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AI-First Company Memos

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Re: AI-First Company Memos

#101

Post by munk-a »

nilkn wrote: post #80
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s simply not true. Developers hand-writing assembly readily adopted compilers, accountants readily adopted spreadsheets, and farmers readily adopted tractors and powered mills.

That's false. Those things were in fact resisted in some cases. For instance, look up the swing riots of the 1830s.

There might be a temporary resistance from violence but eventually competition will take over. The issue in this case is that we're not looking at voluntary adoption due to a competitive advantage - we're seeing adoption by fiat.

AI is a broad category of tools, some of which are highly useful to some people - but mandating wide adoption is going to waste a lot of people's time on inefficient tools.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#102

Post by asa400 »

steveBK123 wrote: post #19
upupupandaway wrote: post #6

I work for a large tech company, and our CTO has just released a memo with a new rubric for SDEs that includes "AI Fluency". We also have a dashboard with AI Adoption per developer, that is being used to surveil the teams lagging on the topic. All very depressing. A friend of mine is an engineer of a large pre-IPO startup, and their VP of AI just demanded every single employee needs to create an agent using Claude. T…

This is absolutely the norm across corporate America right now. Chief AI Czars enforcing AI usage metrics with mandatory AI training for anyone that isn't complying. People with roles nowhere near software/tech/data are being asked about their AI usage in their self-assessment/annual review process, etc. It's deeply fascinating psychologically and I'm not sure where this ends. I've never seen any tech theme pushed to…

> I've never seen any tech theme pushed top down so hard in 20+ years working.

> The common theme is C-suite thinks it will save money and their competitors already figured out out, so they are FOMOing at the mouth about catching up on the savings.

I concur 100%. This is a monkey-see-monkey-do FOMO mania, and it's driven by the C-suite, not rank-and-file. I've never seen anything like it.

Other sticky "productivity movements" - or, if you're less generous like me, fads - at the level of the individual and the team, for example agile development methodologies or object oriented programming or test driven development, have generally been invented and promoted by the rank and file or by middle management. They may or may not have had some level of industry astroturfing to them (see: agile), but to me the crucial difference is that they were mostly pushed by a vanguard of practitioners who were at most one level removed from the coal face.

Now, this is not to say there aren't developers and non-developer workers out there using this stuff with great effectiveness and singing its praises. That _is_ happening. But they're not at the leading edge of it mandating company-wide adoption.

What we are seeing now is, to a first approximation, the result of herd behavior at the C-level. It should be incredibly concerning to all of us that such a small group of lemming-like people should have such an enormously outsized role in both allocating capital and running our lives.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#103

Post by goatlover »

chung8123 wrote: post #90
ryandrake wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how all these companies issue these sorts of policies in lock-step with each other. The same happened with "Return To Office". All of a sudden every company decided to kill work from home within the same week or so. Is there some secret CEO cabal that meets on a remote island somewhere to coordinate what they're going to all make workers do next?

It is investor sentiment and FOMO. If your investors feel like AI is the answer you will need to start using AI. I am not as negative on AI as the rest of the group here though. I think AI first companies will out pace companies that never start to learn the AI muscle. From my prospective these memos mostly seem reasonable.

If AI is the answer, then there's no reason for a top-down mandate like this. People will just start using as they see fit because it helps them do their jobs better, instead of it being forced on them, which doesn't sound much like AI is the answer investors thought it was.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#104

Post by badc0ffee »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #10

Whatever happened to "show, don't tell"? Other productivity boosters certainly didn't need such memos; they were naturally adopted because the benefits were unambiguous. There were no "IDE-first company memos" or "software framework-first company memos"; devs organically picked these up because the productivity gains were immediately self-evident.

20 years ago or so, we had an exec ask us about our unit tests.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#105

Post by munk-a »

debo_ wrote: post #5
whiplash451 wrote: post #3

It's so sad to see some of these companies completely fail their AI-first communication [1], when they would just get so much from "We think AI can transform the way we work. We're giving you access to all these tools, please tell us what works and what doesn't". And that would be it. [1] there was a remote universe where I could see myself working for Shopify, now that company is sitting somewhere between Wipro and…

Unfortunately at this scale, when you are this soft on the message, everyone ignores it and keeps doing what they were doing before. Carrot and stick are both required for performance management at this scale. You can argue whether the bet is worth it or not, but to even take the bet, you need a lot more than some resources and a "please".

