On the one hand, this is a clean post that explains exactly what a lot of us have been thinking and seeing on the job at large organizations doing tech work. Dear Author, I agree with you 110% and want everybody else to come to understand what you have written.
On the other hand, it feels like we've been over this tens of times recently, on HN specifically and IRL at work. Another blog post isn't going to convince leaders that this is how the world works when they are socially and financially incentivized to pretend like AI really will speed things up. So now I just wait for their AI projects to fail or go as slowly as previous projects and hope they learn something.
Sadly I think you’re right. I even shy away from sharing these types of posts at work because it feels like anything that doesn’t mesh with the status quo isn’t received well.
Same here. Anyone being even hesitant about AI is viewed negatively by management
This is the one case where management is right, they had to drag my (FAANG) org kicking and screaming into the AI future and it was worth it. We are moving 3-10x faster (team dependent).
Now the engineers I know that had the same skeptical tone as OP are the ones singing its praises and doing cool shit with it.
I disagree, I think the visuals, Gantt charts, are precisely the kind of "PM speak" that can be understood. Sure it won't solve anything as long as C-suite and investors do innovation signaling but that itself can only last so long.
I think the point is that clarity has been published many times.
Humanity knows how to solve starvation. Clear routes were laid out long ago. The work is in adoption.
The alternative viewpoint is that if there weren’t people who continue to try to advocate for a better world, the world we’d live in would be even worse.
Every time these types of posts are discussed at work, the point is always that there's more risk of falling behind (more like FOMO) at pace if others are able to launch or bring new features faster
Yep. I have the luxury of having my mortgage paid off and being able to be a bit picky about my work for a little bit.
So I am spending my days gardening and obsessively working on personal coding projects with these agentic tools. Y'know, building a high performance OLTP database from scratch, and a whole new logic relational persistent programming environment, a synthesizer based on some funky math, an FPGA soft processor. Y'know, normal things normal people do.
So I know what these tools are capable of in a single person's hands. They're amazing.
But I hear the stories from my friends employed at companies setting minimum token quotas or having leaderboards of people who are "star AI coders" telling people "not to do code reviews" and "stop doing any coding by hand" and I shake my head.
I dipped my toes into some contract work in the winter and it was fine but it mostly degraded into dueling LLMs on code reviews while the founder vibe coded an entire new project every weekend.
These tools suck for team work or any real team software engineering work.
I'll just let this shake out and sit out until the industry figures it out. The only places that are going to be sane to work at are places with older wiser people on staff who know how to say "slow down!" and get away with it.
In the meantime, quantities of cut rhubarb $5 a bunch in Hamilton, Ontario area for sale. Also asparagus. Lots and lots of asparagus.
Yeah I think moving forward one of the questions I'll be asking companies I interview with is "what does your seniority distribution look like and how do you intend to maintain it?"