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There is a HUGE amount of waste in big companies from: 1. People being blocked on others 2. Lack of focus (Upper management ordering lower ICs to build bridge

There is a HUGE amount of waste in big companies from: 1. People being blocked on others 2. Lack of focus (Upper management ordering lower ICs to build bridges to nowhere, stop midway, start another bridge to nowhere project) 3. A lot of work being purely performative 4. A large chunk of REAL work having negative returns (management telling people to do stuff you'd be better off not doing financially) 5. ICs having slack. AI doesn't need to do any of the real work. If it can increase efficiency ANYWHERE in this chain, it could have huge rewards. Most people are focusing on getting AI to do REAL work. But most "work" is waste or exceptionally low value, and I think more effort should go to AI reducing (instead of increasing) that.

cool_man_bob 1y ago
2. Has me damn ready to leave the industry if I’m not forced out.
dasil003 1y ago
I agree on the cause of waste, but I'm skeptical AI will move the needle on a solution. The longer I work in big companies the more I realize that things happen because someone has the strength of will combined with the right levers and incentives to make it happen despite organizational inertia. AI is potentially a powerful tool when judiciously used by those who understand what they're doing, but it can also be an amplifier of noise that filibusters real progress when hands-on leadership and good judgement is in short supply.
- WorldMaker 1y ago
  A lot of what I'm seeing feels like LLMs are "perfect" bridge-to-nowhere enablers. They are the ultimate Yes Men and give upper management an impression that nowhere not only needs plenty more bridges but that the bridges are cheap to build and easy to use and may already have been built with magic strong enough to attract leprechauns and their pots of gold to the end of the bridges. Too much of my career has been in the "Legacy Code" mines, and the LLMs seem like the worst pipeline for expanding "Legacy Code" faster than ever. Some of them may as well be called "Legacy Code-as-a-Service". I'm not worried that my "Legacy Code" skills are going to get out-of-date, I'm worried they are going to be in higher, uglier demand when some of these bridge-to-nowhere factories finally get shutdown or at least slowed down for some of the real maintenance costs to finally show up on companies' bottom lines.
huherto 1y ago
True. A lot of work done in big companies is waste. 6. A lot of unneeded complexity is added. Perhaps if we can only use AI to understand the wasted effort. Also, I rather have the ICs with some slack and time for clear thinking to address the big issues than always be busy on a mountain of work that goes now where.
- everforward 1y ago
  This is the big one for me. I recently needed to solve a fairly simple issue; in 3 days I had a solution in FastAPI and SQLAlchemy working with a React front end. Under 1,000 lines of code between the two. Of course we can’t spend $20/month on compute for that, so it’s now a web hook jankily jammed into another app that writes data to Jira with an Airflow job that triggers Databricks to run a notebook that uses Spark to write the data to S3. All that to replace a Lambda that would never have gotten to triple digit queries per day. No, instead we spent a month of engineering time to strap all this together and we probably spend 4x as much on compute because it is both slower and requires more resources. And now I’m getting complaints that it’s complicated and hard to troubleshoot. Yeah, of course, we’ve duct taped together products whose combined manuals are thousands of pages. Color me shocked it’s hard to use.
kulahan 1y ago
AI, to me, seems perfectly positioned to replace a lot of middle managers. Maybe not "every manager at X level", but if you've got some central tool that flows information up and down the chain, and can dig into data on your local network for backup/proof, you could make most middle managers much more efficient. Suddenly, one scrum master covering 4 teams is very feasible. They already know what they need to know, and their status has been reported long before they even started the meeting.
- rightbyte 1y ago
  The Scrum lords and managers might use LLMs to add beurocratic complexity instead of becoming efficient.
  - tart-lemonade 1y ago
    Alternatively, it could become more efficient at creating inefficiencies. Imagine pushing your vibe-coded changes triggering a CI hook that uses an LLM to create a TPS report per commit+pipeline in a merge request, which another LLM-based bureaucrat could use to decide whether the MR should be approved, generating its own TPS reports in turn which some middle manager could use their LLM to summarize. Think of all the shareholder value we could create by going all-in on AI!
    - Gigachad 1y ago
      The number of vibe coded PRs clogging up the review queues is going up. When you ask the submitter what some nonsense line of code is doing and what it's for, they have no idea. Slowing the whole process down.
      - derwiki 1y ago
        It definitely takes me more time to review PRs now, and I have more PRs to review. Agent created code seems “fine” but also seems like 30% more than is needed (total SWAG)
OGEnthusiast 1y ago
Most of these are solved by having better leadership, and unfortunately for job seekers, also solved by hiring fewer, higher-caliber people in the first place.
- thw_9a83c 1y ago
  > ...higher-caliber people in the first place. This is the idea. However, many of these "higher-caliber" people are going to burn out because productivity expectations, especially in software development, are rising insanely due to AI tools.
- HDThoreaun 1y ago
  Ok but finding good leadership is hard. Using an AI api is easy
antipaul 1y ago
You forgot “meetings” :)

