4 ms·

If you're a regular engineer like me, there's no real upside to using AI in a company setting. They're boiling us. Of course, the HN elite (investors, execs, ce

by dakiol 5mo ago

If you're a regular engineer like me, there's no real upside to using AI in a company setting. They're boiling us. Of course, the HN elite (investors, execs, celebrities, and top-tier engineers) will say otherwise because "how can you be against innovation man?" AI/LLMs aren't innovation the way TCP/IP, linux, or postgres were. To be clear: claude/codex/gemini/grok/whatever exist for profit, to squeeze the last drop of productivity out of you until there's nothing left, and then you're disposable (laid off). If you like AI, use open source models, use them in your side projects.

asdfman123 5mo ago
1) The game is not ending, it's changing. AI can sling a lot of code but we still need engineers that actually understand what the hell is going on. That's always been the bottleneck. It could eliminate junior positions, but seniors are fine for now. 2) It's been a hard lesson for me to learn because I'm naturally a contrarian, but you are hired to do what management wants you to do. If you resist, your best bet is to hope they don't notice or care, but it's not going to change much.
- herpderperator 5mo ago
  If you eliminate juniors over the next few years, there will be no seniors for the future when the current seniors retire.
  - sanderjd 5mo ago
    Yep, I'm a fan of the current crop of AI tools because they are incredibly useful to me, but I have deep concerns about the pipeline problem.
  - Our_Benefactors 5mo ago
    Then pay will go up again for those mid-level developers who still remain, and companies will again overhire and overtrain like we saw during COVID years. “We won’t have any seniors in ten years!!1!” is a handwringy problem that self solves by the free market.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - testudovictoria 5mo ago
    The people that's a problem for don't understand this fact. Of the ones that do, there's upper management and/or shareholder pressure for profits now. It's a can that infinitely gets kicked down the road until they reach a dead end.
    - asdfman123 5mo ago
      No, it's a "tragedy of the commons" problem, for lack of a less dramatic phrase. If you ran a software company, would you want to train juniors who are slower than AI and much more expensive? Who would just jump ship in two years? It wouldn't make sense to. "Someone" should do it: someone other than you.
      - patch_dev 5mo ago
        I see this take all the time, but hiring a junior/intern has never been great ROI, so I hear. Why did we ever do it in the past? Its not like it was ever likely that hiring a junior means getting an employee for life. Could it be that the economic and shareholder pressures are requiring this rather than it being a logical thing?
        an0malous 5mo ago
        People used to stay at companies longer than a couple years
        p1necone 5mo ago
        Anecdotal counterpoint, the best teams I've been on have always had a good mix of a couple of really senior/decent intermediate people and a few either totally fresh grads or juniors (at the beginning of the project). Those fresh people have a good chance of becoming pretty formidable pretty quickly with the right mentoring, and without them seniors have a tendency to just remain experts on whatever tech stack they're familiar with but not think out of the box. Hiring a mediocre senior is much worse than hiring a grad because they will never get any better, and it's very hard to know at hiring time that they're mediocre.
  - root_axis 5mo ago
    They're making the bet that seniors won't be needed by then. I think it's a bad bet, but it makes sense to follow through if 40% of the economy is already being occupied by this tech.
sanderjd 5mo ago
Seems like the upside is that it makes the job way easier? What am I missing?
- cj 5mo ago
  It seems like a lot of developers have philosophical disagreements with the direction of AI combined with fear of change and fear that AI makes them less competitive in the job market. I see people regularly boycotting or rejecting AI for a variation of these reasons, and it feels a lot like self-sabotage.
  - renegade-otter 5mo ago
    My biggest challenge is to look productive while still having some time and focus left to be a good expert. After all - we are just code reviewers now, and you are a no good reviewer if you never get any shovel time yourself. The juniors are eliminated and the seniors indulge in cognitive surrender because it feels good.
- zbentley 5mo ago
  What do you do all day at your job? Serious question. I think the reason that there's such a disconnect among AI-for-work users about whether it's a panacea or bullshit accelerator is that different software developers have massively different duties and conceptions about what their job is or should be.
  - sanderjd 5mo ago
    1. Communicate with people about what to build, fix, or improve, and about our progress with current ongoing work. 2. Figure out what components already exist and what new things we need to build and how things should be integrated. 3. Actually build the things according to what was figured out in the previous step. 4. Review my own work and other people's work. 5. Release things and make sure they work. 6. Respond to emergent issues in things that have been released. I find the current generation of AI tooling to be very useful for all of these tasks. Less so for task #1 than the others. What are other people doing that is different?
bonesss 5mo ago
There’s an engineering story of being abused by capitalists, but from an Executive perspective the whole thing strikes me as insane except for ‘next quarters bonus’. Anyone remember what SCO did to the industry as it went under? The part I still don’t get is where Enterprises are dumping internal ‘secrets’ (code, processes, customer needs, internal politics, leadership dreams), into the hands of startups and untrustworthy conglomerates. MS used to be famous for NDA and deal abuse. I don’t believe for a second the LLM giants would be shy about training on corporate materials and lying about it. And if they start going under? This gold rush might have a long, ugly, tail.
- soared 5mo ago
  What is sco?
  - gnabgib 5mo ago
    Oh yeah, it's hard to find now. [Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) Unix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation)
graphememes 5mo ago
This is a really bad take, many on hackernews have a very skewed idea of what a CEO thinks about its employees it seems, or why firings happen in the first place. Quite honestly the firings that are happening are the ones who are not adopting the technologies, if you're doing this you're quite literally just putting yourself in scope. Just read coinbase today. They are culling those who are not adopting the future because they get in the way of progress. They don't help, they don't push things forward and they hold back those who do.
- hunterpayne 5mo ago
  "Quite honestly the firings that are happening are the ones who are not adopting the technologies, " And there is why the hate exists. You as the CEO know nothing about how your business works. You neither actually try to understand nor do you have the technical background to understand. So you substitute gamed numbers. And in doing this, you setup your company to tank the industry that props up the world economy. And then act like you are the rational one while doing this. There is nothing rational about how most CEOs act. There is a reason why companies do better under dev founders than any other circumstance. There is a reason why dev CEOs do better than non-dev CEOs. Yet despite this, you will tank both your company and a substantial part of the industry just so you can get yours. That's why you are getting the hate. Ignorant indifference is just as objectionable as the caricature of a CEO you see in these posts.
  - graphememes 5mo ago
    >You as the CEO know nothing about how your business works. That's too broad of a statement and quite honestly, in my opinion and experience, wrong. There may be some who this does apply to but the vast majority that I know, it does not, and when you get to companies that are actually doing firings based on this its even less.
eloisant 5mo ago
They're not innovations like TCP/IP, Linux or Postgres, they're innovations like compilers, syntax highlighting, and IDEs.

