to be having a great time regardless of
 their skill level or years experience. And that's because what differentiates
 full-stack developers is less about capability than about mindset. They're
 results-oriented: they may enjoy coding, but they like getting shit done even
 more. They're methodical: when they encounter a problem, they experiment and
 iterate until they arrive at a solution. The best among them are visionaries:
 they don't wait to be told what to work on, they identify opportunities others
 don't see, and they dream up software no one else has imagined.
 
 Many are worried the market's rejection of junior developers portends a future
 in which today's senior engineers age out and there's no one left to replace
 them. I am less concerned, because less experienced full-breadth developers are
 navigating this environment extraordinarily well. Not only because they
 excitedly embraced the latest AI tools, but also because they exhibit the
 discipline to move slowly, understand, and critically assess the code these
 tools generate. The truth is computer science majors, apprenticeship programs,
 and code schools—today, all dead or dying—were never very effective at turning
 out competent software engineers. Claude Pro may not only be the best
 educational resource under $20, it may be the best way to learn how to code
 that's ever existed.
 
 [47]There is still hope
 
 Maybe you've read this far and the message hasn't resonated. Maybe it's
 triggered fears or worries you've had about AI. Maybe I've put you on the
 defensive and you think I'm full of shit right now. In any case, whether your
 organization isn't designed for this new era or you don't yet identify as a
 full-breadth developer, this section is for you.
 
 [48]Leaders: go hire a good agency
 
 While my goal here is to coin a silly phrase to help us better communicate
 about the transformation happening around us, we've actually had a word for
 full-breadth developers all along: consultant.
 
 And not because consultants are geniuses or something. It's because, as I
 learned when I interviewed at Google, if a full-breadth developer wants to do
 their best work, they need to exist outside the organization and work on
 contract. So it's no surprise that some of my favorite full-breadth consultants
 are among AI's most ambitious adopters. Not because AI is what's trending, but
 because our disposition is perfectly suited to get the most out of these new
 tools. We're witnessing their potential to improve how the world builds
 software firsthand.
 
 When founding our consultancy [49]Test Double in 2011, [50]Todd Kaufman and I
 told anyone who would listen that our differentiator—our whole thing—was that
 we were business consultants who could write software. Technology is just a
 means to an end, and that end (at least if you expect to be paid) is to
 generate business value. Even as we started winning contracts with VC-backed
 companies who seemed to have an infinite money spigot, we would never break
 ground until we understood how our work was going to make or save our clients
 money. And whenever the numbers didn't add up, we'd push back until the return
 on investment for hiring Test Double was clear.
 
 So if you're a leader at a company who has been caught unprepared for this new
 era of software development, my best advice is to hire an agency of
 full-breadth developers to work alongside your engineers. Use those experiences
 to encourage your best people to start thinking like they do. Observe them at
 work and prepare to blow up your job descriptions, interview processes, and
 career paths. If you want your business to thrive in what is quickly becoming a
 far more competitive landscape, you may be best off hitting reset on your human
 organization and starting over. Get smaller, stay flatter, and only add
 structure after the dust settles and repeatable patterns emerge.
 
 [51]Developers: congrats on your new job
 
 A lot of developers are feeling scared and hopeless about the changes being
 wrought by all this. Yes, AI is being used as an excuse by executives to lay
 people off and pad their margins. Yes, how foundation models were trained was
 unethical and probably also illegal. Yes, hustle bros are running around making
 bullshit claims. Yes, almost every party involved has a reason to make
 exaggerated claims about AI.
 
 All of that can be true, and it still doesn't matter. Your job as you knew it
 is gone.
 
 If you want to keep getting paid, you may have been told to, "move up the value
 chain." If that sounds ambiguous and unclear, I'll put it more plainly: figure
 out how your employer makes money and position your ass directly in-between the
 corporate bank account and your customers' credit card information. The longer
 the sentence needed to explain how your job makes money for your employer, the
 further down the value chain you are and the more worried you should be.
 There's no sugar-coating it: you're probably going to have to push yourself way
 outside your comfort zone.
 
 Get serious about learning and using these new tools. You will, like me, recoil
 at first. You will find, if you haven't already, that all these fancy AI tools
 are really bad at replacing you. That they fuck up constantly. Your new job
 starts by figuring out how to harness their capabilities anyway. You will
 gradually learn how to extract something that approximates how you would have
 done it yourself. Once you get over that hump, the job becomes figuring out how
 to scale it up. Three weeks ago I was a Cursor skeptic. Today, I'm utterly
 exhausted working with Claude Code, because I can't write new requirements fast
 enough to keep up with parallel workers across multiple worktrees.
 
 As for making yourself more valuable to your employer, I'm not telling you to
 demand a new job overnight. But if you look to your job description as a shield
 to protect you from work you don't want to do… stop. Make it the new minimum
 baseline of expectations you place on yourself. Go out of your way to surprise
 and delight others by taking on as much as you and your AI supercomputer can
 handle. Do so in the direction of however the business makes its money. Sit
 down and try to calculate the return on investment of your individual efforts,
 and don't slow down until that number far exceeds the fully-loaded cost you
 represent to your employer.
 
