3 ms·

I feel this in my bones. Every day I'm getting challenged by leadership that we're not using AI enough, told that I should halve my estimates because "we'll use

I feel this in my bones. Every day I'm getting challenged by leadership that we're not using AI enough, told that I should halve my estimates because "we'll use AI", and being told that there's a new AI tool that I have to adopt because someone is tracking KPIs related to adoption and if our team doesn't adopt enough AI tools we're going to be fired to give more headcount to those that do. It's like the world has lost it's goddamn mind. AI is always being touted as the tool to replace the other guy's job. But in reality it only appears to do a good job because you don't understand the other guy's job. Management has an AI shaped hammer and they're hitting everything to see if it's a nail.

abletonlive 1y ago
Well when you have a hammer big enough everything is indeed a nail. Have you considered that instead of resisting you should do more to figure out why you're not getting the results that a lot of us are talking about? If nothing has changed for you in the past 2 years in your productivity the problem is most likely you. Don't you think it's your responsibility as an engineer to figure out what you're doing wrong when there are a lot of people telling you that it's a life changing tool? Or did you just assume that everybody was lying and you were doing everything correctly? Sorry to say it. It's an unpopular opinion but I think it's pretty much a harsh truth.
- oh_my_goodness 1y ago
  "Well when you have a hammer big enough everything is indeed a nail." I think this pretty much speaks for itself.
- malfist 1y ago
  Where did you see that I didn't use AI and that _nothing_ has changed for me?
- dpistole 1y ago
  > why you're not getting the results that a lot of us are talking about? IMO the problem occurs when "the results" are hyped up linkedIn posts not based in reality, AI is a boon but it's not lived up to the "IDEs are a thing of the past, youre all prompt engineers now" expectations that we hear from executives
- MeetingsBrowser 1y ago
  Kind of brutal, but if LLMs drastically improved your productivity I think it speaks more to your baseline productivity than the power of LLMs.
  - abletonlive 1y ago
    What's more likely A) all of this money being funneled into tech to build out trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure, a month over month increasing user base buying subscriptions for these llm services, every company buying seats for LLM because of the value that it provides - these people are wrong B) yappers on hackernews that claim they derive no productivity boost out of llms while showing absolutely nothing about their workflow or method when the interface is basically a chat box with no guardrails - these people are wrong Sorry I'm going to be it's B and you just suck at it
    - mplanchard 1y ago
      Regarding A, first time on the hype train? VC and silicon valley funding is often completely divorced from any real value, and is one of the last places I’d look for reliable signal on quality. Regardless, I’m sure it’s a little of A and a little of B, plus some of C) yappers on Hackernews who think that the majority of the work of software engineering is writing code, and who generally write code in sufficiently simple contexts for the LLMs to produce something equivalent to their normal output.
    - sumeno 1y ago
      Yeah, definitely A, same reason why all banking is done exclusively on the blockchain now and NFTs are the only way to get music
    - MeetingsBrowser 1y ago
      Just like the trillions poured into blockchain have revolutionized the internet. All the jaw dropping ICOs, million dollar NFTs, and cryptocurrency price surges. Surely that proves its value in our daily lives.
bluefirebrand 1y ago
> Management has an AI shaped hammer and they're hitting everything to see if it's a nail. I really think we need to figure out how to cut back on management so we can get back to the business of actually doing work
- yencabulator 1y ago
  Clearly the answer is to replace them with AI.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  Unions. What other way is there? https://www.epi.org/blog/americans-favor-labor-unions-over-big-business-now-more-than-ever/ https://www.epi.org/blog/americans-favor-labor-unions-over-b...
- ghaff 1y ago
  Coordinating teams, talking to stakeholders/customers (including spending a lot of time with them), having someone manage individual contributors at some level, etc. is work that can't just be ignored at a company of any size. The only way to avoid (a lot of) it is to be very small and that has its own set of issues.
  - lyu07282 1y ago
    I mean don't bite the boot that you can lick amirite
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    Sure, but do we really need four layers of people to do all of that? It's really common to see just layers and layers of management at companies that get big enough
    - ghaff 1y ago
      For a big enough company? Probably. Someone isn't going to effectively manage 100 or 500 people.
nyarlathotep_ 1y ago
> I feel this in my bones. Every day I'm getting challenged by leadership that we're not using AI enough, told that I should halve my estimates because "we'll use AI", and being told that there's a new AI tool that I have to adopt because someone is tracking KPIs related to adoption and if our team doesn't adopt enough AI tools we're going to be fired to give more headcount to those that do. This--all of this--seems exactly antithetical to computing/development/design/"engineering"/architecture/whatever-the-hell people call this profession as I understood it. Typically, I labored under the delusion that competent technical decision makers would integrate tooling or choose to use a language, "service", platform, whatever, if they saw benefits and if they could make a "case" for why something was the correct approach, i.e how it met some product's needs, addressed some shortcomings, made things more efficient. Like "here's my design doc, I chose $THING for caching for $REASON and $DATASTORE as it offers blah blah" "Please provide feedback and questions" This is totally alien to that approach. Ideally, "hey we're going to use CoPilot/other LLM thingy, let us know if it aids your workflow, give us some report in a month and we'll go from there to determine if we want to keep paying for it"
ivape 1y ago
But, management is the one to go soon. The other shoe is going to drop dear brother, this I promise you. Stay strong.
sanderjd 1y ago
Yeah, I mean, this is just the current phase of the hype cycle. It'll settle down. Some of the tools and techniques will have staying power, most won't. If you can figure out which is which and influence others, you'll be in good shape.
lamename 1y ago
> AI is always being touted as the tool to replace the other guy's job. But in reality it only appears to do a good job because you don't understand the other guy's job. This is a well considered point that not enough of us admit. Yes many jobs are rote or repetitive, but many more jobs, of all flavors, done well have subtleties that will be lost when things are automated. And no I do not think that some "80% done by AI is good enough" because errors propagate through a system (even if that system is a company or society), AND the people evaluating that "good enough" are not necessarily going to be those experienced in that same domain.

