AI is a great revolutionary tool for work, but it is still a tool and needs humans to drive it. Obviously companies heard the promise of "Replace your large headcount expense with cheap tokens" and creamed their pants. Its funny to see them walk back, it will be at least a few years if not more before it replaces humans fully (and will need another breakthrough)
Back in dot-com, there used to be a website called f'ed company that chronicled the dot-com dead pool. This time around there needs to be a similar website that records AI walk backs so it helps the mgmt class not make stupid decisions.
The first attempt failed, so they caved in, but they’ll try again after a while and lay those people off again.
The dream of perpetual labor machine is something capitalists are willing to destroy the planet in order to chase their fictitious dream. Oppressors must be stopped.
Steer towards that Fully-Automated Luxury Communism.
Documentation driven development is your friend here. 75% of my workflow is generating documentation, at ever lower levels of abstraction, until it’s just code. The code usually comes out optimal, clean, and bug free (after passing tests) and. Suuuuuper well documented lol. It’s human in the loop over and over again tho
I tend to feel like, I start out with a rough idea of a program I want to write in my head. I find it easier to just write the code directly than to write a document with sufficient detail about how I want it to work for an LLM to actually write the right code, then have the LLM write the code. And the resulting documentation is about as likely to be useless or a burden as it is to be helpful in the future.
You don’t write the doc. You talk to the LLM about the idea and the anchor points, and have it write the doc.
Society is incredibly inconsistent on this point. If a CEO shit-cans 500 people who sacrificed future career prospects for the company and end up destitute, society say's that's capitalism and they need to learn to code in a month or something. If a stay at home wife gets "bored" and divorces her husband of 20 years, he commonly owes her a decade+ of alimony to "make up for the sacrifice and time to get on her feet"…
> As usual it's communism for the plebs and something entirely different for the capital wielding class. Bad example. Ask Bezos how much he paid his wife after the divorce.
It's a good point, the counterpoint is, he really only had to cushion the post-association lifestyle of one of thousands whom became dependent on his amazon business, a tiny fraction. A typical pleb will be held to cushion the lifestyle of nearly everyone who depends on their paycheck if someone decides to terminate the relationship (usually, their spouse and kids -- in USA this doesn't extend to elderly parents though it does in some other countries).
Generally, you don’t want to punish people for making decisions. At least I don’t. I value people who are willing to try things and I generally believe any decision made in good faith is better than no decision. My litmus test is was it a reasonable decision given the information available at the time in service of a greater goal. I can live with the consequences of that. If it turns out to be a not so great decision…
Society is incredibly inconsistent on this point. If a CEO shit-cans 500 people who sacrificed future career prospects for the company and end up destitute, society say's that's capitalism and they need to learn to code in a month or something. If a stay at home wife gets "bored" and divorces her husband of 20 years, he commonly owes her a decade+ of alimony to "make up for the sacrifice and time to get on her feet"…
A job doesn't usually involve a lifetime contract. And if it does, the severance required had better be incredible.
Nobody should "sacrifice future career prospects" just for a job. And if they do, it's hard to blame the employer on this, especially considering the premise implies they had choice in the matter.
There's the added cost that the best people are the least likely to return after a layoff.
And those which return will have zero loyalty to firm. Once you were dumped for AI gamble, you will never do the extra work, because you will probably be dumped in year or so, when someone else will get same or different stupid idea. But it's not stupid idea, it's more like desperate attempt to remain in game in competitive market by doing what everyone else does. Idea crafted to final decision by people paid to see…
Perhaps if the rank and file at a company see personal consequence for those in the topmost posistions (salary deductions, demotions, or firing) in response to such glaring fuck ups that might even help mitigate some of these morale issues.
There is a huge cost for this either way (severance packages, yes, but also lost productivity, reduced team coherence, etc), but that unfortunately doesn’t necessarily translate to a political cost for the managers involved in pushing the dumb idea, particularly if the CEO was pressuring everyone for cost savings. They will escape by saying, “We did it because everyone else is doing it and we were told it was the rig…
> We did it because everyone else is doing it and we were told it was the right thing. How were we to know that it wouldn’t work?” And why does the board/shareholders allow a CEO to continue into their position by just following everyone else? I'm sure things are different at massive scales, but I run my own side business (photography). I watch the local market, and I have the attitude of "Whatever everyone else is d…
Let’s be honest about how the incentives work at large companies. The CEO probably has a $10m/yr comp package. The EVPs under him are $3m-$5m each. Nobody is really interested in making the company wildly successful, because that would entail lots of risk. Better to just keep everything moving along at the market average, don’t get fired, and collect the package every year. If you’re lucky, you do this for 3-5 years and you collect another $10-$20m termination package when they fire you. Then you hire an executive headhunter to get you the next gig and you repeat it. So, your main goal is to play defense. Don’t do anything risky that would get you fired. Pay McKinsey to bless whatever you want to do and if it blows up, blame them and call Accenture or Deloitte next time. Rotate between management consultants as required. Buy your tech from IBM, because nobody gets fired for buying IBM. Yes, your whole career will be MEH, but you can vacation all the time at your multiple houses in the Hamptons and Italy.