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Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

johnjwang.com

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Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

#11

Post by kubb »

try-working wrote: post #6

I'm an IC and I love it. Executives have the wrong concept of AI. For them it's chat + magic, and then it does everything. You can't work with people who have incorrect concepts about how the world works. Best ignore them.

You're right, execs keep trying to fit the LLM square peg into the "inteligent agent" round hole.

Developers use it, for groking a codebase, for implementing boilerplate, for debugging. They don't need juniors to do the grunt work anymore, they can build and throw away, the language and technology moats get smaller.

The value of low level managers, whose power came from having warm bodies to do the grunt work, diminishes.

The bean counters will be like when does it pay for itself. Will it? IDK, IDC.

Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

#13

Post by SirensOfTitan »

I think executives are excited about AI because it confirms their worldview: that the work is a commodity and the real value lies in orchestration and strategy.

It doesn't help that the west has a clear bias wherein moving "up" is moving away from the work. Many executives often don't know what good looks like at the detail level, so they can't evaluate AI output quality.

Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

#16

Post by withinboredom »

exolymph wrote: post #4

People who will get paid more if AI eliminates jobs (in theory, anyway — execs aren't necessarily owners) versus people whose jobs will be eliminated.

The funny thing is that AI can probably replace the exec’s job before it can replace a devs job.

Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

#17

Post by sigbottle »

What? Doesn't this boil down to "people like people who reliably get results", e.g., we live in a complicated nondeterministic world but we try and make it as deterministic as possible, except for some reason you focus on the nondeterministic part for managers, and "deterministic" part for engineers?

Not even sure if determinism is a good axis to analyze this problem. Also smells extremely like concept creep - do you mean "moving up the abstraction stack" as "non determinism" too?

Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

#18

Post by pron »

As someone who's both an IC and leads other developers I disagree with the explanation. As a technical lead, with people I can much better predict the quality of the outcome than with LLMs, and the "failure modes" are much more manageable. As a programmer, I am actually more impressed with AI agents but in an informed and qualified way. Their debugging ability wows me; their coding ability disappoints and frustrates me.

I think that the simple explanation for why executives are so hyped about AI is simply that they're not familiar with its severe current limitations. For example, Garry Tan seems to really believe he's generating 10KLOC of working code per day; if he'd been a working developer he would have known he isn't.

Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

#20

Post by afavour »

paxys wrote: post #5

You must be living in a different universe if you think ICs aren't enamored by AI. Every developer I know basically can't operate now without Claude Code (or equivalent).

I hope that’s exaggeration because being unable to operate without it means you’re going to do a terrible job of reviewing the code it’s producing.
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