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No, if he speaks against it he gets labeled "anti-AI" and laid off or not promoted. If he stays silent he retains his job. Corporate Capitalism's main innovati

No, if he speaks against it he gets labeled "anti-AI" and laid off or not promoted. If he stays silent he retains his job. Corporate Capitalism's main innovation was virtualizing feudalism. Now anyone with a bit of cash flow can be a feudal lord with peasants to do his will. No need to maintain land or fight over it with other feudal lords. There's still fighting, naturally, but now the game isn't zero sum. The serfs don't get any real say in this model. At best you can bend the lord's ear if you're sufficiently trusted an advisor. But part of the reason you're trusted is to be trusted not to treat the lord like he's too much of an idiot. A huge problem is that capitalism rewards cash flows and accumulated capital so powerfully that lots of other things just don't matter, potentially for a very long time. Look at GitHub. This leads to immensely extended fuck around phases and "find out" looks like IBM (fossilization and bizarre holdings corporation / dead company parking lot) just as often as it looks like Enron.

brabel 2mo ago
> The serfs don't get any real say in this model I am a programmer but also in management, and if I knew my team thought like that I would be horrified. We absolutely care about what the team members want , like, hate etc. I for once would love someone to bring up stuff like this to me. As long as they are as open minded about things as they would like me to be, there is no issue. But it’s a serious issue to pretend everything is fine while thinking like you say.
- keosak 2mo ago
  > We absolutely care about what the team members want , like, hate etc. Do the people above you in management care as much? It's the top levels of management that decide hiring, firing and budgets.
  - atomicnumber3 2mo ago
    Correct. I do believe my _manager_ wants me to have a say etc. but I also know my manager has terrifically little power overall. "In management" just means you can't unionize and have to dance to the company tune.
munksbeer 2mo ago
I was nodding to your post for a short period, then you just had to throw in the usual anti-capitalism zeitgeist rant. Reframe your context, pretend you're in a communist society, and you could be making the exact same point about speaking up against the grain being bad for you. It feels as though people are brainwashed by anti-capitalism sentiment at the moment, unable to see outside of that context.
- atomicnumber3 2mo ago
  I don't want communism, I want a functioning free market with socialist safety net policies and for strong anti-trust/monopoly regulations. Mega corporations pervert free markets and democracy, and we have a huge number of mega corporations At this point.
  - munksbeer 2mo ago
    That's not the point of my response. It is tiresome, and detracts from meaningful discourse to have the same tired anti-capitalism meme tacked onto everything. It didn't even make sense in the post I was responding to - which is entirely my point.
    - atomicnumber3 2mo ago
      It's relevant because the feedback mechanism for countering all of this is "theoretically, the firm gets outcompeted by other actors who are not doing the bad things." I'm pointing out that, due to how strongly capitalism rewards cash flow and previously accumulated capital, that feedback/correcting mechanism is often _extremely slow_. That feels relevant to me.
miraculixx 2mo ago
Who'd want to work in an environment like this? It's not sustainable
- atomicnumber3 2mo ago
  Everyone who wants to eat and send their kids to college
- WorldMaker 2mo ago
  That's the existential threat right now, isn't it? So much of our industry is top-down being told "agentic programming is the only way forward" and anyone who disagrees is laid off. (I'm in that boat. I've been out of work since April.) It doesn't feel sustainable now. It won't feel sustainable in the future when companies are trying to operate on an entire fossil layer of LLM-generated legacy code. Do I expect managers to get smarter about LLMs and their limits or do I "retire" and find an entire new industry to work in? It's really depressing and there has been a lot of grieving since April that it feels like my entire 20+ year career path disappeared overnight, replaced by something unsustainable and ultimately terrifying.
  - brabel 2mo ago
    You believe they are wrong so strongly you are willing to be out of a job rather than let them play the game which just happens to make your job easier and see what happens? I don’t understand that attitude. Couldn’t you just do as you were told and use AI to the best of your abilities making sure it doesn’t push broken code? You can even have fun coding by hand while your agents are doing other stuff behind the scenes.
    - WorldMaker 1mo ago
      It's a tool. I use it as a tool. I'm a pragmatist as much as I'm a skeptic. In the one phone screen I've had since April (!) I was asked if I could be a cheerleader for it. I can't do that. So far I haven't seen very many jobs that want pragmatists because most of the job descriptions say that they want cheerleaders. I haven't talked myself out of a job, the market has said it doesn't need my experience because I can't talk myself in to a new type of job (of being what I consider to be a liar or a grifter). That's not a job that I want, unfortunately my sense of professional ethics is too strong. But also, yes I have done enough Legacy Code work in my career that I don't think I want to deal with "Legacy Code as a Service" machines and companies spraying entire geological layers of Legacy Code as fast as they can across as much of the company as they can. That's a sustainability crisis that doesn't sound like it is going to be fun to maintain in 3 years from now (or fewer) when companies realize what they encouraged to happen and how much "new" code they need archaeologists for and have few to no maps of.

