How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants? • Hacker News Board

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#251

Post by bigiain » Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 8:59 AM UTC

hef19898 wrote: post #198

ashtonkem wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that a C suite member talking about AI without a specific goal in mind (“we will use AI to automate X, which will help us do Y better”) is a huge red flag.

It also seems to be a main selling point of a lot of logistics and supply chain star-ups these days. I guess it sounds way sexier than "give us millions to build a new forwarder and our own tech because we don't want to use off-the-shelf software and we want to be acquired by DHL one day".

At least they've stopped talking about blockchain though...

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#252

Post by waltherg » Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 9:01 AM UTC

worriedformyjob wrote: post #13

Obviously using a throwaway here. Our board members got it into their heads that successful companies must have an AI "play", so they instructed the CEO to invest about 10% of our development budget on AI. We are doing absolutely inane projects that have no hope of succeeding. We serve a niche industry where certified professionals have to do certain tasks personally, instead of being able to delegate to secretaries.…

Any chance at sharing what consulting company put the AI play idea in your CEO's head?

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#253

Post by cwp » Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 9:03 AM UTC

No. We know people want this. Many existing customers joined the wait list to try it, and a few employees are using a ludicrously inadequate alpha version.

We might get the details wrong, but somebody is going to make a killing with this in the next few years.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#254

Post by C1sc0cat » Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 9:05 AM UTC

noizejoy wrote: post #241

C1sc0cat wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember just before my first web project. I worked on a Oracle client server project (SMDS management tool) and to install the client, you installed about 4 products via 14 floppy disks one after the other on the client PC. Took two days for two of us to install it on five or six client PC's

So you can probably imagine what it was like when we had several dozens of client pc’s across several customer companies across several cities across the continent.

Oh yes in 94 that was my key take away, you could launch a new system as a website and save a lot on deployment cots on say 500 seats.

I recall discussing this with the engineering centre manager about how in 5 -10 years the web could replace fat clients on PC's

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#255

Post by waltherg » Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 9:08 AM UTC

bob33212 wrote: post #63

reading-at-work wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we all know the project will fail unless someone develops well-perfoming, human-level AGI before Q4/2020 This is hilarious, and makes me wonder how many similar corporate AI initiatives are under way in the world right now.

I have had a couple conversations where a business guy starts off with a decent idea then he says something like "the cognitive AI module will fill out your expense report after watching you do it for a couple weeks". What the fuck? If I had the ability to code a cognitive AI module which could do that I would not be building it for you, I would solve self driving and license the software for billions.

Been there so many times.

I've been kicked off a project because I couldn't stop talking about training data (they already had) and machine learning algorithms (NLP, text classification) that we could implement right now to start automating a couple of internal processes that are currently pointlessly manual. Think moving incoming e-mail to appropriate downstream support channels.

Not enough magical AI / AGI in there.

The countless PowerPoint presentations built after my departure described processes along the lines of "the AI will detect when you're about to miss your connecting flight and book you into your favourite hotel with your favourite dinner pre-ordered".

Surprisingly, the project survived and now they collect training data and use machine learning for text classification.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#256

Post by bigiain » Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 9:09 AM UTC

hef19898 wrote: post #250

bigiain wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a boss not so long ago who kept selling our customers our "Conversational AI Bot". What we gave them was a fairly dumb keyword search of a library of questions the customer would type in along with answers - wrapped in some html widgets displaying cartoon robot heads. It still astounds me that not only did none of those customers sue us for blatant misrepresentation, but most of them were delighted with what th…

There are a couple of lessons in that anecdote.

Yep. Still learning them...

I had a similar cognitive dissonance when doing "R&D Grant applications" a long time back. I kept on thinking "Research" was the sort of rigorous academic work you do to earn a PhD. In the government/business world, it seems pretty much spending time or money to learn how to do anything not 100% required for your business previously counts. Including things like "selling our widgets, only via the internet" being valid and acceptable thing to get government rebates for "R&D". I still feel dirty everytime I draft one of those grant applications... :shrug:

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#257

Post by tupac_speedrap » Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 9:10 AM UTC

This is pretty common in government. We have way too much duplication between projects so somebody gets the bright idea to replace all the standards with one standard but it doesn't get traction and basically doesn't get used.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#258

Post by mercer » Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 9:12 AM UTC

brain5ide wrote: post #219

hef19898 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What always drives me crazy about instances like this, is that managers and the c-level seem to be much more willing to listen to some "random" guy or blog over their own people. People they hired, people that have a much better understanding of the issue, the processes and so on. This effect is by no means limited to tech. And engineers, regardless of type, are by no means immune to that as soon as they reach higher…

They're just seeking some outside the box solutions. If you don't course correct, how do you know/show that you're driving?

Plus, how else would you create all that synergy.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#259

Post by pbhjpbhj » Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 9:14 AM UTC

bigbluedots wrote: post #224

petre wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Financier Martin Armstrong claims to have exactly such a system but it doesn't predict the market, it only makes quite accurate market forecasts.

I have heard about this guy's forecasts but have been unable to find a list of predicted vs actual. Do you know of such a list?

He started with a list of 1024^w512 sure things, but 7 years of mostly good picks later now he just promotes 8 companies ... /s

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#260

Post by didymospl » Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 9:20 AM UTC

worriedformyjob wrote: post #13

Obviously using a throwaway here. Our board members got it into their heads that successful companies must have an AI "play", so they instructed the CEO to invest about 10% of our development budget on AI. We are doing absolutely inane projects that have no hope of succeeding. We serve a niche industry where certified professionals have to do certain tasks personally, instead of being able to delegate to secretaries.…

I used to work at a software house which makes software for few big companies. A few years ago our CEO thought it's time to diversify our income stream by creating some SaaS. He came up with a really then-buzzword-packed(AI, ML, IoT, microservices, Kubernetes, mobile first) product. Quite ambitious, especially for a team of 5 people, regular web devs who had no working experience with any of those. Everyone voiced their concerns but we were told to just use our best efforts.

Long story short: after a year or so, our boss decided to scrap our half-baked system and gave up on the idea of creating some internal product entirely.