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I work for a large tech company, and our CTO has just released a memo with a new rubric for SDEs that includes "AI Fluency". We also have a dashboard with AI Ad

I work for a large tech company, and our CTO has just released a memo with a new rubric for SDEs that includes "AI Fluency". We also have a dashboard with AI Adoption per developer, that is being used to surveil the teams lagging on the topic. All very depressing. A friend of mine is an engineer of a large pre-IPO startup, and their VP of AI just demanded every single employee needs to create an agent using Claude. There were 9700 created in a month or so. Imagine the amount of tech debt, security holes, and business logic mistakes this orgy of agents will cause and will have to be fixed in the future. edit: typo

coldpie 8mo ago
I'm so glad I'm nearer the end of my career than the beginning. Can't wait to leave this industry. I've got a stock cliff coming up late this summer, probably a good time to get out and find something better to do with my life.
- actionfromafar 8mo ago
  Then, you might even tinker with some AI stuff on your own terms, you never know. :) Or install a landline (over 5G because that's how you do it nowadays) and call it a day. :-)
  - coldpie 8mo ago
    > Then, you might even tinker with some AI stuff on your own terms, you never know Indeed! I'm not like dead set against them. I just find they're kind of a bad tool for most jobs I've used them for and I'm just so goddamn tired of hearing about how revolutionary this kinda-bad tool is.
    - blindriver 8mo ago
      If you're finding their a bad tool for most jobs you're using them for, you're probably being closed minded and using it wrong. The trick with AI these days is to ask it to do something that you think is impossible and it will usually do a pretty decent job at it, or at least close enough for you to pick up or to guide it further. I was a huge AI skeptic but since Jan 2025, I have been watching AI take my job away from me, so I adapted and am using AI now to accelerate my productivity. I'm in my 50s and have been programming for 30 years so I've seen both sides and there is nothing that is going to stop it.
      - coldpie 8mo ago
        I try them a few times a month, always to underwhelming results. They're always wrong. Maybe I'll find an interesting thing to do with them some day, I dunno. It's just not a fun or interesting tool for me to learn to use so I'm not motivated. I like deterministic & understandable systems that always function correctly; "smart" has always been a negative term in marketing to me. I'm more motivated to learn to drive a city bus or walk a postal route or something, so that's the direction I'm headed in.
      - toraway 8mo ago
        Okay, I use OpenCode/Codex/Gemini daily (recently cancelled my personal CC plan given GPT 5.2/3 High/XHigh being a better value, but still have access to Opus 4.5/6 at work) and have found it can provide value in certain parts of my job and personal projects. But the evangelist insistence that it literally cannot be a net negative in any contexts/workflows is just exhausting to read and is a massive turn-off. Or that others may simply not benefit the same way with that different work style. Like I said, I feel like I get net value out of it, but if my work patterns were scientifically studied and it turned out it wasn't actually a time saver on the whole I wouldn't be that surprised. There are times where after knocking request after request out of the park, I spend hours wrangling some dumb failures or run into spaghetti code from the last "successful" session that massively slow down new development or require painful refactoring and start to question whether this is a sustainable, true net multiplier in the long term. Plus the constant time investment of learning and maintaining new tools/rules/hooks/etc that should be counted too. But, I enjoy the work style personally so stick with it. I just find FOMO/hype inherently off-putting and don't understand why random people feel they can confidently say that some random other person they don't know anything about is doing it wrong or will be "left behind" by not chasing constantly changing SOTA/best practices.
      - n4r9 8mo ago
        Maybe not everyone finds them as useful for their everyday tasks as you do? Software development is quite a broad term.
      - blibble 8mo ago
        > you're probably being closed minded and using it wrong > I was a huge AI skeptic but since Jan 2025, > I'm in my 50s and have been programming for 30 years > there is nothing that is going to stop it. I need to turn this into one of those checklists like the anti-spam one and just paste it every time we get the same 5 or 6 clichés
ej88 8mo ago
1. execs likely have spend commits and pressure from the board about their 'ai strategy', what better way to show we're making progress than stamping on some kpis like # of agents created? 2. most ai adoption is personal. people use whichever tools work for their role (cc / codex / cursor / copilot (jk, nobody should be using copilot) 3. there is some subset of ai detractors that refuse to use the tools for whatever reason the metrics pushed by 1) rarely account for 2) and dont really serve 3) i work at one of the 'hot' ai companies and there is no mandate to use ai... everyone is trusted to use whichever tools they pick responsibly which is how it should be imo
