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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

jonready.com

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#181

Post by robocat »

rawgabbit wrote: post #21
mips_avatar wrote: post #2

Author here if anyone has thoughts

Regarding "And then came the final insult: everyone was forced to use Microsoft's AI tools whether they worked or not." As a customer, I actually had an MS account manager once yelled at me for refusing to touch with a ten foot pole. Sorry, burn me a dozen times; I don't have any appendages left to care. I seriously don't get Microsoft. I am still flabbergasted anytime anyone takes Microsoft seriously.

> MS account manager once yelled at me

Presumably the account manager is under a lot of pressure internally...

Do they repeatedly yell at you?

Do you know how your usage was measured - what metrics was the account manager supposed to improve?

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#182

Post by jfalcon »

mips_avatar wrote: post #2

Author here if anyone has thoughts

I get the feeling that this is supposed to be about the economics of a fairly expensive city/state and that "six-figure salary", but you don't really call it out.

If it was about the technology, then it would be no different than being a java/c++ developer and calling someone who does html and javascript their equal so pay them. It's not.

People get anxious when something may cause them to have to change - especially in terms of economics and the pressures that puts on people beyond just "adulting". But I don't really think you explained the why of their anxiety.

Pointing the finger at AI is like telling the Germans that all their problems are because of Jews without calling out why the Germans are feeling pressure from their problems in the first place.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#183

Post by Forgeties79 »

lambchoppers wrote: post #87
Forgeties79 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s so striking to me is these “vocal boosters” almost preach like televangelists the moment the subject comes up. It’s very crypto-esque (not a hot take at all I know). I’m just tired of watching these people shout down folks asking legitimate questions pertaining to matters like health and safety.

Health and safety seems irrelevant to me. I complain about cars, I point out "obscure" facts like that they are a major cause of lung related health problems for innocent bystanders, I don't actually ride in cars on any regular basis, I use them less in fact than I use AI. There were people at the car's introduction who made all the points I would make today. The world is not at all about fairness of benefits and imp…

> health and safety seems irrelevant to me

Honestly I don’t really know what to say to that, other than it seems rather relevant to me. I don’t really know what to elaborate on given we disagree on such a fundamental level.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#184

Post by sleepybrett »

MicrosoftShill wrote: post #136
nickff wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was under the distinct impression that Seattle was somewhat divided over 'big tech', with many long-term residents resenting Microsoft and Amazon's impact on the city (and longing for the 'artsy and free-spirited' place it used to be). Do you think those non-techies are sympathetic to the Microsofties and Amazonians? This is a genuine question, as I've never lived in Seattle, but I visit often, and live in the PNW.

I've lived in the Seattle area most of my life and lived in San Francisco for a year. SF embraces tech and in general (politics, etc) has a culture of being willing to try new things. Overall tech hostility is low, but the city becoming a testbed for projects like Waymo is possibly changing that. There is a continuous argument that their free-spirited culture has been cannibalized by tech. Seattle feels like the comp…

'how much they do for the community' like trying to buy elections so we won't tax them, same thing boeing and microsoft did. Anytime out local government gets a little uppity suddenly these big corps are looking to move like boeing largely did. Remember Amazon HQ2, at least part of the reasoning behind that disaster was seattlites asking, 'what the hell is amazon doing for us besides driving up rents and snarling traffic?'

(.. and exactly how is boeing doing since it was forced to move away from 'engineering culture' by moving out of the city where their workforce was trained and training the next generation. Oh yeah planes are falling out of the sky and their software is pushing planes into the ground.)

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#185

Post by mips_avatar »

paxys wrote: post #179

All big corporate employees hate AI because it is incessantly pushed on them by clueless leadership and mostly makes their job harder. Seattle just happens to have a much larger percent of big tech employees than most other cities (>50% work for Microsoft or Amazon alone). In places like SF this gloom is balanced by the wide eyed optimism of employees of OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google etc. and the thousands of sta…

That's probably the difference

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#187

Post by throwout4110 »

aisengard wrote: post #171
throwout4110 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right this is what I can’t quite understand. A lot of HN folks appear to have been burned by e.g. horrible corporate or business ideas by non technical people that don’t understand AI, that is completely understandable. What I never understand is the population of coders that don’t see any value in coding agents or are aggressively against them, or people that deride LLMs as failing to be able to do X (or hallucinate…

There is zero guarantee that these tools will continue to be there. Those of us who are skeptical of the value of the tools may find them somewhat useful, but are quite wary of ripping up the workflows we've built for ourselves over decade(s)(+) in favor of something that might be 10-20% more useful, but could be taken away or charged greater fees or literally collapse in functionality at any moment, leaving us sudde…

What would you imagine a plausible scenario would possibly be that your tools would be taken away or “collapse in functionality”? I would say Claude right now has probably made worse code and wasted time than if I had coded things myself, but it’s because this is like the first few hundred days of this. Open weight models are also worse but they will never go away and improve steadily as well. I am all for people doing whatever works for them I just don’t get the negativity or the skepticism when you look at the progress over what has been almost zero time. It’s crappy now in many respects but it’s like saying “my car is slow” in the one millisecond after I floor the gas pedal

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#188

Post by hinkley »

bccdee wrote: post #41

> Engineers don't try because they think they can't. This article assumes that AI is the centre of the universe, failing to understand that that assumption is exactly what's causing the attitude they're pointing to. There's a dichotomy in the software world between real products (which have customers and use cases and make money by giving people things they need) and hype products (which exist to get investors excite…

I wonder if objectively Seattle got hit harder than SF in the last bust cycle. I don’t have a frame of comparison. But if the generational trauma was bigger then so too would the backlash against new bubbles.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#189

Post by whoamiopa »

Very new ex-MSFT here. I couldn’t relate more with your friend. That’s exactly what happened. I left Microsoft about 5 weeks ago and it’s been really hard to detox from that culture.

AI pushed down everywhere. Sometimes shitty-AI that needed to be proved at all cost because it should live up to the hype.

I was in one of such AI-orgs and even there several teams felt the pressure from SLT and a culture drift to a dysfunctional environment.

Such pressure to use AI at all costs, as other fellows from Google mentioned, has been a secret ingredient to a bitter burnout. I’m going to therapy and under medication now to recover from it.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#190

Post by pjmlp »

mr_toad wrote: post #156
pjmlp wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In European consulting agencies the trend now is to make AI part of each RFP reply, you won't go through the sales team, if AI isn't crammed there as part of the solution being delivered, and we get evaluated for it. This takes all the joy away, even traditional maintenance projects of big corps seems attractive nowadays.

I remember when everything had a have the word ‘digital’ in it. And I’m old enough to remember when ‘multimedia’ was a buzzword that was crammed into anywhere it would fit.

Same, doesn't make this hype phase more bearable though.
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