abletonlive 1y ago

Well when you have a hammer big enough everything is indeed a nail. Have you considered that instead of resisting you should do more to figure out why you're not getting the results that a lot of us are talking about? If nothing has changed for you in the past 2 years in your productivity the problem is most likely you. Don't you think it's your responsibility as an engineer to figure out what you're doing wrong when there are a lot of people telling you that it's a life changing tool? Or did you just assume that everybody was lying and you were doing everything correctly? Sorry to say it. It's an unpopular opinion but I think it's pretty much a harsh truth.

oh_my_goodness 1y ago
"Well when you have a hammer big enough everything is indeed a nail." I think this pretty much speaks for itself.
malfist 1y ago
Where did you see that I didn't use AI and that _nothing_ has changed for me?
dpistole 1y ago
> why you're not getting the results that a lot of us are talking about? IMO the problem occurs when "the results" are hyped up linkedIn posts not based in reality, AI is a boon but it's not lived up to the "IDEs are a thing of the past, youre all prompt engineers now" expectations that we hear from executives
MeetingsBrowser 1y ago
Kind of brutal, but if LLMs drastically improved your productivity I think it speaks more to your baseline productivity than the power of LLMs.
- abletonlive 1y ago
  What's more likely A) all of this money being funneled into tech to build out trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure, a month over month increasing user base buying subscriptions for these llm services, every company buying seats for LLM because of the value that it provides - these people are wrong B) yappers on hackernews that claim they derive no productivity boost out of llms while showing absolutely nothing about their workflow or method when the interface is basically a chat box with no guardrails - these people are wrong Sorry I'm going to be it's B and you just suck at it
  - mplanchard 1y ago
    Regarding A, first time on the hype train? VC and silicon valley funding is often completely divorced from any real value, and is one of the last places I’d look for reliable signal on quality. Regardless, I’m sure it’s a little of A and a little of B, plus some of C) yappers on Hackernews who think that the majority of the work of software engineering is writing code, and who generally write code in sufficiently simple contexts for the LLMs to produce something equivalent to their normal output.
  - sumeno 1y ago
    Yeah, definitely A, same reason why all banking is done exclusively on the blockchain now and NFTs are the only way to get music
  - MeetingsBrowser 1y ago
    Just like the trillions poured into blockchain have revolutionized the internet. All the jaw dropping ICOs, million dollar NFTs, and cryptocurrency price surges. Surely that proves its value in our daily lives.

bluefirebrand 1y ago

> Management has an AI shaped hammer and they're hitting everything to see if it's a nail. I really think we need to figure out how to cut back on management so we can get back to the business of actually doing work

yencabulator 1y ago
Clearly the answer is to replace them with AI.
toomuchtodo 1y ago
Unions. What other way is there? https://www.epi.org/blog/americans-favor-labor-unions-over-big-business-now-more-than-ever/ https://www.epi.org/blog/americans-favor-labor-unions-over-b...
ghaff 1y ago
Coordinating teams, talking to stakeholders/customers (including spending a lot of time with them), having someone manage individual contributors at some level, etc. is work that can't just be ignored at a company of any size. The only way to avoid (a lot of) it is to be very small and that has its own set of issues.
- lyu07282 1y ago
  I mean don't bite the boot that you can lick amirite
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  Sure, but do we really need four layers of people to do all of that? It's really common to see just layers and layers of management at companies that get big enough
  - ghaff 1y ago
    For a big enough company? Probably. Someone isn't going to effectively manage 100 or 500 people.

nyarlathotep_ 1y ago

> I feel this in my bones. Every day I'm getting challenged by leadership that we're not using AI enough, told that I should halve my estimates because "we'll use AI", and being told that there's a new AI tool that I have to adopt because someone is tracking KPIs related to adoption and if our team doesn't adopt enough AI tools we're going to be fired to give more headcount to those that do. This--all of this--seems exactly antithetical to computing/development/design/"engineering"/architecture/whatever-the-hell people call this profession as I understood it. Typically, I labored under the delusion that competent technical decision makers would integrate tooling or choose to use a language, "service", platform, whatever, if they saw benefits and if they could make a "case" for why something was the correct approach, i.e how it met some product's needs, addressed some shortcomings, made things more efficient. Like "here's my design doc, I chose $THING for caching for $REASON and $DATASTORE as it offers blah blah" "Please provide feedback and questions" This is totally alien to that approach. Ideally, "hey we're going to use CoPilot/other LLM thingy, let us know if it aids your workflow, give us some report in a month and we'll go from there to determine if we want to keep paying for it"

ivape 1y ago

But, management is the one to go soon. The other shoe is going to drop dear brother, this I promise you. Stay strong.

sanderjd 1y ago

Yeah, I mean, this is just the current phase of the hype cycle. It'll settle down. Some of the tools and techniques will have staying power, most won't. If you can figure out which is which and influence others, you'll be in good shape.

lamename 1y ago

> AI is always being touted as the tool to replace the other guy's job. But in reality it only appears to do a good job because you don't understand the other guy's job. This is a well considered point that not enough of us admit. Yes many jobs are rote or repetitive, but many more jobs, of all flavors, done well have subtleties that will be lost when things are automated. And no I do not think that some "80% done by AI is good enough" because errors propagate through a system (even if that system is a company or society), AND the people evaluating that "good enough" are not necessarily going to be those experienced in that same domain.