- Octoth0rpe 8mo ago
  > (cc / codex / cursor / copilot (jk, nobody should be using copilot) I seem to be using claude (sonnet/opus/haiku, not cc though), and have the option of using codex via my copilot account. Is there some advantage to using codex/claude more directly/not through copilot?
  - ej88 8mo ago
    copilot is a much worse harness, although recently improvements in base model intelligence have helped it a bit if you can, use cc or codex through your ide instead, oai and anthropic train on their own harnesses, you get better performance
    - Octoth0rpe 8mo ago
      I'm currently using opus in Zed via copilot (I think that's what you're recommending?) and tbh couldn't be happier. It's hard to imagine what better would look like.
      - ej88 8mo ago
        oh, i meant copilot as in microsoft copilot in vscode. i havent used zed so can't speak to it but if it works for you it works!
- 8mo ago
palmotea 8mo ago
> We also have a dashboard with AI Adoption per developer, that is being used to surveil the teams lagging on the topic. All very depressing. Enforced use means one of two things: 1. The tool sucks, so few will use it unless forced. 2. Use of the tool is against your interests as a worker, so you must be coerced to fuck yourself over (unless you're a software engineer, in which case you may excitedly agree to fuck yourself over willingly, because you're not as smart as you think you are).
- SketchySeaBeast 8mo ago
  3. They discovered it's something they can measure so they made a metric about it.
  - steveBK123 8mo ago
    4. They heard from their golf buddy who heard from his racquetball buddy that this other CTO at this other shop is saving lots of money with AI
    - upupupandaway 8mo ago
      I know you're speaking half in jest but the C-suite of my area actually used a tweet by an OpenAI executive as the agenda for an AI brainstorm meeting.
      - steveBK123 8mo ago
        I am at less than half jest here. I have friends who are finance industry CTOs, and they have described it to me in realtime as CEO FOMO they need to manage .. Remember tech is sort of an odd duck in how open people are about things and the amount of cross pollination. Many industries are far more secretive and so whatever people are hearing about competitors AI usage is 4th hand hearsay telephone game. edit: noteworthy someone sent yet another firmwide email about AI today which was just linking to some twitter thread by a VC AI booster thinkbro
      - 8mo ago
SketchySeaBeast 8mo ago
This feels like a construction company demanding that everyone, from drywaller to admin assistant, go out and buy a drill.
- steveBK123 8mo ago
  This is literally happening in non-tech finance firms where people in non-tech roles are being judged on their AI adoption.
- MattGaiser 8mo ago
  Some companies swear by this. CP Rail is notorious for training everyone to drive a train.
  - SketchySeaBeast 8mo ago
    That kind of makes sense philosophically if your business is trains, but I don't think that their business was AI agents. Although given they have a VP of AI, I have no idea. What a crazy title.
- munk-a 8mo ago
  Can I modify your example to: Demanding everyone, from drywaller to admin assistant go out and buy a purple colored drill, never use any other colored drill, and use their purple drill for at least fifty minutes a day (to be confirmed by measuring battery charge).
  - SketchySeaBeast 8mo ago
    Better, yeah.
    - munk-a 8mo ago
      Awesome, with that new policy we'll be sure to justify my purple drill evangelist role by showing that our average employee is dependent on purple drills for at least 1/8th of their workload. Who knew that our employees would so quickly embrace the new technology. Now the board can't cut me!
steveBK123 8mo ago
This is absolutely the norm across corporate America right now. Chief AI Czars enforcing AI usage metrics with mandatory AI training for anyone that isn't complying. People with roles nowhere near software/tech/data are being asked about their AI usage in their self-assessment/annual review process, etc. It's deeply fascinating psychologically and I'm not sure where this ends. I've never seen any tech theme pushed top down so hard in 20+ years working. The closest was the early 00s offshoring boom before it peaked and was rationalized/rolled back to some degree. The common theme is C-suite thinks it will save money and their competitors already figured out out, so they are FOMOing at the mouth about catching up on the savings.
- collingreen 8mo ago
  > FOMOing at the mouth This is a great line - evocative, funny, and a bit o wordplay. I think you might be right about the behavior here; I haven't been able to otherwise understand the absolute forcing through of "use AI!!" by people and upon people with only a hazy notion of why and how. I suppose it's some version of nuclear deterrence or Pascal's wager -- if AI isn't a magic bullet then no big loss but if it is they can't afford not to be the first one to fire it.
  - steveBK123 8mo ago
