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CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

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Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#151

Post by AnimalMuppet »

sarchertech wrote: post #149
jimbokun wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. There was an unequivocal claim that it will work better than our current system.

They said “Acting like centrally planned dictatorships is a good form of collaboration is just so off base. There's no reason to think that introducing democracy into the work place wouldn't immediately benefit both workers + customers.” That sounds more like there’s no evidence that it won’t work than an unequivocal claim that it will.

Well... there is historical evidence that centrally planned dictatorships are not a very responsive form of government.

Now, corporations usually have the problem of competition, so if they aren't responsive (or at least responsive enough), they get out-competed by those that are. Is that enough to make them different from governments? Perhaps, but I don't know.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#152

Post by mjr00 »

tauserfunnel wrote: post #127
socketcluster wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agree. Shipping a complete product with a functioning user acquisition funnel is much harder. It's like; you have to build the whole product first with lots of features and then you have to try to create a highly condensed overview of all those features to expose them all on the landing page. If you can't make the visitor understand your entire complex product in 10 seconds, then you've lost them. Your product…

I hate to use a throwaway, but this bit: > with a functioning user acquisition funnel How do you actually get this. I've got a product, the site is hand crafted, shows the complex product really well (and had good feedback on it) but how do I acquire the users? It seems as the cost of creating software has plummeted, it's the actual sales side of it that's going to matter even more. I'm stuck at this point.

"How do I acquire users" is the entire function of sales and marketing. A single HN comment explaining how to do sales and marketing, which is highly dependent on your product and market (and much more difficult than technical people tend to believe), is a bit unrealistic. And a great opportunity to use Claude/ChatGPT for something other than code. There's no silver bullet but as a springboard you can think about:

Who is your ideal customer profile (look up buyer personas) -- if you're B2B figure out both the profile of the company who would buy, as well as the person who would actually buy, and the person who would actually use the software: remember that buyer != user in B2B scenarios, and you'll have to figure out if the buyer, user or both is the best path to getting a sale. If you're B2C figure out your buyer personas so you know where to advertise.

Why would people want your product; sounds like you may already have this down but be ready to explain your value proposition concisely.

How will these people hear about your product -- a SaaS that falls in the woods doesn't make a sound, you need people to learn your product exists before they can pay for it. This is the point of figuring out buyer personas, you need to meet your customers where they are, and you can't know where they are unless you know who they are. This is highly dependent on your product/personas, and could range from running LinkedIn ads to SEO to having a Bluesky brand account to going to local meetup groups or conferences and trying to get your first handful of users in-person.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#153

Post by cornholio »

socketcluster wrote: post #55
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #39

Reminds me of the old joke "90% of the code is 90% of the work. The last 10% of the code is the other 90% of the work." I have spent almost my entire adult life (since 1986) shipping products. One of the very first things that I learned, was that "shipping" > "designing". There's so much work in delivering products that will carry your brand, and then must be supported. I liken it to having children. Conceiving them…

Fully agree. Shipping a complete product with a functioning user acquisition funnel is much harder. It's like; you have to build the whole product first with lots of features and then you have to try to create a highly condensed overview of all those features to expose them all on the landing page. If you can't make the visitor understand your entire complex product in 10 seconds, then you've lost them. Your product…

I'm not entirely sure how that dismisses the CEO's putative argument: they go big on AI precisely because shipping end-to-end is hard, so they think they shouldn't waste resources on tasks that can be automated.

The structure of a good argument would be something like: certain tasks are fundamentally human and impossible to automate (which and why?) and by pushing AI use beyond what is optimal you are actually hurting your employees ability to do those hard parts.