by dakiol 5mo ago

asdfman123 5mo ago

1) The game is not ending, it's changing. AI can sling a lot of code but we still need engineers that actually understand what the hell is going on. That's always been the bottleneck. It could eliminate junior positions, but seniors are fine for now. 2) It's been a hard lesson for me to learn because I'm naturally a contrarian, but you are hired to do what management wants you to do. If you resist, your best bet is to hope they don't notice or care, but it's not going to change much.

herpderperator 5mo ago
If you eliminate juniors over the next few years, there will be no seniors for the future when the current seniors retire.
- sanderjd 5mo ago
  Yep, I'm a fan of the current crop of AI tools because they are incredibly useful to me, but I have deep concerns about the pipeline problem.
- Our_Benefactors 5mo ago
  Then pay will go up again for those mid-level developers who still remain, and companies will again overhire and overtrain like we saw during COVID years. “We won’t have any seniors in ten years!!1!” is a handwringy problem that self solves by the free market.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- testudovictoria 5mo ago
  The people that's a problem for don't understand this fact. Of the ones that do, there's upper management and/or shareholder pressure for profits now. It's a can that infinitely gets kicked down the road until they reach a dead end.
  - asdfman123 5mo ago
    No, it's a "tragedy of the commons" problem, for lack of a less dramatic phrase. If you ran a software company, would you want to train juniors who are slower than AI and much more expensive? Who would just jump ship in two years? It wouldn't make sense to. "Someone" should do it: someone other than you.
    - patch_dev 5mo ago
      I see this take all the time, but hiring a junior/intern has never been great ROI, so I hear. Why did we ever do it in the past? Its not like it was ever likely that hiring a junior means getting an employee for life. Could it be that the economic and shareholder pressures are requiring this rather than it being a logical thing?
      - an0malous 5mo ago
        People used to stay at companies longer than a couple years
      - p1necone 5mo ago
        Anecdotal counterpoint, the best teams I've been on have always had a good mix of a couple of really senior/decent intermediate people and a few either totally fresh grads or juniors (at the beginning of the project). Those fresh people have a good chance of becoming pretty formidable pretty quickly with the right mentoring, and without them seniors have a tendency to just remain experts on whatever tech stack they're familiar with but not think out of the box. Hiring a mediocre senior is much worse than hiring a grad because they will never get any better, and it's very hard to know at hiring time that they're mediocre.
- root_axis 5mo ago
  They're making the bet that seniors won't be needed by then. I think it's a bad bet, but it makes sense to follow through if 40% of the economy is already being occupied by this tech.

