I have been the tech lead for two companies between 2015-2020.

The first company was a low margin business that sent home health care nurses to special needs kids and reimbursements came from Medicaid.

I was hired by the new director to modernize their aging in house Electronic Medical System built on FoxPro 1999 running on SQL Server 2000 - in 2016.

They had two “developers” who had been their for 10 and 20 years respectively who only knew Sql Server and FoxPro.

They also had some other software.

After doing some assessments of the situation, my report to the director and the CTO was that this company should not try to support a software development department and hire new people. Their margins are too small to be competitive or to keep people.

I suggested we outsource everything to other consulting companies - not staff augmentation. Let the consulting company do the entire implementation based on a Statement of Work.

The two “developers” role changed to “data analyst”. Even with AI I would have said the same thing today. Not every company needs to try to do software engineering. Every company does need to understand its data. [1]

The next company was a startup. I was adamant about blocking every developer who suggested any internal tool that we could get a well known SaaS to do or where AWS had a service that wasn’t firefly related to our product. To use the cliche - anything “that didn’t make the beer taste better”. My opinion wouldn’t have changed with AI.

The last thing I want is a bunch of bespoke internal vibe coded AI Slop that we have to support that is not in service to the product when we can find a reputable third party product.

And no that doesn’t mean I am going to trust some unknown one person SaaS company.

[1] 18 months into the job, I walked into the director’s office and told him, “let’s be honest, you all don’t need me anymore”. I purposefully put myself out of job. But boy did I have a story to tell during behavioral interviews at my next job at the startup and my interview for my job at BigTech after I left the startup.