4 ms·

I think for a lot of companies, AI is a destabilizing force that their managerial structure is unable to compensate for. When you change the economics to such

I think for a lot of companies, AI is a destabilizing force that their managerial structure is unable to compensate for. When you change the economics to such a degree, you're basically removing a dam - resulting in far more stress on the rest of the system. If the leaders of the org don't see the potential downsides and risks of that, they're in for a world of hurt. I think we're going to see a real surge of companies just like this - crash and burn even though this tech was sold as being a universal improvement. The ones that survive will spread their knowledge about how to tame this wild horse, and ideally we'll learn a thing or two in the future. But the wave of naivety has surprised me, and I think there's an endless onrush of people that are overly excited about their new ability to vibe-code things into existence. I think we've got our own endless September event going on for the foreseeable future.

vkou 5mo ago
> I think for a lot of companies, AI is a destabilizing force that their managerial structure is unable to compensate for. Absolutely. Giving a traditional company AI is like giving an unlimited supply of crystal-blue methamphetamine to a deadbeat pill addict. It enables and supercharges all their worst impulses. Making a broken system more 'productive' doesn't do shit to make the users better off. The work output everyone produces doubles, but the ratio of productive to net-negative work plummets.
funimpoded 5mo ago
I increasingly see “AI” as a sort of virus tuned to target management, specifically. Its output is catnip to them, and it’s going to be unavoidable for those who want to look good to superiors and peers (i.e. the #1 priority for managers) even as it adds no actual value whatsoever to what they do. People under them, too, will have to start burning tokens on bullshit to satisfactorily perform competence and “doing work”. Meanwhile, none of this is actually productive. It’s goddamn peacock feathers. It’s like some kind of management parasite. I’m not even sure at this point that it’s going to lead to an overall productivity increase whatsoever for most sectors, because of this added drag on everything.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- pmg101 5mo ago
  I agree with everything you've said, but don't you think quite a lot of things have also been like this before, just to a lesser degree? I've often had the sense that most of what is done inside companies is a kind of performance of work rather than work itself. Mostly all a big status game between various different factions. All actual value provided by just a few engineers here and there who are able to shut out the noise and build things.
  - eproxus 5mo ago
    Things have probably always been like that, agree. I often try to see AI as a catalyst, that accelerates what already is. In a good culture, with high competence and trust this can yield increased output (to some degree at least) and in a bad culture it will accelerate and expedite the dominating traits instead.
  - grvdrm 5mo ago
    I often think that executive level work is about changing the executive team and writing memos about changing the executive team. Then there’s a different team with different members and they begin the cycle again. Repeat over and over again. The number of times I’ve seen a HTML memo sent from the assistant of the executive that says “from the desk of…” with babble about new leadership.
    - jimbokun 5mo ago
      The rest of the work is inventing new ways to increase their compensation.
  - funimpoded 5mo ago
    > I agree with everything you've said, but don't you think quite a lot of things have also been like this before, just to a lesser degree? That’s exactly the reason LLMs and friends are so dangerous to companies, and it’s so hard for them to resist using them in useless/counter-productive ways. They’re excellent at faking signs of effort and work that companies can hardly help but reward, absent any actual way to measure manager effectiveness (and approximately nobody knows how to measure that, in the wild). This takes the form of gilding and padding on a lot of communication, none of which adds actual value but it does cost money directly and indirectly (time wasted sorting out which parts of a document are intentional and meaningful, and which are plausible but irrelevant LLM inventions, for instance)
bonesss 5mo ago
I’m an LLM enjoyer who also thinks that ‘er ‘jerbs are safe and, taken to their logical conclusion, most LLM-stroking online around coding reduces to an argument that we should be speaking Haskell to LLMs and also in specs and documentation (just kidding, OCaml is prettier). But also, I do a little business. You’ve hit the real issue, IT management is D-tier and lacks self awareness. “Agile” is effed up as a rule, while also being the simplest business process ever. That juniors and fakers are whole hog on LLMs is understandable to me. Hype, fashion, and BS are always potent. The part I still cannot understand, as an Executive in spirit: when there is a production issue, and one of these vibes monkeys you are paying has to fix it, how could you watch them copy and paste logs into a service you’re top dollar paying for, over and over, with no idea of what they’re doing, and also not be on your way to jail for highly defensible manslaughter? We don’t pay mechanics to Google “how to fix car”.
- tyyyy3 5mo ago
  The more difficult it is to trace one’s labour to output.. expect more theatrics ;)
- 20after4 5mo ago
  > We don’t pay mechanics to Google “how to fix car”. No, instead of google they just look it up on alldata.
- smileysteve 5mo ago