 Start living these values in how you show up at work. Nobody is going to
 appreciate it if you rudely push back on every feature request with, "oh yeah?
 How's it going to make us money?" But your manager will appreciate your asking
 how you can make a bigger impact. And they probably wouldn't be mad if you were
 to document and celebrate the ROI wins you notch along the way. Listen to what
 the company's leadership identifies as the most pressing challenges facing the
 business and don't be afraid to volunteer to be part of the solution.
 
 All of this would have been good career advice ten years ago. It's not rocket
 science, it's just deeply uncomfortable for a lot of people.
 
 [52]Good game, programmers
 
 Part of me is already mourning the end of the previous era. Some topics I spent
 years blogging, speaking, and building tools around are no longer relevant.
 Others that I've been harping on for years—obsessively-structured code
 organization and ruthlessly-consistent design patterns—are suddenly more
 valuable than ever. I'm still sorting out what's worth holding onto and what I
 should put back on the shelf.
 
 As a person, I really hate change. I wish things could just settle down and
 stand still for a while. Alas.
 
 If this post elicited strong feelings, please [53]e-mail me and I will respond.
 If you find my perspective on this stuff useful, you might enjoy my podcast, 
 [54]Breaking Change. 💜
 
 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
 
 Got a taste for hot, fresh takes?
 
 Then you're in luck, because you'll pay $0 for my 2¢ when you [55]subscribe to
 my work, whether via [56]RSS or your favorite [57]social network.
 
 I also have a monthly [58]newsletter where I write high-tempo,
 thought-provoking essays about life, in case that's more your speed:
 
 [59][                    ] [60][Sign up]
 And if you'd rather give your eyes a rest and your ears a workout, might I
 suggest my long-form solo podcast, [61]Breaking Change? Odd are, you haven't
 heard anything quite like it.
 
 © 2025 Justin Searls. All rights reserved.
 
 
 References:
 
 [1] https://justin.searls.co/
 [3] https://justin.searls.co/posts/
 [4] https://justin.searls.co/casts/
 [5] https://justin.searls.co/links/
 [6] https://justin.searls.co/shots/
 [7] https://justin.searls.co/takes/
 [8] https://justin.searls.co/tubes/
 [9] https://justin.searls.co/clips/
 [10] https://justin.searls.co/spots/
 [11] https://justin.searls.co/slops/
 [12] https://justin.searls.co/mails/
 [13] https://justin.searls.co/about/
 [14] https://justin.searls.co/search/
 [15] https://justin.searls.co/subscribe/
 [16] https://justin.searls.co/posts/
 [17] https://justin.searls.co/casts/
 [18] https://justin.searls.co/links/
 [19] https://justin.searls.co/shots/
 [20] https://justin.searls.co/takes/
 [21] https://justin.searls.co/tubes/
 [22] https://justin.searls.co/clips/
 [23] https://justin.searls.co/spots/
 [24] https://justin.searls.co/slops/
 [25] https://justin.searls.co/mails/
 [26] https://justin.searls.co/about/
 [27] https://justin.searls.co/search/
 [28] https://justin.searls.co/subscribe/
 [29] https://searls.co/
 [30] https://github.com/searls
 [31] https://youtube.com/@JustinSearls
 [32] https://linkedin.com/in/searls
 [33] https://instagram.com/searls
 [34] https://mastodon.social/@searls
 [35] https://twitter.com/searls
 [36] https://justin.searls.co/posts/full-breadth-developers/
 [37] https://posseparty.com/
 [38] https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code
 [39] https://justin.searls.co/posts/full-breadth-developers/#we-cant-all-be-winners
 [40] https://youtu.be/-9ZQVlgfEAc?si=bMjmWriVIFWtJmci&t=38
 [41] https://justin.searls.co/posts/full-breadth-developers/#google-screwed-up
 [42] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googleplex
 [43] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigtable
 [44] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Dean
 [45] https://www.itsiticecream.com/
 [46] https://justin.searls.co/posts/full-breadth-developers/#what-separates-people
 [47] https://justin.searls.co/posts/full-breadth-developers/#there-is-still-hope
 [48] https://justin.searls.co/posts/full-breadth-developers/#leaders-go-hire-a-good-agency
 [49] https://testdouble.com/
 [50] https://www.linkedin.com/in/testdoubletodd
 [51] https://justin.searls.co/posts/full-breadth-developers/#developers-congrats-on-your-new-job
 [52] https://justin.searls.co/posts/full-breadth-developers/#good-game-programmers
 [53] mailto:[email protected]
 [54] https://justin.searls.co/casts/breaking-change/
 [55] https://justin.searls.co/subscribe/
 [56] https://justin.searls.co/rss/
 [57] https://justin.searls.co/posse/
 [58] https://justin.searls.co/newsletter
 [61] https://justin.searls.co/casts/breaking-change/