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This meeting happens literally every week, and has for years. Feels like the media is making a mountain out of a mole hill here.
I'm not sure the sustainable solution is to treat an excess of lower-quality code output as the fixed thing to work with, and operationalize around that, but sure.
Take a perfectly productive senior developer and instead make him be responsible for output of a bunch of AI juniors with the expectation of 10x output.
I'm not surprised by the outages, but I am surprised that they're leaning into human code review as a solution rather than a neverending succession of LLM PR reviewers. I wonder if it's an early step towards an apprenticeship system.
How else would they train the LLM PR reviewers to their standards?
I've never personally been in the position, because my entire career has been in startups, but I've had many friends be in the unenviable position of training their replacements. Here's the thing though, at least they knew they were training their replacements. We could be looking at a potential future where an employee or contractor doesn't realize s/he is actually just hired to generate training data for an LLM to replace them, and then be cut.
I'm not surprised by the outages, but I am surprised that they're leaning into human code review as a solution rather than a neverending succession of LLM PR reviewers. I wonder if it's an early step towards an apprenticeship system.
They're torn between "we want to fire 80% of you" and "... but if we don't give up quality/reliability, LLMs only save a little time, not a ton, so we can only fire like 5% of you max".
(It's the same in writing, these things are only a huge speed-up if it's OK for the output to be low-quality, but good output using LLMs only saves a little time versus writing entirely by-hand—so far, anyway, of course these systems are changing by the day, but this specific limitation has remained true for about four years now, without much improvement)
This “mandatory meeting” is just the usual weekly company-wide meeting where recent operational issues are discussed. There was a big operational issue last week, so of course this week will have more attendance and discussion. This meeting happens literally every week, and has for years. Feels like the media is making a mountain out of a mole hill here.
That's been their job ever since cable news was invented.
So basically, kill the productivity of senior engineers, kill the ability for junior engineers to learn anything, and ensure those senior engineers hate their jobs.
Bold move, we'll see how that goes.
Review by a senior is one of the biggest "silver bullet" illusions managers suffer from. For a person (senior or otherwise) to examine code or configuration with the granularity required to verify that it even approximates the result of their own level of experience, even only in terms of security/stability/correctness, requires an amount of time approaching the time spent if they had just done it themselves.
I.e. senior review is valuable, but it does not make bad code good.
This is one major facet of probably the single biggest problem of the last couple decades in system management: The misunderstanding by management that making something idiot proof means you can now hire idiots (not intended as an insult, just using the terminology of the phrase "idiot proof").
> The response for now? Junior and mid-level engineers can no longer push AI-assisted code without a senior signing off. So basically, kill the productivity of senior engineers, kill the ability for junior engineers to learn anything, and ensure those senior engineers hate their jobs. Bold move, we'll see how that goes.