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CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
301–310 of 337 posts
Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#302Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
Boris also says he stops using /plan, he writes loop to write prompt, and he simply asks AI to come up with solutions. He also said many times that his agents would comb their emails, slack channels, and Github issues to come up with things to do. When we combine what he has said, it's hard not to have the impression that he was implying full autonomy of their agents. The only that the engineers need to do is to buil…
Boris who?
Not OP, but I assume he means the Boris Cherny, the guy who made Claude code and is a micro-celebrity in certain developer circles now because of it.
Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#304> The worst case of these were the few companies that set up token leaderboards, which is perhaps the dumbest way possible to encourage learning how to use LLMs well
My company does something dumber now. A leaderboard of how many lines of code you shipped, weighted by how complex they were (assigned by a heuristic). You can imagine the incentive this creates. I wish we just measured tokens
Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#305A custom-built AI would be pretty good at replacing a CEO. Think of all the things a company could do if they reduced overhead by that much?
Who takes responsibility when the AI does something unethical or illegal? Do we put the computer in jail? Or do we just look the other way like we do with human CEOs?
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Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
CEOs do get there with lots of politics in almost all cases. It’s all about who’s ass you kiss and who’s ass you don’t and if you’re lucky with timing things might just fall into place. I think it’s exceedingly rare that a CEO is actually competent at their job. In most cases it’s the labor class propping the company up, and in some cases the workers are doing so against the wishes of the CEO. Not that executives wan…
> CEOs do get there with lots of politics in almost all cases. I know this can be hard for engineers to sometimes accept, but relationships (aka politics) are a key part of business. Rarely is one technical solution absolutely superior to another, making purchasing decisions come down to relationships. Politics is also about compromise and managing a bunch of differing opinions/desires, which is one of the key skills…
> Politics is also about compromise and managing a bunch of differing opinions/desires
Except, it seems, when it comes to the current AI zeitgeist. Then it feels a lot more like CEOs are taking a "my way or the highway" approach. Maybe they can compromise on just how necessary it is for all employees to use AI?
Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#307A custom-built AI would be pretty good at replacing a CEO. Think of all the things a company could do if they reduced overhead by that much?
It's pretty disappointing that people on this site of all places have no idea what CEOs do. Many of them are certainly overpaid, and like any other profession, many are not good at their jobs, but they aren't sitting around drafting memos and coming up with deciding who to fire all day.
I would never accuse CEOs of sitting around drafting memos or daydreaming about who to fire
They're too busy playing golf
Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So far, LLMs seem to deliver code with "Louie Da Loan Shark"-levels of tech debt. Maybe a couple of years ago, but these days, Opus 4.8 is frankly writing better software than what I've seen over the previous decades in non-tech enterprise. These previous two months, we've replaced so much technical debt we've been dragging along for the previous 5 years as our team went from 25 to 3 people. This is in non-tech ent…
> Maybe a couple of years ago, but these days, Opus 4.8... No. Opus 4.8 still writes bad code, just like every other time AI boosters have claimed "but the newest models are really good".
Your experience is apparently different than mine. I went from using our corporate tool to copilot cowork when it became available to us. From opus 4.6 to 4.8 and there has been a massive difference. It's ridiculously good at programming in the right hands, but the right hands is frankly becoming more and more automatable as well, since you can input design documents, compliance policies and allowed packages and it'll do fine.
If you want, you can go through my history and you'll find that I haven't exactly been a fan of AI, but it's silly to deny that it's gotten good.
Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#309There are a lot of bad CEOs, though. It's a lot like a politician -- it's quite difficult to become a CEO, and the skills to make it to that position don't always intersect nicely with the skills necessary to actually do the job well.
CEOs do get there with lots of politics in almost all cases. It’s all about who’s ass you kiss and who’s ass you don’t and if you’re lucky with timing things might just fall into place. I think it’s exceedingly rare that a CEO is actually competent at their job. In most cases it’s the labor class propping the company up, and in some cases the workers are doing so against the wishes of the CEO. Not that executives wan…
I personally know a lot of people (n>15) who are the CEOs of their own companies (ignoring unsuccessful ones). If I broke these into a couple groups, I mostly still see competent, hard working people:
Group 1: company stays small, like a ma & pa shop or small service, with few employees. This is a mixed bag of really hard working individuals and scumbags. The scummy ones aren't breaking any laws or doing anything nefarious, they just found a financial opportunity and shoved themselves in as a middleman and just subcontract out everything and do literally nothing except sit to the side and collect a paycheck.
Group 2: large company, making a name for themselves with hundreds of employees. I only know one guy who meets this category, and he is incredibly talented and hard working
Group 3: wildly successful, international company. Again I only know one guy, so I can't generalize, but he is super lazy. I think this is what y'all are referring to when y'all are hating on CEOs. To give him some slack, he was hard working when we met, and he actually made numerous companies, but this one exploded and now he lives in luxury. He hasn't lost his moral compass, but he doesn't really needs to work hard anymore either.
I should caveat that all of these folks who I know built their company. They weren't hired into one and fought their way to the top with politics or anything. Maybe I surround myself with ambitious people rather than politically toxic people, because otherwise I think it is odd that every single one of the many CEOs I know built their company, rather than getting the seat in a different way.
Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does this argument never apply to neoliberalism? That was never put to a vote but it still thrusted upon a country where the results are what you would expect: the worse income inequality ever seen in the history of the nation, life expectancy has increased, deaths of despair have reached record highs, more children go to bed hungry, healthcare is being ripped from civilians, and corporations are legally allowed…
Based on what you say, it should be easy to find data showing the superior performance of coops for employees in terms of wages, benefits, profit sharing, etc, right? Health care is a different topic and yes, socialized healthcare systems seem to perform better across the board.
Where is the data that neoliberalism helps people? Like can't you see how stupid this argument is? Current system is terrible for the vast majority of workers, but we aren't allowed to change this system why exactly? Especially regarding a system that was never discussed or debated? God damn this is pathetic. What you are doing is like the number one tactic elites use to squash any ideas of creating a better world.
The idea that opponents of neoliberalism have to recreate all aspects of society and consider every potential edge case isn't realistic, and it's not how systematic change actually occurs.
Once again, the Q is this. Where is the evidence that neoliberal economics has helped Americans? Income inequality is at its absolute height, along with deaths of despair.
I'm sorry but why are you personally defending such a sick society? Did you vote to implement neoliberalism in the 1970s or what? Where you the one who told Ford to tell NYC to suck it?