Paige Niedringhaus
Staff software engineer with a frontend focus, previously a digital marketer, and author of The newline Guide to Modernizing an Enterprise React App.
“There's a lot more that people are trying to shove in as requirements than there ever was before. And it's because AI is making it possible time-wise, but people are still people at the end of the day and only have a finite amount of time and energy and focus. And that's not really being accounted for in this new era.”
Front-End Fire · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026
Niedringhaus says her company is hiring directors who are also expected to write code, hire, manage people and fill in when the team is lean. She is describing how job titles now carry more than they used to.
Transcript
Yeah. There's so many things I think of that feel antiquated now, but we still kind of do them because we go through the motions and change is very hard. Yeah. Like hiring process, redefining roles, coming up with all the logistics and bureaucratic changes around that is very hard and it takes time.
But I think for all that. Oh, sorry.
Well, kind of piggybacking off of that, I've seen, and you're probably seeing too, we're trying to hire for titles that previously did one thing, except we're now expecting them to do other things. Like we're trying to hire for directors at my company, but we don't want them to just be directors like old school directors. We want them to also be individual contributors who can jump in and write some code and jump out and do some hiring and do some management and some people stuff and then also jump back in and like help out when the team is lean. So it seems like there's a lot more that people are trying to shove in as requirements than there ever was before. And it's because AI is making it possible time-wise, but people are still people at the end of the day and only have a finite amount of time and energy and focus. And that's not really being accounted for in this new era.
Yeah. We're starting to learn again that code, the velocity of coding was never truly the problem in our systems. Like, you know, you can make a whole lot of features and give them a QA and they're just going to be swamped. You know, what is that going to happen? Yeah. But I think I too, am being an oldie, I'm optimistic. Like I love the idea that, you know, potentially I've been in so many companies and jobs where there's been some software, software that was created as like a spike or something like that, or like a one-off feature or something. And the team was super excited about it. They worked three months on it. They delivered it. And then they all went off and went to different places. And now it's unmaintained. Right. And I really think there's a lot of value there in AI, BISP being able to be like the lighthouse keeper that kind of keeps the light on and keeps the package JSON updated, all that kind of stuff. I never wanted to do that job. Nobody wants to do that job, but it would free up like a whole bunch of people get the linear ticket. Like, oh, you got to go and fix the thing again. I haven't worked on that in like 10 months. What? I don't even know. AI can fix that. I think AI at this point can fix that.
All right. Well, from that, speaking of things AI can fix, we have a lot of releases that we want to cover, a lot of bonus leggings. So why don't we get going?
Yeah.
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