    I think one thing that I noticed this week in terms of "eye of the beholder" view on AI was the Goldman press release. Apparently Anthropic has been in there for 6 months helping them with some back office streamlining and the outcome of that so far has been.. a press release announcing that they are working on it! A cynic might also ask if this is simply PR for Goldman to get Anthropic's IPO mandate. I think people underestimate the size/scope/complexity of big company tech stacks and what any sort of AI transformation may actually take. It may turn into another cottage industry like big data / cloud / whatever adoption where "forward deployed / customer success engineers" are collocated by the 1000s for years at a time in order to move the needle.
- hnthrow0287345 8mo ago
  At least they are consistently applying this to all roles instead of only making tech roles suffer through it like they do with interview processes
Rover222 8mo ago
I mean get onboard or fall behind, that's the situation we're all in. It can also be exciting. If you think it's still just slop and errors when managed by experienced devs, you're already behind.
- collingreen 8mo ago
  The obvious pulling ahead from early AI adopters/forcers will happen any moment now... any moment
  - Rover222 8mo ago
    It's not obvious because the multiplier effect of AI is being used to reduce head count more than to drastically increase net output of a team. Which yeah is scary, but my point is if you don't see any multiplier effect from using that latest AI tools, you are either doing a bad job of using them (or don't have the budget, can't blame anyone for that), or are maybe in some obscure niche coding world?
    - emp17344 8mo ago
      >the multiplier effect of AI is being used to reduce head count more than to drastically increase net output of a team This simply isn’t how economics works. There is always additional demand, especially in the software space. Every other productivity-boosting technology has resulted in an increase in jobs, not a decrease.
      - Rover222 8mo ago
        Well that's certainly and obviously how it's working at the moment in the software industry. We're in the transition between traditional coding jobs and agentic managers (or something like that)
        reverius42 8mo ago
        It's kind of inexplicable though, unless AI being the reason for layoffs is a lie, because it's true that historically there has always been way more demand for software than people who can make it (hence the decades of rising salaries relative to other professions). It seems like too much of a coincidence that the AI got good enough to replace humans at exactly the same time that humans in general don't need as much software made.
mdavid626 8mo ago
Reminds me of those little gadgets, which move your mouse, so that you show up online on Slack. I’d just add a cron job to burn some tokens.
- munk-a 8mo ago
  That sounds like a lot of work - maybe you could burn some tokens asking AI to write a cron to burn some tokens for you?
  - otabdeveloper4 8mo ago
    But then you'd have to code review that crap and write test harnesses and other shit. Sounds like a lot more work tbh.
    - munk-a 8mo ago
      Assign the PR to the offshore team and then just forget about it when they never end up reviewing it?
- ron_woods 8mo ago
  Years ago I remember talking to someone who purchased a "mouseJiggler" for that very purpose. That was literally what he called it. Problem for him was we turned it into a meme, and he immediately regretted telling us.
monkaiju 8mo ago
That sounds awful... Thankfully our CTO is quite supportive of our teams anti-AI policy and is even supportive of posting our LLM-ban on job postings. I honestly dont think that I could operate in an environment with any sort of AI mandate...
- chung8123 8mo ago
  That seems just as bad but the opposite direction.
  - monkaiju 8mo ago
    I guess time will tell, but so far none of the AI-output we've seen is any good. We dont like to adopt technologies based on hype, so if it proves itself it will be adopted, but until then its a toy.
gtowey 8mo ago
Leadership loves AI more than anything they have ever loved before. It's because for them, the fawning, sycophantic, ego-stroking agents who cheerfully champions every dumb idea they have and helps them realize it with spectacular averageness, is EXACTLY what they've always expected to receive from their employees.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
SkyPuncher 8mo ago
I'm so happy I work at a sane company. We're pushing the limits of AI and everyone sees the value, but we also see the danger/risks. I'm at the forefront of agentic tooling use, but also know that I'm working in uncharted territory. I have the skills to use it safely and securely, but not everyone does.
Tangurena2 8mo ago
One small company I worked for had a similar mandate come from their large clients - since offshoring was fashionable in business journals, they must offshore the next project for those clients. That company spent more time reworking the offshored software than if we had done the development in-house. This is just another business fad, but because the execs want to seem to be cool and seem to be doing what their "peers" claim to be doing, well, then by gosh, all of the workers have to do the same fad.

