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> I’ve been around long enough to see resistance to things like the Internet, version control, bug tracking systems, ORMs, automated tests, etc. Not every advan
by mjr00 1y ago
> I’ve been around long enough to see resistance to things like the Internet, version control, bug tracking systems, ORMs, automated tests, etc. Not every advancement is welcomed by everybody. An awful lot of people are very set in their ways and will refuse to change unless given a firm push.
There was never any widespread resistance to "the Internet", let's be real here.
In any case, adoption of all those things was bottom-up rather than top-down. CEOs were not mandating that tech teams use version control or ORMs or automated testing. It was tech leadership, with a lot of support from ICs in their department.
Tech people in particular are excited about trying new things. I never heard CEOs mandating top-down that teams use Kubernetes and adding people's Kubernetes usage into their performance reviews, yet Kubernetes spread like wildfire--to the point where many software companies which had no business using something as complicated as Kubernetes started using it. Same with other flavor-of-the-month tools and approaches like event sourcing, NoSQL/MongoDB, etc.
If anything, as a leader you need to slow down adoption of new technology rather than force it upon people. The idea that senior leadership needs to push to get AI used is highly unusual, to say the least.
- brummm 1y agoIsn't Amazon's APIs everywhere another example of just this that came right from the top? In some companies CEOs double as the tech lead, no?
- mjr00 1y agoThe API mandate notably specified what rather than how. "It doesn’t matter what technology [you] use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols — doesn’t matter." In some ways it's quite the opposite of CEO mandates to use AI, which specify how you must build things (using AI!) rather than what. The equivalent of the API mandate for AI would be if CEOs were demanding that all products include a "Summarize Content" button. Or that all code repositories contain a summary of their contents in a README. The use of AI to solve these problems would be an implementation detail.
- ryandrake 1y agoOr if CEOs were demanding that everything be written in Python. Programming language should also be an implementation detail, not something a CEO would worry about. Just like "using AI."
- dowager_dan99 1y agoto me this was more about guiding towards a desired outcome. An opinionated bet, but not overly prescriptive. "AI first" is saying do everything with AI and then hope you find some efficiencies, almost by accident.
- jimbokun 1y agoMy recollection is that AWS was extremely popular among developers very early on.
- skwirl 1y agoDo you just mean within Amazon? Because outside of Amazon, there was major resistance to AWS/cloud computing in general from older devs highly invested in the status quo. I have spent a significant amount of effort in my career fighting for cloud adoption.
- nitwit005 1y agoThe trendy stuff does get mandated from the top. It just gets mandated when it's already caught on elsewhere, and the CEO wonders why they aren't cool too.