  This is definitely ¾ of what you pay a mechanic to do; 1 publisher writes a maintenance manual for a car; mechanics all around the globe can use that to work on that specific car. It's the mechanics that don't reference Google or the Haynes manual that are more likely to get it incorrect. As a kicker, mechanics also have a pricing book for the task, they know how many hours a task will take on a certain car (rounded up for the most part).
  - voxl 5mo ago
    You are not responding faithfully to the comment. A mechanic looking up the schematics in a manual understands them. Just because they haven't memorized the material does not make it the same. This is more analogous to looking up a function in the documentation that you forgot about. This is clearly not what the post was referring to, which is instead like googling how to fix a pipe in your home when you've never done any plumbing before in your life. Can it work out? Sure, depends on the issue, can you cause your pipes to freeze, your house to flood, or sediment build up to completely block a pipe? Yes.
atomicnumber3 5mo ago
Honestly, the most impactful thing I've seen AI do for any workplace is serve as the ultimate excuse for whatever pet thing someone's wanted to do, that can't stand on its own merits, and what they really need is a solid excuse. Rewrite that old crunchy system that has had 0 incidents in the last year and is also largely "done" (not a lot of new requirements coming in, pretty settled code/architecture)? It's actually one of our most stable systems. But someone who doesn't even write code here thinks the code is yucky! But that doesn't convince the engineers who are on-call for it to replace it for almost no reason. Well guess what. We can do it now, _because AI!!!_ (cue exactly what you think happens next happening next) Need to lay off 10% of staff because you think the workers are getting too good of a deal? AI. Need to convince your workers to go faster, but EMs tell you you can't just crack the whip? AI mandates / token spend mandates! Didn't like code reviews and people nitpicking your designs? Sorry, code reviews are canceled, because of AI. Don't like meetings or working in a team? Well now everyone is a team of 1, because of AI. Better set up some "teams" full of teams of 1, call them "AI-first" teams, and wait what do you mean they're on vacation and the service is down? Etc. And they don't even care that these things result in the exact negative outcomes that are why you didn't do them before you had the excuse. You're happy that YOUR thing finally got done despite all the whiners and detractors. And of course, it turns out that businesses can withstand an absurd amount of dysfunction without really feeling it. So it just happens. Maybe some people leave. You hire people who just left their last place for doing the thing you just did and now maybe they spend a bit of time here. And the game of musical chairs, petty monarchies, and degenerate capitalism continues a bit longer. Big props to the people who managed to invent and sell an excuse machine though. Turns out that's what everyone actually wanted.
- LinuxAmbulance 5mo ago
  > Need to lay off 10% of staff because you think the workers are getting too good of a deal? AI. I think we're seeing a ton of that right now, and it's not slowing down any time soon it seems.
darth_avocado 5mo ago
> I think for a lot of companies, AI is a destabilizing force that their managerial structure is unable to compensate for. From the article: > because the competence the work reflects is not the novice’s competence at all The core of the problem is that AI allows engineers who were previously inexperienced or downright mediocre, pretend that they are talented, and a lot of management isn’t equipped to evaluate that. It’s like tourists looking at a grocery store in North Korea from their tour bus. It looks like a fully functioning grocery store from the outside, but it is mostly cutouts and plastic fruit.
Terr_ 5mo ago
you're basically removing a dam - resulting in far more stress on the rest of the system. Adding to the grab-bag of useful flow-dysfunction concepts and metaphors: Braess's paradox. [0] Sometimes adding a new route makes congestion strictly worse! Not (just) because of practical issues like intersections, but because it changes the core game-theory between competing drivers choosing routes. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox
cmrdporcupine 5mo ago
100% agree on this. Big log jam coming, with volume of code piling up behind the requirements and planning and "meaning" of the work aspects. In particular, I think the agentic tools as written today are particularly corrosive on code review culture. We spent years having mainline companies migrating from free for all commit privileges (everywhere I worked was like this prior to about 2010 or so) to variants of code review / "PR" code reviewing culture, only to have it all disintegrate in the last 6 months as "reviews" have ended up consisting of people tossing agentic code over the fence and then people having other agents review it, and then again agents respond to comments, etc. etc. It's a bit of code review theatre that pretends there's still eyes on things, when there's not. Similarly the whole edifice of "agile" planning in SCRUM etc form makes no sense when pumping out code isn't the time blocker. All the backlog refinement meetings and burn down charts and points tracking are pointless ceremony when what people really need is intense clarity on what needs to be done and why and intensive review of what's already been built and where the holes are. All of this is just going to create a giant logjam in the higher level "executive function" aspects of a company. Getting people talking to each other has always been something most management at most companies I've worked at have failed at. Now they're going to really suffer for it.

