The premise is wrong. Plenty of ICs 'enamored' with AI. If you are not, you either have a boring job or do not have any ideas that are worth prototyping asynchronously. Or haven't tried AI in the last ~3 months.
They are, until HR comes for them.
Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?
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Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?
#32What's an IC?
An individual contributor. Someone who delivers technical work without managing people. It is an alternative to being promoted into a management role.
Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?
#33> I think there’s pretty clearly a divide in AI perception between executives and individual contributors (ICs).
Narrator: there is not
Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?
#34You 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).
If those devs can't operate without an LLM, they weren't worth their salt to begin with. I find that most competent devs are skeptical of the tech, because it doesn't help them. But even among those who embrace it, they would get by just fine if it was gone tomorrow.
The industry is filled with people who just want to close their tickets and sign off.
And plenty of prolific programmers are writing publicly about their Ai use.
Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?
#35Eh...
In my systems programming job ICs have mostly avoided it because we don't have time to learn a new thing with questionable benefits. A lot of my team are really, really good programmers and like that aspect of the job. They don't want to turn any part of it over to a machine. Now if a machine could save us from ever dealing with Jira...
That said, I have begun using AI for some things and it is starting to be useful. It's still 50/50 though, with many hallucinations that waste time but some cases where it caught very simple bugs(syntax or copy/paste errors). I think the experience of, say, systems programmers is very different vs python/web folks though. AI does a great job for my helper scripts in Python.
Management needs to take their own medicine though. They continue to refuse to leverage AI to do things it could actually be good at. I give a duplicate status to management 3x/week now. Why? AI could handle tracking and summarizing it just fine. It could also produce my monthly status for me.
Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?
#36AI has freed me from a vicious cycle that I had been corralled into as an explicit attrition tactic, and which almost ended with me being used non-consensually for reproductive purposes on at least one occasion.
It accomplished this not simply by eliminating my overpaid bullshit job as parasite attractor; but by putting an end to its pathetic semblance of a premise: building software to be used by, uh, someone? for, uh, something?
The various entities requesting the work (or, in later years, the layers of barely-sentient intermediaries between me and said entities) were hardly if ever clear on how exactly this was supposed to produce value; but now they're free, too! Free from having to even try to understand how answering that question is relevant, emdash - so in the end it worked out for them as well!
I am finally at liberty to do something worthwhile with my life, and while at this point I realize it'll take me some time to even remember what "worthwhile" even was (or whether such a thing still exists in your imaginary world of personalized sensory bubbles), I do sleep a rich REM sleep knowing society is now capable of digging its own grave without my assistance. Seriously, I was looking at my bank account and getting a little worried.
I am told that mine is a minority position: if you happen to be the kind of person who believes that more is better, no matter more of what, rest assured you and your eventual progeny will be quite safe - for a while, anyway - in your new role as AI trainer (or is it AI fodder, let's let the market decide!)
Well, turns out when we are all busy looking the part, it becomes impossible for anyone to actually play the part; but also nobody notices, so this is fine too!
Just one request on my part: if possible, do shut up while figuring out how to better turn yourself and our world into paperclips, alright? Besides the ones that you recognize as people, a whole bunch of other people do live on this here planetation - and I hear they find all the AI blather to be mighty annoying.
Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?
#37You 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.
It's not. Most developers are pretty bad at their job, and already can't review code very effectively.
They just create even more slop currently, which will be the case until someone realizes they aren't needed to produce slop at all.
Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?
#38The bigger question is if AI helps cut down the time of development by 10x (assume for this conversation), and the products are released immediately, will companies keep pushing products/functionalities out every week/month? They still have to wait and see adoption, feedback etc to see if it works or not. Sure ai speeds up development but to what end? It’s not like meta is going to compress 5yrs or instagram features into 1! No one has the pipeline built up. So not sure how it fits into the overall company strategy. It’s only helping to fire people now that’s it?
Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?
#39In addition to reason in the article, one thing I’ve noticed among some executives and product managers is their experience using LLM coding tools causes them to lose respect for human software engineers. I’ve seen managers lose all respect for engineering excellence and assume anything they want can be shat out by an LLM on a short deadline. Or assume because they were able to vibe code something trivial like a blog they don’t need to involve engineers in the design of anything, rather they should just be code monkeys that follow whatever design the product managers vibed up. It is really demoralizing to be talked to as if the speaker is promoting an LLM.
Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?
#40Reads like an extended slop LinkedIn post. The author poses a question with an obvious answer yet answers with the most galaxy brain take possible while dropping in some academic concepts to make themselves sound like a thought leader despite probably only taking an intro class in college 10+ years ago.