Lines of code got a better publicist

> covid era over-hiring

That's a generous excuse. To me it looks like they're just trying to depress wages across the board. Given that _several_ rounds of layoffs have occured since then, this 6 year old excuse rings particularly hollow.

> investors by showing they're embracing the hip new technologies

I thought investors cared about returns.

> to become a more streamlined and cost-efficient operation than ever.

And a completely uncompetetive one as well. "We're using the same whizz bang technology that any idiot in their bedroom can use!"

Anecdotally, coworkers are writing a LOT more unit tests. By which I mean NOBODY is writing unit tests, but Claude is generating a ton of em. We’re talkin 300 lines of unit tests for 20 line changes that are already covered by other, better kinds of tests. Huge JSON objects of test data that we already have generators for, etc

Strongly agreed. It is a signal. I did an analysis once at the end of the year. Work group of about 45 engineers. The CM system had a lot of steps, and work could get bounced around, but there was a step where some one "resolved" a software activity. Bug fix or new requirements, it did not matter. This step was when someone actually completed work and put into into the dev stream.

A quick DB query and the variance was substantial. A couple of people had over a hundred. About 10 had 2. For the year. The ramp up was slow, average was 8 to 10 a year.

Dig a little deeper. Those at the top were 'group leads' not only did they do IC work, they also got stuck with all 'paperwork' on the problem work packages. They had 'power', so they could override various things. So, they were doing a lot of work, and taking care of things. Good signal, matches what one would expect.

Those at the bottom. One of them had effectively been a 'systems engineer'; all of their time was working on requirements with the customer, making powerpoint, etc. Important work, so that signal was inverse of what it originally showed.

A couple were in the middle that had great reputations for technical expertise. They were spending almost full time in training / mentoring / very hard problems mode. Highly valuable, but not shown by looking at these numbers.

All the rest? 80% of the work was being done by 20% of the people. We could have dropped about 12 heads and barely noticed.

The problem is, you could not take action on this measure. It gave you a place to start, but you needed to know more about what was going on day to day.

I too made a post like this on here not that long ago. The point i was trying to make was to be AI knowledge first. The tools are here and someone has spent lots of money(foolishly yess!, But) creating this tools, so why not use them to your advantage. The one's that wait too long find themselves playing catch up on the next big thing that's comes of it. This is a phase that will blow over and in that process there is something cooking. Think of it as the stepping stone to the next era into the future. The future isn't created on its own, we must push for it. Hope doesn't do much in creating innovative advancements.

Before the smartpphones we have today there was touch pad LCD products all fighting for what now we call smartphones, that came with heavy innovative techniques to achieve a goal. The goal wasn't evident nor clear at the time.

This will lead to something else that is far more useful and could be harmful in many ways not just to employment.Economies are changing like never before transformational force are changing our lives as we speak. housing prices, Wages, Technology, Political Power, Warfare, ideologies, the list goes on. AI is the starting point in this new era. Choosing to use silly words like " This is not how we used to do things: no shit, we also used to ride horses and sacrifice virgins for it to rain. I don't know when people will ever get this ( The world is ever evolving) that is what humans do.

Having a say so and a control in what is harmful and what is helpful is just as equally important.

What happened was the audience changed. Before, the audience for things about writing code was mostly software developers. Now it's the employing class. The collective wisdom of engineers? It has little impact on the conversation because the audience doesn't care. In fact, it's more than indifference; many are eager to no longer be "burdened" by it.

Not only do they not want to pay our salaries, which is an expense, they're eager not to have to depend on our expertise or judgement as well. That judgement and expertise is a locus of control that resides outside their own hierarchy.