vkou 5mo ago

> I think for a lot of companies, AI is a destabilizing force that their managerial structure is unable to compensate for. Absolutely. Giving a traditional company AI is like giving an unlimited supply of crystal-blue methamphetamine to a deadbeat pill addict. It enables and supercharges all their worst impulses. Making a broken system more 'productive' doesn't do shit to make the users better off. The work output everyone produces doubles, but the ratio of productive to net-negative work plummets.

funimpoded 5mo ago

I increasingly see “AI” as a sort of virus tuned to target management, specifically. Its output is catnip to them, and it’s going to be unavoidable for those who want to look good to superiors and peers (i.e. the #1 priority for managers) even as it adds no actual value whatsoever to what they do. People under them, too, will have to start burning tokens on bullshit to satisfactorily perform competence and “doing work”. Meanwhile, none of this is actually productive. It’s goddamn peacock feathers. It’s like some kind of management parasite. I’m not even sure at this point that it’s going to lead to an overall productivity increase whatsoever for most sectors, because of this added drag on everything.

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
pmg101 5mo ago
I agree with everything you've said, but don't you think quite a lot of things have also been like this before, just to a lesser degree? I've often had the sense that most of what is done inside companies is a kind of performance of work rather than work itself. Mostly all a big status game between various different factions. All actual value provided by just a few engineers here and there who are able to shut out the noise and build things.
- eproxus 5mo ago
  Things have probably always been like that, agree. I often try to see AI as a catalyst, that accelerates what already is. In a good culture, with high competence and trust this can yield increased output (to some degree at least) and in a bad culture it will accelerate and expedite the dominating traits instead.
- grvdrm 5mo ago
  I often think that executive level work is about changing the executive team and writing memos about changing the executive team. Then there’s a different team with different members and they begin the cycle again. Repeat over and over again. The number of times I’ve seen a HTML memo sent from the assistant of the executive that says “from the desk of…” with babble about new leadership.
  - jimbokun 5mo ago
    The rest of the work is inventing new ways to increase their compensation.
- funimpoded 5mo ago
  > I agree with everything you've said, but don't you think quite a lot of things have also been like this before, just to a lesser degree? That’s exactly the reason LLMs and friends are so dangerous to companies, and it’s so hard for them to resist using them in useless/counter-productive ways. They’re excellent at faking signs of effort and work that companies can hardly help but reward, absent any actual way to measure manager effectiveness (and approximately nobody knows how to measure that, in the wild). This takes the form of gilding and padding on a lot of communication, none of which adds actual value but it does cost money directly and indirectly (time wasted sorting out which parts of a document are intentional and meaningful, and which are plausible but irrelevant LLM inventions, for instance)

bonesss 5mo ago

I’m an LLM enjoyer who also thinks that ‘er ‘jerbs are safe and, taken to their logical conclusion, most LLM-stroking online around coding reduces to an argument that we should be speaking Haskell to LLMs and also in specs and documentation (just kidding, OCaml is prettier). But also, I do a little business. You’ve hit the real issue, IT management is D-tier and lacks self awareness. “Agile” is effed up as a rule, while also being the simplest business process ever. That juniors and fakers are whole hog on LLMs is understandable to me. Hype, fashion, and BS are always potent. The part I still cannot understand, as an Executive in spirit: when there is a production issue, and one of these vibes monkeys you are paying has to fix it, how could you watch them copy and paste logs into a service you’re top dollar paying for, over and over, with no idea of what they’re doing, and also not be on your way to jail for highly defensible manslaughter? We don’t pay mechanics to Google “how to fix car”.