brabel 2mo ago

> The serfs don't get any real say in this model I am a programmer but also in management, and if I knew my team thought like that I would be horrified. We absolutely care about what the team members want , like, hate etc. I for once would love someone to bring up stuff like this to me. As long as they are as open minded about things as they would like me to be, there is no issue. But it’s a serious issue to pretend everything is fine while thinking like you say.

keosak 2mo ago
> We absolutely care about what the team members want , like, hate etc. Do the people above you in management care as much? It's the top levels of management that decide hiring, firing and budgets.
- atomicnumber3 2mo ago
  Correct. I do believe my _manager_ wants me to have a say etc. but I also know my manager has terrifically little power overall. "In management" just means you can't unionize and have to dance to the company tune.

munksbeer 2mo ago

I was nodding to your post for a short period, then you just had to throw in the usual anti-capitalism zeitgeist rant. Reframe your context, pretend you're in a communist society, and you could be making the exact same point about speaking up against the grain being bad for you. It feels as though people are brainwashed by anti-capitalism sentiment at the moment, unable to see outside of that context.

atomicnumber3 2mo ago
I don't want communism, I want a functioning free market with socialist safety net policies and for strong anti-trust/monopoly regulations. Mega corporations pervert free markets and democracy, and we have a huge number of mega corporations At this point.
- munksbeer 2mo ago
  That's not the point of my response. It is tiresome, and detracts from meaningful discourse to have the same tired anti-capitalism meme tacked onto everything. It didn't even make sense in the post I was responding to - which is entirely my point.
  - atomicnumber3 2mo ago
    It's relevant because the feedback mechanism for countering all of this is "theoretically, the firm gets outcompeted by other actors who are not doing the bad things." I'm pointing out that, due to how strongly capitalism rewards cash flow and previously accumulated capital, that feedback/correcting mechanism is often _extremely slow_. That feels relevant to me.

miraculixx 2mo ago

Who'd want to work in an environment like this? It's not sustainable

atomicnumber3 2mo ago
Everyone who wants to eat and send their kids to college
WorldMaker 2mo ago
That's the existential threat right now, isn't it? So much of our industry is top-down being told "agentic programming is the only way forward" and anyone who disagrees is laid off. (I'm in that boat. I've been out of work since April.) It doesn't feel sustainable now. It won't feel sustainable in the future when companies are trying to operate on an entire fossil layer of LLM-generated legacy code. Do I expect managers to get smarter about LLMs and their limits or do I "retire" and find an entire new industry to work in? It's really depressing and there has been a lot of grieving since April that it feels like my entire 20+ year career path disappeared overnight, replaced by something unsustainable and ultimately terrifying.
- brabel 2mo ago
  You believe they are wrong so strongly you are willing to be out of a job rather than let them play the game which just happens to make your job easier and see what happens? I don’t understand that attitude. Couldn’t you just do as you were told and use AI to the best of your abilities making sure it doesn’t push broken code? You can even have fun coding by hand while your agents are doing other stuff behind the scenes.
  - WorldMaker 1mo ago
    It's a tool. I use it as a tool. I'm a pragmatist as much as I'm a skeptic. In the one phone screen I've had since April (!) I was asked if I could be a cheerleader for it. I can't do that. So far I haven't seen very many jobs that want pragmatists because most of the job descriptions say that they want cheerleaders. I haven't talked myself out of a job, the market has said it doesn't need my experience because I can't talk myself in to a new type of job (of being what I consider to be a liar or a grifter). That's not a job that I want, unfortunately my sense of professional ethics is too strong. But also, yes I have done enough Legacy Code work in my career that I don't think I want to deal with "Legacy Code as a Service" machines and companies spraying entire geological layers of Legacy Code as fast as they can across as much of the company as they can. That's a sustainability crisis that doesn't sound like it is going to be fun to maintain in 3 years from now (or fewer) when companies realize what they encouraged to happen and how much "new" code they need archaeologists for and have few to no maps of.