> It doesn't help that the west has a clear bias wherein moving "up" is moving away from the work.
Curious how you verify this behavior would be unique to the West?
Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?
151–160 of 179 posts
Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?
#152They don’t have to use the tech, except maybe superficially. They are either being explicitly mislead by salespeople or like others have mentioned, it simply is a vehicle to confirm their own biases or annoyance at having to pay peons. It’s up to the grunts to actually make this work. It’s like Marc Andressen bloviating about how AI will replace everyone except him. To be fair, some of this is understandable. At some…
> It’s like Marc Andressen bloviating about how AI will replace everyone except him.
It's honestly insane that they think this.
They really don't understand that they're building something they cannot possibly control, if it turns out to be what they're envisioning.
Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?
#153AI 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.
But what’s your expectations here? Should companies pretend LLMs don’t exist and just continue as before, or do we need some way of acknowledging there’s a new technology that, when put to good use, can increase productivity?
Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?
#154It's yet another "silver bullet". That's why management loves it and engineers are like "it's just a tool, we still need code review."
Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?
#155[dead]
Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?
#156IC 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.
Of course it is generally available, but I can use it to get 50x gain whereas for others it maybe 3x or even negative.
Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm not talking about LLM, of course they save time.
I'm talking about adding code to a code base. After a certain size, it's mostly garbage. I subscribe to the old unix principle and I have yet to seen a reason how LLM has changed it, it in fact became much more important now as a coding agent would happily add any crap to any repository.
Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if your background just has you fooled. I worked on a data science team and code was always a commodity. Most data scientists know how to code in a fairly trivial way, just enough to get their models built and served. Even data engineers largely know how to just take that and deploy to Spark. They don't really do much software engineering beyond that. I'm not being precious here or protective of my "art" or…
I'm a software engineer and _I_ don't understand the aesthetic value of code. I'm interested in architecture and maintainability but I couldn't give a rats ass on how some section of code looks like, so long as it conforms to a style guide and is maintainable.
> so long as it conforms to a style guide and is maintainable.
Most people consider aesthetic values to align with these things.
Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?
#159Earlier 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.
you're a slop maker
Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?
#160I think executives are excited about AI because it confirms their worldview: that the work is a commodity and the real value lies in orchestration and strategy. It doesn't help that the west has a clear bias wherein moving "up" is moving away from the work. Many executives often don't know what good looks like at the detail level, so they can't evaluate AI output quality.
This is definitely part of it. I think another part of it is that AI tools demo really well, easily hiding how imperfect and limited they are when people see a contrived or cherry-picked example. Not a lot of people have a good intuition for this yet. Many people understand "a functional prototype is not a production app" but far fewer people understand "an AI that can be demonstrated to write functional code is not…
Another thing that I think is critical: AI (by default) responds to you like the leadership-idealized version of an employee: Totally subservient, humble, pleasant, endlessly excited, and always, always telling you that you're absolutely right. AI is like an energetic intern who knows his place on the totem pole and wants to please. The kind of Yes Man, I'll Do It Man that CEOs consider the ideal employee.