Compact Class
Dynamics in IT
"How to deal with growth
and increased complexity
without increasing headcount."
My compact class vehicle
Founded in 1997
About 100 people
Offices in Berlin, Munich, Würzburg
2 Owners/CEO
"Chief Tailwind Officer"
10.03.20 | First Corona Case in a customer team |
---|---|
11.03.20 | Meeting "Ok, what should we do?" |
12.03.20 | Home-Office, Workflow and IT preparation |
13.03.20 | Everybody & everything is working remotely |
19.03.20 | Bits&Pretzels calls: VideoConference for 50.000 |
21.03.20 | First prototype works in benchmark, Go for B&P |
29.03.20 | Virtual Founders Breakfast with 35.000 Visitors |
01.04.20 | Vodafone, WHU, ... ask for help |
20.05.20 | Joint Venture Mingle.Cloud GmbH with Bits&Pretzels |
Change is easy
(if you are small)
✔ Agile for >20 years
✔ Still small
✔ A lot of startup experience
✔ Company is named after a ship
Some headwind
shouldn't
be an issue, right?
... right?
What is happening in Silicon Valley right now
Source: Doppelgaenger.io at OMR 2024
Decoupling growth
from employees
Artificial Intelligence (AI) will Be the Biggest Technological Shift We See in Our Lifetimes
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google
This next generation of AI will reshape every software category and every business, including our own.
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft
"They just want to sell their products"
AI can boost productivity at unprecedented speed.
First movers will be rewarded, and the global race is already on
without any question.
...
Twice the Invests of Europe
Goldman Sachs Study, a.k.a
"Who to fire next"
OpenAI/MIT on
"How much will your job change?"
Translators, Graphic Designers, Customer Support Agents
right now:
Programmer
Productivity *2
Just a phase: Assisted Work
https://www.coatue.com/blog/perspective/ai-the-coming-revolution-2023
Our AlphaGo
12/2023
March 23 | Decision to use autonomous agents |
April 23 | integration performance 5-10 times faster |
May 23 | One team is replaced by autonomous agents |
June 23 | Roadmap Goals 2023 implemented |
July 23 | Requirements Management moved to pull |
Aug 23 | Focus on innovation and new opportunities |
Actual Example
(if your process is specialized)
Case Study: E-Commerce, online shop integration into
Marketplaces, including ad-buying
-
5-10 times faster time to market
-
costs reduced by factor 10
-
Weekly meetings for ideas, experiments and prototypes
https://hups.com/blog/are-developers-needed-in-the-age-of-ai
🧍
Human
🤖
Product Owner
🤖
Architect
🤖
Developer
🤖
Testing Agent
🤖
Inline-
Documentor
🤖
Code-Quality Agent
🤖
Confluence
Intermediate Feedback and Observation
Interaction and Curation
AI Agent based
team structure
Coatue AI Full Report Nov 2023, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gQhYT7j6b2wJmrFZHNeQgTiWPyTsjOfX/view
🧍
Human
🤖
Requirements
🤖
Architect
🤖
Developer
🤖
Testing Agent
🤖
Inline-
Documentor
🤖
Code-Quality Agent
🤖
Confluence
🤖
BugFix-Agent
AI team structure,
revisited
Ephemeral Code
- Written by agents for agents
- When it stops working it will be regenerated
-
No need for human readability
- No need for documentation
It is not just less perks, ...
My education has been devalued.
My experience has been devalued.
My core tasks disappear.
My way of cooperation disappears.
"The agile transformation and corona
were just the in-game tutorial level."
"5-6 golden years."
Gold rush or
End of the World?
SCARF | Impact |
---|---|
Status | Your current status is 100% challenged |
Certainty | Future career prospects unclear |
Autonomy | Potential for a lot of autonomy |
Relatedness | Less social relatedness and interaction. |
Fairness | AI is unfair competition |
Individual effects
of AI in software
-
Fast skill acquisition matters
-
>20% time to learn
- "R&D mode for everyone"
- Safe to fail Environments
- Education is more important
Continuous Discovery: Learning Culture
- Fast discovery of opportunities
- Constant reinvention
- Ability to keep up
- Fast organizational learning
Adaptability wins over Competence
Growth / Entrepreneurial Mindset
- Opportunity orientation
- Tolerance for ambiguity and failure
- Creativeness and innovativeness
- Self confidence and optimism
- Initiative and responsibility
- Proven track record of events where people were rewarded for ...
- speaking up
- disagreeing openly
- innovation instead of success
- mistakes as learnings
Resilience & Psychological Safety
- This change is even for "life long learning" computer scientists too disruptive
- Loss of control, pride, expertise and familiarity
- Loss of narrative and trust
- Mental Health is a now a collective workplace responsibility
Mental Health
Fun Fact 2: it will be easier for well established companies like this one to find software developers :-)
Fun Fact 1: Autonomous Driving is regarded a much harder problem than replacing lawyers, managers or software developers.
Thank You!
Compact class dynamics in IT
By Johann-Peter Hartmann
Compact class dynamics in IT
The it sector, especially in the small and startup branch, was always known to be very fast and adaptable. But there are already quite a lot of signs that this is changing.
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