cool_man_bob 1y ago

2. Has me damn ready to leave the industry if I’m not forced out.

dasil003 1y ago

I agree on the cause of waste, but I'm skeptical AI will move the needle on a solution. The longer I work in big companies the more I realize that things happen because someone has the strength of will combined with the right levers and incentives to make it happen despite organizational inertia. AI is potentially a powerful tool when judiciously used by those who understand what they're doing, but it can also be an amplifier of noise that filibusters real progress when hands-on leadership and good judgement is in short supply.

WorldMaker 1y ago
A lot of what I'm seeing feels like LLMs are "perfect" bridge-to-nowhere enablers. They are the ultimate Yes Men and give upper management an impression that nowhere not only needs plenty more bridges but that the bridges are cheap to build and easy to use and may already have been built with magic strong enough to attract leprechauns and their pots of gold to the end of the bridges. Too much of my career has been in the "Legacy Code" mines, and the LLMs seem like the worst pipeline for expanding "Legacy Code" faster than ever. Some of them may as well be called "Legacy Code-as-a-Service". I'm not worried that my "Legacy Code" skills are going to get out-of-date, I'm worried they are going to be in higher, uglier demand when some of these bridge-to-nowhere factories finally get shutdown or at least slowed down for some of the real maintenance costs to finally show up on companies' bottom lines.

huherto 1y ago

True. A lot of work done in big companies is waste. 6. A lot of unneeded complexity is added. Perhaps if we can only use AI to understand the wasted effort. Also, I rather have the ICs with some slack and time for clear thinking to address the big issues than always be busy on a mountain of work that goes now where.

everforward 1y ago
This is the big one for me. I recently needed to solve a fairly simple issue; in 3 days I had a solution in FastAPI and SQLAlchemy working with a React front end. Under 1,000 lines of code between the two. Of course we can’t spend $20/month on compute for that, so it’s now a web hook jankily jammed into another app that writes data to Jira with an Airflow job that triggers Databricks to run a notebook that uses Spark to write the data to S3. All that to replace a Lambda that would never have gotten to triple digit queries per day. No, instead we spent a month of engineering time to strap all this together and we probably spend 4x as much on compute because it is both slower and requires more resources. And now I’m getting complaints that it’s complicated and hard to troubleshoot. Yeah, of course, we’ve duct taped together products whose combined manuals are thousands of pages. Color me shocked it’s hard to use.

kulahan 1y ago

AI, to me, seems perfectly positioned to replace a lot of middle managers. Maybe not "every manager at X level", but if you've got some central tool that flows information up and down the chain, and can dig into data on your local network for backup/proof, you could make most middle managers much more efficient. Suddenly, one scrum master covering 4 teams is very feasible. They already know what they need to know, and their status has been reported long before they even started the meeting.

rightbyte 1y ago
The Scrum lords and managers might use LLMs to add beurocratic complexity instead of becoming efficient.
- tart-lemonade 1y ago
  Alternatively, it could become more efficient at creating inefficiencies. Imagine pushing your vibe-coded changes triggering a CI hook that uses an LLM to create a TPS report per commit+pipeline in a merge request, which another LLM-based bureaucrat could use to decide whether the MR should be approved, generating its own TPS reports in turn which some middle manager could use their LLM to summarize. Think of all the shareholder value we could create by going all-in on AI!
  - Gigachad 1y ago
    The number of vibe coded PRs clogging up the review queues is going up. When you ask the submitter what some nonsense line of code is doing and what it's for, they have no idea. Slowing the whole process down.
    - derwiki 1y ago
      It definitely takes me more time to review PRs now, and I have more PRs to review. Agent created code seems “fine” but also seems like 30% more than is needed (total SWAG)

OGEnthusiast 1y ago

Most of these are solved by having better leadership, and unfortunately for job seekers, also solved by hiring fewer, higher-caliber people in the first place.

thw_9a83c 1y ago
> ...higher-caliber people in the first place. This is the idea. However, many of these "higher-caliber" people are going to burn out because productivity expectations, especially in software development, are rising insanely due to AI tools.
HDThoreaun 1y ago
Ok but finding good leadership is hard. Using an AI api is easy

antipaul 1y ago

You forgot “meetings” :)