If performance was the true goal then we'd just naturally see slow adopters unperform and phase out of that company. If you make good tooling available and it is significantly impactful the results will be extremely obvious - and, just speaking from a point of view of psychology, if the person next to you is able to do their job in half the time because they experimented with new tooling _and sees some personal benefit from it_ then you'll be curious and experiment too!

It might be that these companies don't care about actual performance or it might be that these companies are too cheap/poorly run to reward/incentivize actual performance gains but either way... the fault is on leadership.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#106

Post by nilkn »

munk-a wrote: post #101
nilkn wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's false. Those things were in fact resisted in some cases. For instance, look up the swing riots of the 1830s.

There might be a temporary resistance from violence but eventually competition will take over. The issue in this case is that we're not looking at voluntary adoption due to a competitive advantage - we're seeing adoption by fiat. AI is a broad category of tools, some of which are highly useful to some people - but mandating wide adoption is going to waste a lot of people's time on inefficient tools.

The competitive advantage belongs to companies, not engineers. That's exactly the conflict. What you're predicting -- voluntary adoption due to advantages -- is precisely what is happening, but it's happening at the company level. It's why companies are mandating it and some engineers are resisting it. Just like in the riots I mentioned -- introduction of agricultural machinery was a unilateral decision made by landowners and tenant farmers, often directly against the wishes of the laborers.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#107

Post by steveBK123 »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #17
upupupandaway wrote: post #6

I work for a large tech company, and our CTO has just released a memo with a new rubric for SDEs that includes "AI Fluency". We also have a dashboard with AI Adoption per developer, that is being used to surveil the teams lagging on the topic. All very depressing. A friend of mine is an engineer of a large pre-IPO startup, and their VP of AI just demanded every single employee needs to create an agent using Claude. T…

This feels like a construction company demanding that everyone, from drywaller to admin assistant, go out and buy a drill.

It's really cascaded down too.

Each department head needs to incorporate into their annual business plan how they are going to use a drill as part of their job in accounting/administration/mailroom.

Throughout the year, must coordinate training & enforce attendance for the people in their department with drill training mandated by the Head of Drilling.

And then they must comply with and meet drilling utilization metrics in order to meet their annual goals.

Drilling cannot be fail, it can only be failed.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#108

Post by goatlover »

debo_ wrote: post #5
whiplash451 wrote: post #3

It's so sad to see some of these companies completely fail their AI-first communication [1], when they would just get so much from "We think AI can transform the way we work. We're giving you access to all these tools, please tell us what works and what doesn't". And that would be it. [1] there was a remote universe where I could see myself working for Shopify, now that company is sitting somewhere between Wipro and…

Unfortunately at this scale, when you are this soft on the message, everyone ignores it and keeps doing what they were doing before. Carrot and stick are both required for performance management at this scale. You can argue whether the bet is worth it or not, but to even take the bet, you need a lot more than some resources and a "please".

If everyone is ignoring it, it can't be that great. If it's that great, people will adopt it organically based on how it's useful for them.

Re: AI-First Company Memos

#109

Post by munk-a »

nilkn wrote: post #106
munk-a wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There might be a temporary resistance from violence but eventually competition will take over. The issue in this case is that we're not looking at voluntary adoption due to a competitive advantage - we're seeing adoption by fiat. AI is a broad category of tools, some of which are highly useful to some people - but mandating wide adoption is going to waste a lot of people's time on inefficient tools.

The competitive advantage belongs to companies, not engineers. That's exactly the conflict. What you're predicting -- voluntary adoption due to advantages -- is precisely what is happening, but it's happening at the company level. It's why companies are mandating it and some engineers are resisting it. Just like in the riots I mentioned -- introduction of agricultural machinery was a unilateral decision made by lando…

A well run company would provide an incentive to their employees for increasing their productivity. Why would employees enthusiastically respond to a mandate that will provide them with no benefit?

Companies are just groups of employees - and if the companies are failing to provide a clear rationale to increase productivity those companies will fail.

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