W02 - Differentiation

This week I read Xiang Shuai’s 2020 Wealth Report, themed “Divergence and Choice.” Looking back from 2021 at that turbulent year, using the word “divergence” to understand the evolution of today’s world feels especially apt. With the pandemic came the highest unemployment rates since World War II, and at the same time a frenzy in capital markets that multiplied the fortunes of top billionaires.

Something more personal: an important insight it gave me. The trend of “divergence” doesn’t only apply to the world we inhabit; it also deeply reflects the evolution of the engineering profession. The more creative the industry, the more severe the 80/20 divergence becomes.

Today’s R&D—especially at large tech companies—is shifting from traditional labor-intensive development toward systematic, innovation-driven platform development. This process resembles industrial production’s path from small-scale farming to assembly lines, to large-scale automation, and now to Foxconn-style unmanned factories. It’s hard to say whether the bar for programmers has risen or fallen, but the trend of divergence is clear. You either move up by reducing costs and increasing efficiency, or you accept a steady role as a “glue engineer.” “Glue engineer” is a term I whimsically coined: as the name implies, it’s someone who bonds platforms together, provides inputs to systems, or checks outputs. There will always be some tasks where machines are more expensive than humans to perform.

A concrete example: in front-end automation, several projects have already achieved notable results. Generating front-end code from design mockups for secondary development (D2C) has shown promising progress this year; from D2 presentations, Alibaba has made impressive gains. The productivity improvements in product and engineering are beginning to form a consensus. Alibaba’s D2C flagship, Imgcook, covered more than 90% of the modules for the 2020 Double 11 pages, with a usable output rate of 79.26%, delivering a 1.5–2x increase in throughput. They claim to have optimized the usable output rate to its limit for D2C, and are now working on P2C by introducing PRD logic as annotations to push toward a 100% usable output rate and fully replace manual work. Similarly, Deco—a D2C project incubated by Aotu Lab—also claims it will soon reach the level of a T3 engineer.

Gates once said, “An outstanding lathe operator earns several times the salary of an ordinary lathe operator, but an outstanding software engineer is worth 10,000 times an ordinary software engineer.”