tyyyy3 5mo ago
The more difficult it is to trace one’s labour to output.. expect more theatrics ;)
20after4 5mo ago
> We don’t pay mechanics to Google “how to fix car”. No, instead of google they just look it up on alldata.
smileysteve 5mo ago
This is definitely ¾ of what you pay a mechanic to do; 1 publisher writes a maintenance manual for a car; mechanics all around the globe can use that to work on that specific car. It's the mechanics that don't reference Google or the Haynes manual that are more likely to get it incorrect. As a kicker, mechanics also have a pricing book for the task, they know how many hours a task will take on a certain car (rounded up for the most part).
- voxl 5mo ago
  You are not responding faithfully to the comment. A mechanic looking up the schematics in a manual understands them. Just because they haven't memorized the material does not make it the same. This is more analogous to looking up a function in the documentation that you forgot about. This is clearly not what the post was referring to, which is instead like googling how to fix a pipe in your home when you've never done any plumbing before in your life. Can it work out? Sure, depends on the issue, can you cause your pipes to freeze, your house to flood, or sediment build up to completely block a pipe? Yes.

atomicnumber3 5mo ago

Honestly, the most impactful thing I've seen AI do for any workplace is serve as the ultimate excuse for whatever pet thing someone's wanted to do, that can't stand on its own merits, and what they really need is a solid excuse. Rewrite that old crunchy system that has had 0 incidents in the last year and is also largely "done" (not a lot of new requirements coming in, pretty settled code/architecture)? It's actually one of our most stable systems. But someone who doesn't even write code here thinks the code is yucky! But that doesn't convince the engineers who are on-call for it to replace it for almost no reason. Well guess what. We can do it now, _because AI!!!_ (cue exactly what you think happens next happening next) Need to lay off 10% of staff because you think the workers are getting too good of a deal? AI. Need to convince your workers to go faster, but EMs tell you you can't just crack the whip? AI mandates / token spend mandates! Didn't like code reviews and people nitpicking your designs? Sorry, code reviews are canceled, because of AI. Don't like meetings or working in a team? Well now everyone is a team of 1, because of AI. Better set up some "teams" full of teams of 1, call them "AI-first" teams, and wait what do you mean they're on vacation and the service is down? Etc. And they don't even care that these things result in the exact negative outcomes that are why you didn't do them before you had the excuse. You're happy that YOUR thing finally got done despite all the whiners and detractors. And of course, it turns out that businesses can withstand an absurd amount of dysfunction without really feeling it. So it just happens. Maybe some people leave. You hire people who just left their last place for doing the thing you just did and now maybe they spend a bit of time here. And the game of musical chairs, petty monarchies, and degenerate capitalism continues a bit longer. Big props to the people who managed to invent and sell an excuse machine though. Turns out that's what everyone actually wanted.

LinuxAmbulance 5mo ago
> Need to lay off 10% of staff because you think the workers are getting too good of a deal? AI. I think we're seeing a ton of that right now, and it's not slowing down any time soon it seems.

darth_avocado 5mo ago

> I think for a lot of companies, AI is a destabilizing force that their managerial structure is unable to compensate for. From the article: > because the competence the work reflects is not the novice’s competence at all The core of the problem is that AI allows engineers who were previously inexperienced or downright mediocre, pretend that they are talented, and a lot of management isn’t equipped to evaluate that. It’s like tourists looking at a grocery store in North Korea from their tour bus. It looks like a fully functioning grocery store from the outside, but it is mostly cutouts and plastic fruit.

Terr_ 5mo ago

you're basically removing a dam - resulting in far more stress on the rest of the system. Adding to the grab-bag of useful flow-dysfunction concepts and metaphors: Braess's paradox. [0] Sometimes adding a new route makes congestion strictly worse! Not (just) because of practical issues like intersections, but because it changes the core game-theory between competing drivers choosing routes. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox

cmrdporcupine 5mo ago

100% agree on this. Big log jam coming, with volume of code piling up behind the requirements and planning and "meaning" of the work aspects. In particular, I think the agentic tools as written today are particularly corrosive on code review culture. We spent years having mainline companies migrating from free for all commit privileges (everywhere I worked was like this prior to about 2010 or so) to variants of code review / "PR" code reviewing culture, only to have it all disintegrate in the last 6 months as "reviews" have ended up consisting of people tossing agentic code over the fence and then people having other agents review it, and then again agents respond to comments, etc. etc. It's a bit of code review theatre that pretends there's still eyes on things, when there's not. Similarly the whole edifice of "agile" planning in SCRUM etc form makes no sense when pumping out code isn't the time blocker. All the backlog refinement meetings and burn down charts and points tracking are pointless ceremony when what people really need is intense clarity on what needs to be done and why and intensive review of what's already been built and where the holes are. All of this is just going to create a giant logjam in the higher level "executive function" aspects of a company. Getting people talking to each other has always been something most management at most companies I've worked at have failed at. Now they're going to really suffer for it.