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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?

#121

Post by try-working »

simianwords wrote: post #114
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.

I've seen literally every company in the world launch a chat bot as their AI strategy. I've also had clients who "wanted to do something with AI", and they would only be happy when they saw a chat UI. I built Semantic Search. Improves business performance significantly without changing the UI. Nobody is impressed because you cannot show it around and talk about it. It looks the same. It has to look like real AI, they say.

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

#122

Post by [deleted] »

staticassertion wrote: post #91
garciasn wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have worked at many places and have seen the work of DEs and DSs that is borderline psychotic; but it got the job done, sorta. I have suffered through QA of 10000 lines that I ended up rewriting in less than 100. So, yes; I understand where you’re coming from. But; that’s not what we do.

Yes, but then you said that you do what I'm suggesting is still critical to do, which is maintain the codebase even if you heavily leverage models. " we do indeed take care to ensure we’re building these things the right way."

[deleted]

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

#123

Post by prewett »

> individual contributors are evaluated by their execution on deterministic tasks.

Ha! Apparently the author hasn't been asked "how long will it take to code this?" yet... And isn't a common developer complaint that management does not know how to evaluate them, and substitutes things like how quickly a task gets completed, with the result that some guy looks amazing while his coworkers get stuck with all his technical debt?

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

#124

Post by bitwize »

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…

A friend of mine works at a place whose CEO has been completely one-shotted; he vibe-coded an app and decided this could multiply their productivity like a hundredfold. And now he's implementing an AI mandate for every employee, replete with tracking and metrics and the threat of being fired of you don't play ball.

I was explaining this to my wife, who asked, why doesn't the CEO understand the limitations and the drawbacks the programmers are experiencing. And I said—he doesn't care, because he's looking at what other businesses are doing, what they're writing about in Bloomberg and WSJ, what "industry best practice is", and where the money is going. Trillions of dollars are going in to revolutionizing every industry with AI. If you're a CEO and you're not angling to capture a piece of that, then the board is going to have some serious questions about your capability to lead the company. Executives are often ignorant of the problems faced by line workers in a way perhaps best explained by a particular scene from Swordfish (2001): "He lives in a world beyond your world..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOV6YelKJ-A The complaints of a few programmers just don't matter when you have millions or billions of capital at your command, and business experts are saying you can tenfold your output with half the engineering workforce.

Right now there are only two choices for programmers: embrace generative AI fully and become proficient at it. Instead of surfacing problems with it, offer solutions: how can we use AI to make this better? Or have a very, very hard time working in the field.

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

#126

Post by auggierose »

detourdog wrote: post #65
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…

I'm sure an IC is not an integrated circuit or independent contractor. So what is it?

It is silicon valley speech for "programmer".

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

#127

Post by rkomorn »

detourdog wrote: post #65
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…

I'm sure an IC is not an integrated circuit or independent contractor. So what is it?

Individual Contributor, usually as opposed to any kind of management role.

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

#128

Post by 000ooo000 »

Aperocky wrote: post #48

IC here enamored with LLM - my implementation speed used to be a bottleneck of what I can do both professionally and personally, and now only thoughts and idea are the limit. That is incredibly exciting . Thoughts and idea as in "I will implement this in this structure, with these tradeoff, and it will work with these 4 APIs and have no extra features and here's how I'm (or LLM with tools is) going to run it and test…

>My competitive edge did not diminish, it expanded.

Reality check: LLMs are available to everyone, dev or otherwise, so your 'competitive edge' is indeed diminished if you believe LLMs are all that.

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