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Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

johnjwang.com

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Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

#111

Post by atomic_reed »

withinboredom wrote: post #54
xixixao wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think the exec job is? What do they do every day, every working hour? And how will AI replace that?

It’s not a mystery… I can tell you what I do most days, and probably 80% of it is communication. An AI could do that. That communication is to learn what is going on up, down, and across the org. I mostly want to make sure we aren’t doing redundant work — though sometimes that is useful, and making sure timelines aren’t slipping. Oh, and dealing with conflicts. The other 20% is writing: policies, SOPs, audits, grants…

[dead]

Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

#112

Post by tdsanchez »

Because like everything else in technology, executive don’t understand it beyond a first order level and assign their own value system to it. It seems like magic TO THEM because they’ve never been able to orchestrate such capability without friction until now and that is the shadow of 20 years of search and semantic search stagnation mostly due to Google.

Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

#113

Post by UtopiaPunk »

I don't buy it. Executives worry about labor costs, ARR, RoI, etc. The grandest promises of AI are that executives will make a lot more money with a lot fewer employees. Of course they are pushing it!

ICs worry about doing their job (either doing it well because they care about their craft, or doing it good enough because they need to pay bills). AI doesn't really promise them anything. Maybe they automate some of their tasks away, but that just means they will take on more tasks. For practically any IC, there is no increase in wealth nor reduction in labor time. There is only a new quiet lingering threat that they might be laid off if an executive determines they're not needed anymore.

That's the difference in enthusiasm about AI.

Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

#114

Post by simianwords »

try-working wrote: post #6

I'm an IC and I love it. Executives have the wrong concept of AI. For them it's chat + magic, and then it does everything. You can't work with people who have incorrect concepts about how the world works. Best ignore them.

> For them it's chat + magic, and then it does everything

Look, I know that we like poking fun at some people but generally I haven't seen execs saying this.

Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

#115

Post by simianwords »

mystraline wrote: post #27

IC is a strange relabeling of a "worker". When you analyze this as "Management loves AI" and "workers hate it" goes completely back to 'who owns the means of production?', and can be clearly seen within Marx's critique.

> When you analyze this as "Management loves AI" and "workers hate it" goes completely back to 'who owns the means of production?', and can be clearly seen within Marx's critique.

How? Marx's critique doesn't land here at all.

Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

#116

Post by simianwords »

I liked the article but it misses one point. ICs take pride in some types of expertise they have accumulated over the years. AI kinda nullifies this. For instance, if I worked with Python/Django for ~5-10 years I might have become a sort of expert in Django. I know exactly the utility methods, conventions to use etc. But there's little need for such expertise with AI.

Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

#117

Post by afavour »

kolinko wrote: post #42
afavour wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope that’s exaggeration because being unable to operate without it means you’re going to do a terrible job of reviewing the code it’s producing.

Since the November/December Opus and Claude Code, I found I don't need to read the code any more. Architecture overview sure, and testing yes, but not reading the code directly any more. Me (and my friends similarly) inspect code indirectly now - telling agents to write reports about certain aspects of the code and architecture etc.

If I were you I’d very worried about getting laid off. That kind of work isn’t going to keep earning a software engineer salary.

Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

#118

Post by simianwords »

pron wrote: post #94
garciasn wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lead a team of Data Engineers, DevOps Engineers, and Data Scientists. I write code and have done so literally for my entire life. AI-assisted codegen is incredible; especially over the last 3-4m. I understand that developers feel their code is an art form and are pissed off that their life’s work is now a commodity; but, it’s time to either accept it and move on with what has happened, specialize as an actual artis…

My problem with the code the agents produce has nothing to do with style or art. The clearest example of how bad it is was shown by Anthropic's experiements where agents failed to write a C compiler , which is not a very hard programming job to begin with if you know compilers, as the models do, but they failed even with a practically unrealistic level of assistance (a complete spec, thousands of human-written tests,…

The thing is for most places the kind of code they write is good enough. You have painted an awfully pessimistic picture that frankly does not mirror reality of many enterprises.

> What does it say when a compiler expert that knows multiple compilers pretty much by heart, with access to thousands of tests, can't even write a C compiler?

It does not know compilers by heart. That's just not true. The point of the experiment was to see how big of a codebase it can handle without human intervention and now we know the limits. The limitation has always been context size.

>By which I don't mean they never do, but you really can't trust them to do it as you can a programmer. Knowing to code, like knowing to fly a plane, doesn't mean sometimes getting the right result. It means always getting the right result (within your capabilities that are usually known in advance in the case of humans).

Getting things right ~90% of the time still saves me a lot of time. In fact I would assume this is how autopilot also works in that it does 90% of a job and the pilot is required to supervise it.

Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

#119

Post by simianwords »

Aperocky wrote: post #52
pron wrote: post #18

As someone who's both an IC and leads other developers I disagree with the explanation. As a technical lead, with people I can much better predict the quality of the outcome than with LLMs, and the "failure modes" are much more manageable. As a programmer, I am actually more impressed with AI agents but in an informed and qualified way. Their debugging ability wows me; their coding ability disappoints and frustrates…

pass a certain LOC number, the utility become negative (unless they were pure tests).

I disagree because I use it in a pretty huge codebase and it definitely saves time.

Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

#120

Post by simianwords »

atmavatar wrote: post #104
fcarraldo wrote: post #10

AI allows executives to spend R&D to create a flywheel which builds more, faster, without hiring more. It makes every individual employee able to deliver more. ICs dislike this because it raises expectations and puts the spotlight on delivery velocity. In a manufacturing analogy, it’s the same as adding robots that enables workers to pack twice as many pallets per day. You work the same hours, but you’re more tired,…

ICs dislike this because executives haven't been shy that their goal in increasing productivity with LLMs is to reduce headcount. Additionally, we have 50 years of data showing that increased productivity only marginally increases pay, if at all - all the gains are captured by the executives. The more appropriate tools for ICs are torches and pitchforks.

IC's can cry about it because they did the exact same thing to the people they replaced.
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