They don’t because of at-will employment. It’s just sort of the more moral, empathetic, right thing to do instead of leaving them with no income, no insurance, etc.
> The list of PE-owned retail chains that have filed for bankruptcy or liquidated includes Toys “R” Us, Payless ShoeSource, Sports Authority, Gymboree, rue21, The Limited, Barneys New York, and many others.
Once again, you can't lump all PE groups into one all cohorts. All of these companies were bought out by Large-cap PE which is notoriously predatory. They may have an overwhelming amount of the drypowder, but in terms of absolutely number of PE groups, there are far more operating in the middle and lower middle market who don't do this.
This sentiment is going exactly against the trend right now. AI coding is making technically minded product manager's MORE powerful not less. When/if coding just because your ability to accurately describe what you want to build, the people yielding this skill are the ones who understand customer requirements, not the opposite.
> Find your most socially competent engineer,
These usually get promoted to product management anyway, so this isn't a new thought.
> This sentiment is going exactly against the trend right now.
It's not.
Engineers are having more and more minutia and busy work taken off their plate, now done by AI.
That allows them to be heads up more often, more of their cognitive capacity is directed towards strategy, design, quality.
Meanwhile, users are building more and more of their own tools in house.
Why pay someone when you can vibe code a working solution in a few minutes?
So product managers are getting squeezed out by smarter people below them moving into their cognitive space and being better at solving the problems they were supposed to be solving.
And users moving into their space by taking low hanging fruit away from them.
No more month long discussions about where to put the chart and what color it should be.
The user made their own dashboard and it calls into the API. What API? The one the PM doesn't understand and a single engineer maintains with the help of several LLMs.
If it's simple and easy: the user took it over, if it's complex: it's going to the smartest person in the room. That has never been the PM.
In my average experience, without interviewing management teams - my observation is that the "smartest person in the room" is rarely the one deciding anything.
This also depends on your definition on "smartest".
> This also depends on your definition on "smartest".
Which the parent conveniently left out a definition of. I sort of ignored that implication and went straight to the point - which is it doesn't matter if the PM is the smartest or not. What matters is who makes the decisions and typically the PM does.
> Now that actually writing code has less value than prompting, and prompting is lower skill than writing code, in what world do you think that the pay will remain the same?
Don't you think people said the same thing C and Python? Isn't Python a lower skill than C for example?
People will pay for quality craftsmanship they can touch and enjoy and can afford and cannot do on their own - woodworking. Less so for quality code and apps because (as the Super Bowl ads showed us) anyone can create an app for their business and it's good enough. The days of high-paid coders is nearly gone. The senior and principals will hang on a little longer. Those that can adapt to business analyst mode and project manager will as well (CEOs have already told us this: adapt or get gone), but eventually even they will be outmoded because why buy a $8000 couch when I can buy one for $200 and build it myself?
Visa's processes ~$14T in transactions. At 0.2% thats roughly ~$28B in revenue (VISA posted ~$40B in revenue in 2025) versus 2% is $280B in revenue.
EDIT: The 2~3% you're talking is the payment processor fees which get divvy'd out to acquiring processors, acquiring banks, gateways, merchant processing, etc. etc.
The word miracle itself is hyperbolic in nature...it's meant to enchant and not to be used literal or concretely.
No need to be pedantic here, there is a large cohort of the population that seemingly never thought a robot would be able to write usable code ("inexplicable by natural or scientific laws") and now here we are seeing that happen ("hey this must be preternatural! there is no other explanation")
Honestly, the costs are so minimal and vary wildly relative to the cost of a developer that it's frankly not worth the discussion...yet. The reality is the standard deviation of cost is going to oscillate until there is a common agreed upon way to use these tools.
> Honestly, the costs are so minimal and vary wildly relative to the cost of a developer that it's frankly not worth the discussion...yet
Is it? Sure, the chatbot style maxes at $200/month. I consider that ... not unreasonable ... for a professional tool. It doesn't make me happy, but it's not horrific.
The article, however, explicitly pans the chatbot style and is extolling the API style being accessed constantly by agents, and that has no upper bound. Roughly $10-ish per Megatokens. $10-ish per 1K web searches. etc.
This doesn't sound "minimal" to me. This sounds like every single "task" I kick off is $10. And it can kick those tasks and costs off very quickly in an automated fashion. It doesn't take many of those tasks before I'm paying more than an actual full developer.
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