Engineers at our startup don't build features anymore

I like to point back at an ancient pattern in engineering: prototypes.

Prototypes are built to learn. They're not optimized nor efficient. They don't scale. They discover what needs to be built and are then thrown away. They should not be sold into production. Learning also includes getting user feedback, or finding out whether all the systems play together well.

Once the prototype is valid, pass it to an engineer to build it in properly and efficiently.

Another variation might be turning the engineers into ops. I did that early on at a startup. We built the whole delivery management system in 3 days - who ordered what, the state of it being delivered (packed/in delivery), informing buyers of product tracking number, asking them whether it was received in good condition, flagging things that have exceeded delivery time, etc. This was before AI and I built it so damn fast because it's a pain to handle this process on spreadsheet. The downside was that orders in those 3 days were delayed by 3 days.

But the big downside to engineers doing these is that you have to pay them engineer salaries. If it leads to a world where marketers can be given engineer salaries and engineers can be given marketing jobs, maybe we're in a better place?

I have never heard of this approach. It does sound interesting in theory, but I have a hard time seeing this work beyond the simplest of CRUD apps.

My initial concerns would be:

- Maintainability: the "duct-tape logic", as you put it, sounds like spaghetti code from hell. Making sense of a feature comprised of tons of chained third party calls will be a nightmare.

- Expressiveness: complex functionality may require complex code. I don't quite understand how you would write even medium complexity algorithms using this system.

- Reliability and performance: you are now entirely at the mercy of third party providers. This is often the case with SaaS products, but this seems like a particularly severe case. Each hop reduces performance as well, which may impact user experience (assuming we're talking about user-facing features).

- Quality: by moving business logic out of code, you're throwing out testability, so no more unit tests. I guess integration tests could still happen, but they're going to be slow, expensive, and involve someone writing the actual code - which, given the premise of product managers creating features, seems very unlikely.

This is not the new normal.

Engineering should be doing the engineering.

Product should be doing product.

DevOps should be providing infra.

If end users want to use a report generator or setup a notification rule that's one thing but duct taping features together never is sustainable.

Sounds quite similar to how running an internal dev shop in an enterprise environment used to be, before SaaS apps took over. "Power users" would write basic apps in SharePoint, Domino, Business Objects, or other such "low-code" platforms... even Salesforce in its early days. It worked fine for department-level CRUD/LOB apps. If anything they were doing grew and became important enough that their lack of engineering skills became a problem, us IT folks would come in, take over the app, refactor it, and make in an officially supported app. But we would have hundreds of half-baked apps out there that were good enough to handle the small stuff that small business groups needed. We focused on keeping the platforms up to date, running well, setting up various data they could query, etc.

Has anyone else tried this kind of setup?

Yes.

We don’t even have the budget to hire non-technical people for tech products. Everybody gotta code. We also avoid feature bloat.

We focus only on core features. If someone has an idea and can build it, they’re welcome to try. But most ideas won’t make it to production.

this only works for very early stage

The hardest part is a good authz system.

Code is data but now no data is code.

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