sanderjd 5mo ago

Seems like the upside is that it makes the job way easier? What am I missing?

cj 5mo ago
It seems like a lot of developers have philosophical disagreements with the direction of AI combined with fear of change and fear that AI makes them less competitive in the job market. I see people regularly boycotting or rejecting AI for a variation of these reasons, and it feels a lot like self-sabotage.
- renegade-otter 5mo ago
  My biggest challenge is to look productive while still having some time and focus left to be a good expert. After all - we are just code reviewers now, and you are a no good reviewer if you never get any shovel time yourself. The juniors are eliminated and the seniors indulge in cognitive surrender because it feels good.
zbentley 5mo ago
What do you do all day at your job? Serious question. I think the reason that there's such a disconnect among AI-for-work users about whether it's a panacea or bullshit accelerator is that different software developers have massively different duties and conceptions about what their job is or should be.
- sanderjd 5mo ago
  1. Communicate with people about what to build, fix, or improve, and about our progress with current ongoing work. 2. Figure out what components already exist and what new things we need to build and how things should be integrated. 3. Actually build the things according to what was figured out in the previous step. 4. Review my own work and other people's work. 5. Release things and make sure they work. 6. Respond to emergent issues in things that have been released. I find the current generation of AI tooling to be very useful for all of these tasks. Less so for task #1 than the others. What are other people doing that is different?

bonesss 5mo ago

There’s an engineering story of being abused by capitalists, but from an Executive perspective the whole thing strikes me as insane except for ‘next quarters bonus’. Anyone remember what SCO did to the industry as it went under? The part I still don’t get is where Enterprises are dumping internal ‘secrets’ (code, processes, customer needs, internal politics, leadership dreams), into the hands of startups and untrustworthy conglomerates. MS used to be famous for NDA and deal abuse. I don’t believe for a second the LLM giants would be shy about training on corporate materials and lying about it. And if they start going under? This gold rush might have a long, ugly, tail.

soared 5mo ago
What is sco?
- gnabgib 5mo ago
  Oh yeah, it's hard to find now. [Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) Unix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation)

graphememes 5mo ago

This is a really bad take, many on hackernews have a very skewed idea of what a CEO thinks about its employees it seems, or why firings happen in the first place. Quite honestly the firings that are happening are the ones who are not adopting the technologies, if you're doing this you're quite literally just putting yourself in scope. Just read coinbase today. They are culling those who are not adopting the future because they get in the way of progress. They don't help, they don't push things forward and they hold back those who do.

hunterpayne 5mo ago
"Quite honestly the firings that are happening are the ones who are not adopting the technologies, " And there is why the hate exists. You as the CEO know nothing about how your business works. You neither actually try to understand nor do you have the technical background to understand. So you substitute gamed numbers. And in doing this, you setup your company to tank the industry that props up the world economy. And then act like you are the rational one while doing this. There is nothing rational about how most CEOs act. There is a reason why companies do better under dev founders than any other circumstance. There is a reason why dev CEOs do better than non-dev CEOs. Yet despite this, you will tank both your company and a substantial part of the industry just so you can get yours. That's why you are getting the hate. Ignorant indifference is just as objectionable as the caricature of a CEO you see in these posts.
- graphememes 5mo ago
  >You as the CEO know nothing about how your business works. That's too broad of a statement and quite honestly, in my opinion and experience, wrong. There may be some who this does apply to but the vast majority that I know, it does not, and when you get to companies that are actually doing firings based on this its even less.

eloisant 5mo ago

They're not innovations like TCP/IP, Linux or Postgres, they're innovations like compilers, syntax highlighting, and IDEs.