Is this sustainable?
jamiehurst.co.uk
Is this sustainable?
1–10 of 105 posts
Re: Is this sustainable?
#2I read it but I don't really understand the writing.
Re: Is this sustainable?
#3It makes me wonder if large engineering organizations are going to splinter. The coordination costs are getting, proportionally, much larger than they used to.
When I left my corporate engineering job wayyyyy back in March, there were engineers and engineering leaders going off and getting a lot done, individually or in small teams. But project management and QA couldn't keep up with it. Managers resorted to turning their tokens loose on Jira just to try to make sense of it all (which, ironically made them the first to hit their token goals on the dashboard every week, and brought Jira to it's knees).
And, even worse, the junior engineers had no idea what was going on or how to get involved in anything.
The result was an increasingly chaotic mess.
Re: Is this sustainable?
#4I read it but I don't really understand the writing.
Same here - there's no real insight, no key takeaways, nothing useful. It's just a bunch of anecdotes and drivel hidden in self-promotion.
Re: Is this sustainable?
#5No, it isn't sustainable. There is a paper called "The AI Layoff Trap"[1], it says that it is a prisoner's dilemma and this is why this dude feels like he's in an arms race.
On the other front, people are saying that NVidia can't deliver stable drivers for like 15 months and they don't want to take software updates at all, they are more happy with last year's drivers.
I think this is a black swan event in the industry. A lot of people already suffered and more people will suffer still. Industry is going to change for sure, but probably not in a way that you would expect. Black swan simply doesn't work that way, it doesn't change industry in a good way, hence black swan.
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/402969772_The_AI_La...
Re: Is this sustainable?
#6> The result, in my case, is that I code more than I have in years. Three years ago I coded maybe once a fortnight, mostly throwaway PoCs to demonstrate concepts. Now I code most days of the week, in between other work.
This kind of senior engineering role really depends on the type/size of an org. I've had jobs like this on & off and generally don't stick around for long. There have always been high-impact hands-on-keyboard senior roles that involve coding most/every day..
> The other thing that gave way was thinking time. There's very little of it in my working day now. The productivity gains from AI got captured by output volume rather than output quality.
I actually see this externally from b2b vendors I am a client of. Companies that used to churn out X new products/month are now pushing 4X products but they all suck. The quantity over quality market is going to produce new opportunities for others.
Re: Is this sustainable?
#7No, it isn't sustainable. There is a paper called "The AI Layoff Trap"[1], it says that it is a prisoner's dilemma and this is why this dude feels like he's in an arms race. On the other front, people are saying that NVidia can't deliver stable drivers for like 15 months and they don't want to take software updates at all, they are more happy with last year's drivers. I think this is a black swan event in the industr…
black swan is not a reference to the badness of blackness but the unlikelihood of something contradicting volumes of previous data.
Thus it can change industry in a good way or a bad way, because the black swan is unprecedented and unpredicted, its consequences and their nature is unsettled.
Re: Is this sustainable?
#8It makes me wonder if large engineering organizations are going to splinter. The coordination costs are getting, proportionally, much larger than they used to. When I left my corporate engineering job wayyyyy back in March, there were engineers and engineering leaders going off and getting a lot done, individually or in small teams. But project management and QA couldn't keep up with it. Managers resorted to turning…
My take on this, which is almost entirely pulled out of my rear end because I last worked in a large company before the rise of agents, is that we’ll see a move from vertical teams of specialists who get pulled into projects to build a mobile app or handle infrastructure. Instead there’ll be a much stronger focus on teams of generalists, or combined teams of specialists from different fields, working on a feature or product end to end.
Coordination has in my experience always been the big bottleneck in getting anything done, it’s just not hurt so much because everyone expected a feature that could have been done in a fortnight to take months.
Re: Is this sustainable?
#9[flagged]
Re: Is this sustainable?
#10I read it but I don't really understand the writing.
Same here - there's no real insight, no key takeaways, nothing useful. It's just a bunch of anecdotes and drivel hidden in self-promotion.
Sometimes these AI posts and same-y takeaway points are like murmurations of birds flocking.