coldpie 8mo ago

I'm so glad I'm nearer the end of my career than the beginning. Can't wait to leave this industry. I've got a stock cliff coming up late this summer, probably a good time to get out and find something better to do with my life.

actionfromafar 8mo ago
Then, you might even tinker with some AI stuff on your own terms, you never know. :) Or install a landline (over 5G because that's how you do it nowadays) and call it a day. :-)
- coldpie 8mo ago
  > Then, you might even tinker with some AI stuff on your own terms, you never know Indeed! I'm not like dead set against them. I just find they're kind of a bad tool for most jobs I've used them for and I'm just so goddamn tired of hearing about how revolutionary this kinda-bad tool is.
  - blindriver 8mo ago
    If you're finding their a bad tool for most jobs you're using them for, you're probably being closed minded and using it wrong. The trick with AI these days is to ask it to do something that you think is impossible and it will usually do a pretty decent job at it, or at least close enough for you to pick up or to guide it further. I was a huge AI skeptic but since Jan 2025, I have been watching AI take my job away from me, so I adapted and am using AI now to accelerate my productivity. I'm in my 50s and have been programming for 30 years so I've seen both sides and there is nothing that is going to stop it.
    - coldpie 8mo ago
      I try them a few times a month, always to underwhelming results. They're always wrong. Maybe I'll find an interesting thing to do with them some day, I dunno. It's just not a fun or interesting tool for me to learn to use so I'm not motivated. I like deterministic & understandable systems that always function correctly; "smart" has always been a negative term in marketing to me. I'm more motivated to learn to drive a city bus or walk a postal route or something, so that's the direction I'm headed in.
    - toraway 8mo ago
      Okay, I use OpenCode/Codex/Gemini daily (recently cancelled my personal CC plan given GPT 5.2/3 High/XHigh being a better value, but still have access to Opus 4.5/6 at work) and have found it can provide value in certain parts of my job and personal projects. But the evangelist insistence that it literally cannot be a net negative in any contexts/workflows is just exhausting to read and is a massive turn-off. Or that others may simply not benefit the same way with that different work style. Like I said, I feel like I get net value out of it, but if my work patterns were scientifically studied and it turned out it wasn't actually a time saver on the whole I wouldn't be that surprised. There are times where after knocking request after request out of the park, I spend hours wrangling some dumb failures or run into spaghetti code from the last "successful" session that massively slow down new development or require painful refactoring and start to question whether this is a sustainable, true net multiplier in the long term. Plus the constant time investment of learning and maintaining new tools/rules/hooks/etc that should be counted too. But, I enjoy the work style personally so stick with it. I just find FOMO/hype inherently off-putting and don't understand why random people feel they can confidently say that some random other person they don't know anything about is doing it wrong or will be "left behind" by not chasing constantly changing SOTA/best practices.
    - n4r9 8mo ago
      Maybe not everyone finds them as useful for their everyday tasks as you do? Software development is quite a broad term.
    - blibble 8mo ago
      > you're probably being closed minded and using it wrong > I was a huge AI skeptic but since Jan 2025, > I'm in my 50s and have been programming for 30 years > there is nothing that is going to stop it. I need to turn this into one of those checklists like the anti-spam one and just paste it every time we get the same 5 or 6 clichés

ej88 8mo ago

1. execs likely have spend commits and pressure from the board about their 'ai strategy', what better way to show we're making progress than stamping on some kpis like # of agents created? 2. most ai adoption is personal. people use whichever tools work for their role (cc / codex / cursor / copilot (jk, nobody should be using copilot) 3. there is some subset of ai detractors that refuse to use the tools for whatever reason the metrics pushed by 1) rarely account for 2) and dont really serve 3) i work at one of the 'hot' ai companies and there is no mandate to use ai... everyone is trusted to use whichever tools they pick responsibly which is how it should be imo

