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When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

robert-glaser.de

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Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#281

Post by tardedmeme »

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #76
olsondv wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May not have been clear. My job is not AI development. I have features to deliver. The ask from employer is to add the AI knowledge sharing on top of it. They don’t pay for that. When layoffs come, it wouldn’t save me from missed deliverables.

I refuse to use LLMs and don't have a job, so I'm just some guy. What I find strange about this is that in 2020 nobody would be this openly cynical and selfish about, say, good Python idioms, a useful emacs configuration, git shortcuts, etc. This attitude of "your job is to deliver value for the customer, anything else is a distraction, and if you share your hard-earned value-delivery techniques with others then you…

In 2020 we were in an extreme ZIRP phase, a time of plenty (of money). It was easier to get hired. People shared because it made them look better. It was cooperation mode. Now jobs are scarcer so it's competition mode.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#282

Post by tardedmeme »

thfuran wrote: post #269
TallGuyShort wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I find strange about this is that in 2020 nobody would be this openly cynical and selfish about, say, good Python idioms, a useful emacs configuration, git shortcuts, etc. I definitely saw people have concerns about vimrc files and their personal library of shell scripts well before 2020, and I've seen people early in their career get burned by sharing it too. They had a tool that made them productive, it got…

Is it actually their IP? Every dev job I’ve seen has wording in the employment contract that grants the employer ownership of anything developed on company time or company hardware. So unless they made those helpful scripts off the clock on a personal computer, they probably always belonged to the employer.

This only matters if your employer cares enough to choose to create negative consequences for you. I guarantee almost no employer cares about your vim configuration technically being their IP. Even the lawyer work to figure out if it's their IP or not costs more than any possible gain they could have from claiming it.

If your employer is extremely spiteful, they might burn a pile of cash to hurt you. But that's not normal.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#283

Post by blairharper »

daheza wrote: post #116
thfuran wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Sooner or later investors will see the "$2M spend" and demand "$4M net profit", and that's not going to materialize. I think this is probably going to happen at the same time that the providers start really jacking up token prices to extract all the value they can.

I'm a manager and the VPs are starting to ask - how many story points are we getting with AI now. Now we do story points = number of days to implement. (I know this is not real agile but just assume you are in the same position) I can't answer that question but plenty of other managers are fully ready to just give bogus numbers. For my team, use of AI has indeed lowered the story point cost. The coding part of the st…

> use of AI has indeed lowered the story point cost

It should not have. At least not significantly. Points should represent complexity, risk and overall effort (review burden, testing burden, dependencies, etc.), and so AI should increase velocity before it decreases story point estimates.

Over time, if a team's baseline delivery model genuinely changes, then reference stories can be recalibrated, but casually saying "AI lowered the point cost" is usually a smell that points are being treated as time estimates.

This is the same reason points should not = days even without AI. Velocity is what tells you if a team is getting better through training, tooling, hiring/firing, or process improvements. Re-pointing the same class of work downward hides the gain.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#284

Post by thfuran »

tardedmeme wrote: post #282
thfuran wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it actually their IP? Every dev job I’ve seen has wording in the employment contract that grants the employer ownership of anything developed on company time or company hardware. So unless they made those helpful scripts off the clock on a personal computer, they probably always belonged to the employer.

This only matters if your employer cares enough to choose to create negative consequences for you. I guarantee almost no employer cares about your vim configuration technically being their IP. Even the lawyer work to figure out if it's their IP or not costs more than any possible gain they could have from claiming it. If your employer is extremely spiteful, they might burn a pile of cash to hurt you. But that's not n…

Or in the situation described

>it got checked into the repository and now the script they used at their last job too has their current job's copyright notice and license on it, and they're perceived as being petty for trying to claw back their own intellectual property

Where someone is causing a fuss trying to claim ownership of something they never actually owned and thinking the other people are the ones being unreasonable.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#285

Post by Terr_ »

koyote wrote: post #221
recursive wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one's ever been able to explain story points to me without saying something like "Story points are kind of like how long it will take to implement, except it's not that". So what is it then? All the explanations and examples are in units of time, but with a disclaimer saying that the true nature of story points is not time-based, except for the fact that they can only be explained in terms of time.

I always see SP a combination of time and risk. I think a lot of people do not include risk in the estimate. So a story might be estimated at 3SP to implement but there's a high risk that it would blow out (e.g. idea was not fully proven in a PoC, work is in an area that is historically underestimated, reliance on a different team, etc.), so we set it to 5SP to include that risk. Maybe 50% of the time it does get fin…

IMO it's best to welcome the addition of a risk premium, because if you don't, it'll creep in anyway, just in a patchy and inconsistent manner.

Over time it becomes "priced in" to the moving average, which is good, assuming that employee instincts are generally valid.

