I just sent this note on Sunday, before Block then went ahead and laid off 40% of their employees, to my entire engineering team (~400 engineers). Luckily we didn't overhire during post covid like Block did so my take is more on increasing productivity and innovation with the amazing people we have. I am a believer that R&D spend is not going to go down. This is a race and a competition. We ain't spending less on R&D, we're going to make our R&D that much better so that our product will be that much better. Attached below is an excerpt from a note I sent to my engineering team this week, edited very slightly for public consumption. I’m sharing it in case it helps other R&D leaders navigating the same questions and also to share how we're all in at Dialpad:
Brian!! This is awesome and inspiring. I'm pumped up and I am in one of those startups with a greenfield projects!!
go go go. I'd add — It's time to rethink everything about the SDLC, not just how to make any individual step faster with agentic assistance.
Love to see it Petey! Forwarded this post to my engineering team tonight. This is the way. Hard to believe it was a year ago I was still debating with people over whether AI was useful in coding.
You are on point. Prompting should be adapted as higher level of programing language. As Java is to assembly.
Brian Peterson So inspiring!!! I particularly loved “… would rather lose being bold than barely win being boring”.
This is fantastic. I'm very excited for you, especially the unknown of what you will create! Woohoo 🙌
This is the way!
This is great and inspiring, Brian Peterson!
Smartest cofounder and CTO in the Valley:)
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1monothing to lose. not an engineer, but have to imagine your team was hyped up/ready to roll after this. 🏎️