Octoth0rpe 8mo ago
> (cc / codex / cursor / copilot (jk, nobody should be using copilot) I seem to be using claude (sonnet/opus/haiku, not cc though), and have the option of using codex via my copilot account. Is there some advantage to using codex/claude more directly/not through copilot?
- ej88 8mo ago
  copilot is a much worse harness, although recently improvements in base model intelligence have helped it a bit if you can, use cc or codex through your ide instead, oai and anthropic train on their own harnesses, you get better performance
  - Octoth0rpe 8mo ago
    I'm currently using opus in Zed via copilot (I think that's what you're recommending?) and tbh couldn't be happier. It's hard to imagine what better would look like.
    - ej88 8mo ago
      oh, i meant copilot as in microsoft copilot in vscode. i havent used zed so can't speak to it but if it works for you it works!
8mo ago

palmotea 8mo ago

> We also have a dashboard with AI Adoption per developer, that is being used to surveil the teams lagging on the topic. All very depressing. Enforced use means one of two things: 1. The tool sucks, so few will use it unless forced. 2. Use of the tool is against your interests as a worker, so you must be coerced to fuck yourself over (unless you're a software engineer, in which case you may excitedly agree to fuck yourself over willingly, because you're not as smart as you think you are).

SketchySeaBeast 8mo ago
3. They discovered it's something they can measure so they made a metric about it.
- steveBK123 8mo ago
  4. They heard from their golf buddy who heard from his racquetball buddy that this other CTO at this other shop is saving lots of money with AI
  - upupupandaway 8mo ago
    I know you're speaking half in jest but the C-suite of my area actually used a tweet by an OpenAI executive as the agenda for an AI brainstorm meeting.
    - steveBK123 8mo ago
      I am at less than half jest here. I have friends who are finance industry CTOs, and they have described it to me in realtime as CEO FOMO they need to manage .. Remember tech is sort of an odd duck in how open people are about things and the amount of cross pollination. Many industries are far more secretive and so whatever people are hearing about competitors AI usage is 4th hand hearsay telephone game. edit: noteworthy someone sent yet another firmwide email about AI today which was just linking to some twitter thread by a VC AI booster thinkbro
    - 8mo ago

SketchySeaBeast 8mo ago

This feels like a construction company demanding that everyone, from drywaller to admin assistant, go out and buy a drill.

steveBK123 8mo ago
This is literally happening in non-tech finance firms where people in non-tech roles are being judged on their AI adoption.
MattGaiser 8mo ago
Some companies swear by this. CP Rail is notorious for training everyone to drive a train.
- SketchySeaBeast 8mo ago
  That kind of makes sense philosophically if your business is trains, but I don't think that their business was AI agents. Although given they have a VP of AI, I have no idea. What a crazy title.
munk-a 8mo ago
Can I modify your example to: Demanding everyone, from drywaller to admin assistant go out and buy a purple colored drill, never use any other colored drill, and use their purple drill for at least fifty minutes a day (to be confirmed by measuring battery charge).
- SketchySeaBeast 8mo ago
  Better, yeah.
  - munk-a 8mo ago
    Awesome, with that new policy we'll be sure to justify my purple drill evangelist role by showing that our average employee is dependent on purple drills for at least 1/8th of their workload. Who knew that our employees would so quickly embrace the new technology. Now the board can't cut me!

steveBK123 8mo ago

This is absolutely the norm across corporate America right now. Chief AI Czars enforcing AI usage metrics with mandatory AI training for anyone that isn't complying. People with roles nowhere near software/tech/data are being asked about their AI usage in their self-assessment/annual review process, etc. It's deeply fascinating psychologically and I'm not sure where this ends. I've never seen any tech theme pushed top down so hard in 20+ years working. The closest was the early 00s offshoring boom before it peaked and was rationalized/rolled back to some degree. The common theme is C-suite thinks it will save money and their competitors already figured out out, so they are FOMOing at the mouth about catching up on the savings.