Of course, if someone makes the mistake of trying to peg points to time, they're indirectly creating a kind of inflation: Yesterday's "just in case" premium should not become today's "everything goes well" baseline.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#286

Post by patch_dev »

p1necone wrote: post #239
patch_dev wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this take all the time, but hiring a junior/intern has never been great ROI, so I hear. Why did we ever do it in the past? Its not like it was ever likely that hiring a junior means getting an employee for life. Could it be that the economic and shareholder pressures are requiring this rather than it being a logical thing?

Anecdotal counterpoint, the best teams I've been on have always had a good mix of a couple of really senior/decent intermediate people and a few either totally fresh grads or juniors (at the beginning of the project). Those fresh people have a good chance of becoming pretty formidable pretty quickly with the right mentoring, and without them seniors have a tendency to just remain experts on whatever tech stack they'r…

Fully agree actually. Not sure its a counterpoint at all really, but its a great point. My comment wasn't intended to be "juniors were never worth it", but instead "juniors WERE worth it before but not because they produced amazing ROI themselves, why does the introduction of an LLM change that?" I'm solidly against the narrative that now all of a sudden juniors aren't worth hiring anymore because a senior with an LLM = 100x engineer.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#287

Post by sanderjd »

sdevonoes wrote: post #263
sanderjd wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand and share your concerns but (without thinking I'm such a good engineer that companies will kill for me), I just don't share your conclusion. To me, it's pretty simple. I have things to do. This makes it easier for me to do those things. Sometimes that means I can do more things, and sometimes it means I can spend less time on my work, and often both. I have no idea what the future will hold. But to me, i…

That’s fine. Some people cannot (don’t want to) think about the more profound consequences of their actions. No one likes to stop for 10min and think deep about what they are actually doing. The easiest path is always to stay in “robot mode”: my boss pays me $ for my job… therefore I need to satisfy that contract. No time to think”

No, see, this is the disconnect. Whatever happens with this in the future is not due to "the more profound consequences of [my] actions". Whether I choose to take advantage of these useful tools, or not, has absolutely no bearing on the hypothetical future consequences you're suggesting may come to pass.

If you're proposing an organized boycott, I would certainly entertain that proposal. But for me, the bar would be high for both certainty that the hypothetical consequences are likely and bad and that the boycott would have a chance of being effective.

At this particular moment, I'm pretty skeptical on both counts. And I'm flatly against the kind of vibes and guilt tripping driven "boycotts" that you're attempting here.

(And I'm way more bullish on the normal legislative and regulatory processes. I think organized boycotts are something to think about if those processes fail.)

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#288

Post by sanderjd »

mplanchard wrote: post #267
sanderjd wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep I understand this. But what I don't understand is, "wow this is incredibly useful! ... but I'm not gonna use it".

There are a lot of potential reasons. Here’s a thought: consider the potentially analogous case of performance-enhancing drugs for athletes. The drugs unambiguously make them better at their jobs, but the drugs have severe long-term health costs and wreak havoc on the fairness of the playing field. It’s easy to see why an athlete might choose not to use them, even when others are. Of course, those negative factors al…

There are rules against using performance enhancing drugs in competitive sports, because ultimately the goal of the sport is entertainment, and the entertainment value increases with a rule based even playing field.

Business is not like this, because the value of what a business does is in its actual output, not in its entertainment value for spectators.

Of course there are other rules (legislative and regulatory) that apply, for other good reasons. But their goal is not to create an entertaining competitive environment, but rather to control externalities of what companies do.

I favor AI regulation, but I also don't think treating it like a performance enhancing drug would be a smart way to regulate it. Higher business productivity is useful to society in a way that breaking home run records is not.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#289

Post by sanderjd »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #254
sanderjd wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like the upside is that it makes the job way easier? What am I missing?

If it really does make your job easier that's great for you, but if it isn't making you more profitable then the company as a whole is wasting money and some people will have to go until your job is about as stressful as before.

I think if companies feel that AI usage turns out to be wasting money, with negative ROI, then certainly nobody has anything to worry about here! Companies will definitely turn off this spigot the moment they think it's a net negative to their bottom line.

The revealed preference is very far in the opposite direction at the moment.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#290

Post by selicos »

soks86 wrote: post #140
nazcan wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may not be the biggest bottleneck, but if you can have a similar amount of time, but reduce the number of engineers by 30%, that's a huge win. And having less people involved means there is much less communication and alignment. Not to say it's a panacea.

That's an interesting take I don't see anyone else bringing up. It would also, I would think, make it easier for the 30% fewer engineers to earn a better living in the long run and reduce human management effort. This makes the most sense to me. So far AI, being fallible, can only augment humans so you can have less humans to do the same work (or tasks where accuracy can be less than 100%, like lower level support ca…

This was my thinking. It's a tool with many options like digital spreadsheets. It can still be used 'wrong' or poorly, but you better know how to use it on some level.
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