The industry was always a disaster, but if you take a disaster and put AI in the mix you get a disaster at light speed. It was always getting worse and worse but now it’s speedrunning it.
The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat
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Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat
#12From around 2010-2020 the stock market was rewarding growth more than profit. That means large tech employers hired like crazy to indicate growth. Then came COVID and the economy contracted. As a result the stock market changed to reward profitability. So, excess developers had to go. We are still feeling this. I do agree that AI is not to blame for this. In fact I will go further and claim that AI is a net negative…
How exactly are good doctors easy to identify and hard to fire? And how does it follow that AI is a net negative when wielded by professionals who are excellent at what they do? If people can't identify qualified professionals without relying on credentials, they probably aren't qualified to be hiring managers.
> And how does it follow that AI is a net negative when wielded by professionals who are excellent at what they do?
Simple, the 80% of code monkeys who are not good at what they do will cause way more damages than the "professionals who are excellent at what they do". And out fo tech I can guarantee you the vast majority of people use llms to do less, not to do more or do better
It's also easily verifiable, supposedly AI makes everyone a 10x developer/worker, it's been ~3 years now, where are the benefits ? Which company/industry made 10x progress or 10x revenue or cut 90% of their workforce ?
How many man hours are lost on AI slop PRs? AI written tickets which seem to make sense at first but fall apart once you dig deep? AI reports from mckinsey&co which use fake sources?
Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat
#13The industry was always a disaster, but if you take a disaster and put AI in the mix you get a disaster at light speed. It was always getting worse and worse but now it’s speedrunning it.
Computers are a lever, a force multiplier. If your process is shit, you can shit faster with a computer.
LLMs are another force multiplier. If your computerized process is a disaster … well, you said it and you’re right.
Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat
#14From around 2010-2020 the stock market was rewarding growth more than profit. That means large tech employers hired like crazy to indicate growth. Then came COVID and the economy contracted. As a result the stock market changed to reward profitability. So, excess developers had to go. We are still feeling this. I do agree that AI is not to blame for this. In fact I will go further and claim that AI is a net negative…
Qualification is a very difficult problem, but I think everyone resents the characterization of "bad devs". Things like the Metaverse failure - apparently $70bn spent for no results - are primarily management failures. Like the Cybertruck, they succeeded 100% at building a product that the CEO wanted. The problem is that the CEO is basically the only person that wants that product.
There's also the thought nobody wants to examine: what if the consumer market total spend is kind of tapped out?
Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat
#15>In traditional industries like manufacturing you don’t hire 500 factory workers unless you have a production line that needs them. You don’t over-hire based on a guess.
Traditional factories do make wrong guesses about the future and overhire all the time. Example: https://www.google.com/search?q=Ford+f150+lightning+laid+off...
Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat
#16I remember after the Brexit vote (i.e. years before anything actually changed) there was a rash of British companies who clearly would have gone bankrupt anyway blaming their ailing fortunes on Brexit. There is remarkably little pushback on company narratives about layoffs or ailing economic fortunes from journalists which is weird because it's more normal that they are not truthful. The Brexit vote is nothing like t…
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Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat
#17The industry was always a disaster, but if you take a disaster and put AI in the mix you get a disaster at light speed. It was always getting worse and worse but now it’s speedrunning it.
Not so much AI itself, but the billions invested into it and the hardware required - anything you invest billions into but that doesn't have similar return on investment is a fast track to an economic crash / correction. The Y2K tech companies are a previous example, investors were champing at the bit to invest in uh, pets.com or whatever but turns out it didn't / wouldn't earn enough money to earn it back.
Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
How exactly are good doctors easy to identify and hard to fire? And how does it follow that AI is a net negative when wielded by professionals who are excellent at what they do? If people can't identify qualified professionals without relying on credentials, they probably aren't qualified to be hiring managers.
> And how does it follow that AI is a net negative when wielded by professionals who are excellent at what they do? Simple, the 80% of code monkeys who are not good at what they do will cause way more damages than the "professionals who are excellent at what they do". And out fo tech I can guarantee you the vast majority of people use llms to do less, not to do more or do better It's also easily verifiable, supposedl…
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Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat
#19>Europe just became a lower-cost extension of Silicon Valley.
Stay away from europe while you can.
Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat
#20> The liquidity that flooded the tech sector didn’t just inflate valuations; it inflated teams, egos, and expectations.
Yes it's kind of obvious to anyone who's looking at the actual work being done: the constant churn of OS updates, the JS-framework-du-jour, apps being updated constantly...
It seems to me like a lot of this is just busy work, as if engineers need to justify having a job by being releasing inconsequential updates all the time. Bullshit jobs anyone?
I for one would really like things to slow down, we all deserve it!