As I write this, DevSG is now about 4 and half years old. Some time in 2018, I spoke to Michael Cheng (@coderkungfu) of whether we should have a telegram group for DevSG. He encouraged me to just set it up and see where it goes. In that time, I helped setup DesignSG and then ProductSG with Min Li, Brecht, Sid and Siti. The DevSG management was also handed over to Max and Robert. The main purpose for DevSG then was "A place where SG Engineers/Devs congregate from all levels to ask technical questions or to let down their hair to talk about tech or related topics."
Since the rise of conversational A.I., we've found technical questions being asked on DevSG, reddit, stackoverflow and many other places drop. People were asking these questions on ChatGPT, Gemini and so on. A.I. started writing code and built whole websites.
In DevSG, technical topics attracted slightly over 1000 messages. In the job topics, we found more than double messages. The community has over 2000 members, and did not get enough messages.
The community was dying because the questions were asked somewhere else.
What we did very well however was that we were able to get recruiters post job opportunities in these various groups and people were looking for jobs. The tech community in Singapore survived the COVID-19 storm only to step into an A.I. tsunami, and now more uncertainty beckons as the world teeters close to another war.
In almost every group, we found tech professionals in Singapore losing jobs. In just the past 6 months, ProductSG found that Product Managers employment dropped by 7%, from 74% to 67%.
So this morning, I spoke to the admins. It's time we changed how we manage the groups and re-focus our efforts to make the conversations more productive to get people re-employed as soon as we can.
With that, I introduced a few brand changes. Now, all 3 groups would be grouped under a TechSG banner. I bought the domain techsg.pro and redirected it to a Linktree page I setup to showcase all the 3 groups. They will still be managed respectively by the different admins, but this time in order for us to bring about change to the economic situation, we needed a way to work together.
The main idea that I have is to get the unemployed tech pros to form groups up to 3 people with different skill sets (1 dev, 1 designer, 1 pm). It's absolutely possible to do this solo with the help of A.I., but I encourage working together with the help of A.I. What I'm thinking of is to have each team build a simple product that they could either enhance their portfolio, or start up something. We'll get them to launch the product, and each person would record a screen cast about their product. The developer would do a code review, the designer would do a design critique, and the PM would do a product teardown. The idea should be, they should also demonstrate how they used A.I. in the discovery, design and development of their product. In this way, everyone gains real world practice. Not just sign up for a course and upskill. Real skills are born in the wild, and they turn into war stories.
Other than this, I've asked in some of the groups for volunteers to step up to do CV reviews and mentorship. I hope some of us will step up. Finally, we will publish the results of our economic status of our members soon. Some of the groups have reached 10% sample size, but we hope to get more people voting so we can reduce the margin of error. Once we publish the report, we will create the tools for tech pros to get the help they need more easily.
The mandate we started with, to learn from each other didn't change. What changed when A.I. blew up, was helping turn the communities we run to more social endeavours, where we were more interested in building resilience in the members of our communities to face uncertain futures. And the only way to do that is when we work together.