This week I attended CTO Craft Con in London, a conference for engineering leaders to connect, learn, and make leadership feel a little less lonely. It isn’t just for CTOs, though, but also VPs, Heads of Engineering, future leaders, and even out of work Directors of Engineering like me.
After being unemployed (by choice!) for a week, I was looking for ways to keep my mind sharp and help me formalise some of my thoughts on hot topics such as the use of AI within Engineering organisations. Luckily, I spotted CTO Craft Con last week and snagged one of the last few tickets.
Themes & ideas
Of course, everyone pretty much had one thing on their minds at the moment: AI and how it fits into Engineering.
While the general consensus was that the number of Engineers in a team will shrink due to AI, I found it interesting to see which speakers (and their background) thought Engineering organisations would also shrink as a result, versus stay the same size.
Ethical and philosophical dilemmas aside, I’m all in with AI for Engineering, but I see no reason for it to mean the loss of jobs unless your leadership team dangerously missed the point. To be fair, that is unfortunately not that uncommon. At least until one of them tries vibe coding something into production and learns the reality of the situation.
But some speakers also confirmed my suspicion that vibe coding CEO’s might not be the real problem. It is actually us in Engineering leadership. The Engineering leaders who no longer have the time to code and now suddenly feel like we did at the beginning of our careers, giddy at all of the possibilities. I’m interested to see how that plays out.
It was also interesting to hear people talking about Product Engineers again. The concept of a Product Engineer isn’t anything new, but it’s increasingly looking like it will be a requirement to stay relevant if AI is going to be writing the majority of your code. That being said, I don’t think we should stigmatise Engineers who have valued other skills that will remain valuable.
When not talking about AI, many of the other talks had one thing in common, which AI cannot replicate: empathy. Whether that’s how you build trust with a team, handle failure, foster diverse perspectives, or navigate organisational politics, the human side of engineering leadership isn’t going anywhere.
Community
While I didn’t do as much networking as I hoped, those I did speak to were welcoming and could relate to my recent career decisions. I had hoped to talk to people about their journey to CTO, rather than my current situation, but “what do you do/where do you work?” came up early in small talk. To my surprise, most people were genuinely curious and often went out of their way to offer advice or connect me to someone they knew.
Summary
I’m still in two minds as to whether being out of a job at the moment is a good thing or a bad thing. The impact of AI on Engineering as a profession is significant, and it will either leave me playing catch-up or benefit me by waiting until the dust settles. Either way, CTO Craft Con was exactly what I needed to keep pushing myself. Plenty to think about, and I’ll likely be back again next year.