collingreen 8mo ago
> FOMOing at the mouth This is a great line - evocative, funny, and a bit o wordplay. I think you might be right about the behavior here; I haven't been able to otherwise understand the absolute forcing through of "use AI!!" by people and upon people with only a hazy notion of why and how. I suppose it's some version of nuclear deterrence or Pascal's wager -- if AI isn't a magic bullet then no big loss but if it is they can't afford not to be the first one to fire it.
- steveBK123 8mo ago
  I think one thing that I noticed this week in terms of "eye of the beholder" view on AI was the Goldman press release. Apparently Anthropic has been in there for 6 months helping them with some back office streamlining and the outcome of that so far has been.. a press release announcing that they are working on it! A cynic might also ask if this is simply PR for Goldman to get Anthropic's IPO mandate. I think people underestimate the size/scope/complexity of big company tech stacks and what any sort of AI transformation may actually take. It may turn into another cottage industry like big data / cloud / whatever adoption where "forward deployed / customer success engineers" are collocated by the 1000s for years at a time in order to move the needle.
hnthrow0287345 8mo ago
At least they are consistently applying this to all roles instead of only making tech roles suffer through it like they do with interview processes

Rover222 8mo ago

I mean get onboard or fall behind, that's the situation we're all in. It can also be exciting. If you think it's still just slop and errors when managed by experienced devs, you're already behind.

collingreen 8mo ago
The obvious pulling ahead from early AI adopters/forcers will happen any moment now... any moment
- Rover222 8mo ago
  It's not obvious because the multiplier effect of AI is being used to reduce head count more than to drastically increase net output of a team. Which yeah is scary, but my point is if you don't see any multiplier effect from using that latest AI tools, you are either doing a bad job of using them (or don't have the budget, can't blame anyone for that), or are maybe in some obscure niche coding world?
  - emp17344 8mo ago
    >the multiplier effect of AI is being used to reduce head count more than to drastically increase net output of a team This simply isn’t how economics works. There is always additional demand, especially in the software space. Every other productivity-boosting technology has resulted in an increase in jobs, not a decrease.
    - Rover222 8mo ago
      Well that's certainly and obviously how it's working at the moment in the software industry. We're in the transition between traditional coding jobs and agentic managers (or something like that)
      - reverius42 8mo ago
        It's kind of inexplicable though, unless AI being the reason for layoffs is a lie, because it's true that historically there has always been way more demand for software than people who can make it (hence the decades of rising salaries relative to other professions). It seems like too much of a coincidence that the AI got good enough to replace humans at exactly the same time that humans in general don't need as much software made.

mdavid626 8mo ago

Reminds me of those little gadgets, which move your mouse, so that you show up online on Slack. I’d just add a cron job to burn some tokens.

munk-a 8mo ago
That sounds like a lot of work - maybe you could burn some tokens asking AI to write a cron to burn some tokens for you?
- otabdeveloper4 8mo ago
  But then you'd have to code review that crap and write test harnesses and other shit. Sounds like a lot more work tbh.
  - munk-a 8mo ago
    Assign the PR to the offshore team and then just forget about it when they never end up reviewing it?
ron_woods 8mo ago
Years ago I remember talking to someone who purchased a "mouseJiggler" for that very purpose. That was literally what he called it. Problem for him was we turned it into a meme, and he immediately regretted telling us.

monkaiju 8mo ago

That sounds awful... Thankfully our CTO is quite supportive of our teams anti-AI policy and is even supportive of posting our LLM-ban on job postings. I honestly dont think that I could operate in an environment with any sort of AI mandate...

chung8123 8mo ago
That seems just as bad but the opposite direction.
- monkaiju 8mo ago
  I guess time will tell, but so far none of the AI-output we've seen is any good. We dont like to adopt technologies based on hype, so if it proves itself it will be adopted, but until then its a toy.

gtowey 8mo ago

Leadership loves AI more than anything they have ever loved before. It's because for them, the fawning, sycophantic, ego-stroking agents who cheerfully champions every dumb idea they have and helps them realize it with spectacular averageness, is EXACTLY what they've always expected to receive from their employees.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

SkyPuncher 8mo ago

I'm so happy I work at a sane company. We're pushing the limits of AI and everyone sees the value, but we also see the danger/risks. I'm at the forefront of agentic tooling use, but also know that I'm working in uncharted territory. I have the skills to use it safely and securely, but not everyone does.

Tangurena2 8mo ago

One small company I worked for had a similar mandate come from their large clients - since offshoring was fashionable in business journals, they must offshore the next project for those clients. That company spent more time reworking the offshored software than if we had done the development in-house. This is just another business fad, but because the execs want to seem to be cool and seem to be doing what their "peers" claim to be doing, well, then by gosh, all of the workers have to do the same fad.