I’m turning into a Project Manager.
Over the course of my career in tech, my role has evolved and changed. My first job in the industry was as a NOC engineer for a CDN company, NetDNA, back in 2012. Learning how to manage and build servers, working in datacenters, building out monitoring, it was a good introduction.
A good friend of mine (who actually got me the NOC job & was also my roommate at the time) and myself learned and took over the networking side of the things. Getting the company its own AS Number, managing BGP sessions with upstream providers and peering requests. Still working in the racks, but also configuring Cisco Routers & Arista Switches. This was the L1-L3 phase of my career. A fun one indeed that included traveling to countries around the world, setting up a tiny little portion of the greater internet.
After being part of my first acquisition, and my subsequent first layoff, I shifted to DevOps & Cloud. I would make this the new home for my career. Kubernetes, AWS, Helm, blah... blah... blah... All the usual stuff. Then AI rolls around...
I still enjoy doing the infrastructure and devops stuff, though it has started to take a different shape. Like everyone else, over the last couple years I’ve moved away from writing my own code, template files, and configurations.
It started subtly... Auto-fill was getting better. First auto-completing a line, then a function, then the entire file. Eventually the whole repo. Now I'm just giving general direction and requirements and watching things get completed faster than I ever could. It’s kind of weird to look back on.
So the next evolution of my career is happening right now. This time it’s not due to a job change, or a pivot within the company. It just seems to be happening organically because of how good AI has gotten at code and DevOps.
I find myself turning into a project manager.
I’m running an OpenProject (open source JIRA alternative) instance on my NAS to track the stuff I’m (well, my agents. How do you phrase it? Are you still building things?) actually working on. I even slopped together an OpenProject Agent Engine that polls for new tasks I’ve tagged an Agent in and kicks the agent off and manages the workflow. Handles everything from development and code review, to merge and releases.
The agent engine actually turned out pretty nifty. Obviously built with AI
So I’m not even working in my terminal anymore. I’m literally just creating tickets and watching status updates. Not many years ago, I was the snarky engineer mocking and memeing about these people.
Fitting.
I still make pretty detailed tickets and try to help to lead agents in the direction I think is the right path, but that's probably not even going to be necessary as they get better.
It is an odd time.
This blog post was handwritten in ink, then transcribed by AI