A weaker but still useful argument is that most everything can probably be automated, but frontier models aren't there yet.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#155

Post by ofModel35ba3b »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #39

Reminds me of the old joke "90% of the code is 90% of the work. The last 10% of the code is the other 90% of the work." I have spent almost my entire adult life (since 1986) shipping products. One of the very first things that I learned, was that "shipping" > "designing". There's so much work in delivering products that will carry your brand, and then must be supported. I liken it to having children. Conceiving them…

[dead]

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#156

Post by californical »

hintymad wrote: post #109
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #39

Reminds me of the old joke "90% of the code is 90% of the work. The last 10% of the code is the other 90% of the work." I have spent almost my entire adult life (since 1986) shipping products. One of the very first things that I learned, was that "shipping" > "designing". There's so much work in delivering products that will carry your brand, and then must be supported. I liken it to having children. Conceiving them…

> There's so much work in delivering products that will carry your brand, and then must be supported. People think otherwise with AI partly because Anthropic kept telling us that they didn't have to write code or review code any more for most of their work. Their agent swarms just comb through their github, slack and wikis to figure out what to do next, and another swarm of agents just review, test, merge, deploy, A/…

> the safeguards will limit effectiveness through methods such as prompt modification, steering vectors, or parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT)

Holy crap that is dark. I like learning about ML for fun, and now I have to assume that their model is intentionally misinforming me to sabotage my learning? It is absolutely bananas that somebody decided that was ok behavior.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#157

Post by strangattractor »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #39

Reminds me of the old joke "90% of the code is 90% of the work. The last 10% of the code is the other 90% of the work." I have spent almost my entire adult life (since 1986) shipping products. One of the very first things that I learned, was that "shipping" > "designing". There's so much work in delivering products that will carry your brand, and then must be supported. I liken it to having children. Conceiving them…

%80 of CEOs are Meh. %10 of the CEOs add value to the company. %10 of the CEOs are actually detrimental. The %80 will always try and do what they think the top %10 CEOs do because of FOMO. The bottom %10 will do it because they know their days are numbered and hope that it might put them in the %80 keeping their jobs. A good LLM could probably replace most and not do any worse.

Good CEOs don't see their employees as an expense.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#158

Post by sbarre »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #19
sbarre wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what if it is? The example still stands. A "unit of work" that required X people to complete in Y time can now be done by X/Z people in Y time, where Z is whatever efficiency you are able to get out of applying AI tooling to your business. For some companies, Z might be less than 1 though. ;-) So you still need skilled people, just not the same amount as before, because you have different tools available to you. T…

That supposes that AI has a positive impact to efficiency. So far I see the exact contrary, at least for software engineering.

I see tons of evidence of positive impact, but I suppose everyone has their own perspective.

I did try to account for that with this line:

> For some companies, Z might be less than 1 though. ;-)

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#159

Post by 99954bb63ccc »

So, a lot of the article makes several points that aren't necessarily new, but

> The problem tends to show up when a CEO is handed an agentic tool like Claude Code, and has it create something, which will work just fine, and thinks “oh, wait, why do we need so many people, when I can just sit here and make things work?”

> This is a bad CEO.

As described, this seems to me more like a lack of reasoning/critical thinking ability, and it's not unique to CEOs. Tracks more with a combo of "Gell-Mann Amnesia" and automation bias IMO.

> This all reminds me of cargo cult thinking: The CEO knows that somewhere in the org, employees are pecking away at computers and work gets done. So they figure that themselves pecking away with Claude Code and seeing work get done is the same thing. It’s not. All those other steps those people are handling — the ones the CEO never sees — still need to happen.

"Cargo culting" as described here by the author may be happening. But, I think it's CEOs seeing other CEOs doing layoffs and claiming it's because of AI efficiency gains. They see the other CEO's stock go up/get hyped/etc, so they decide to do it. I think it's the same thing that happens inside companies IE people see how others behave and it works, so they do the same. Effectiveness aside because that's not at all what I'm arguing, AI is just the current flavor; it is a very safe thing to "cargo cult" at the moment.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#160

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

stasomatic wrote: post #144
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The context that they think that shipping is simple. Shipping (what you need all those annoying peons for) is really terribly difficult, and has a lot of moving parts that designers often fail to take into account, until the deployment people lock them into a restroom stall, and refuse to let them out, unless they listen. That's common with newer engineers (and now, non-engineers). I believe that Mr. Dunning, and Mr.…

Thank you. You spent some time at Apple, no? There is that “real artists ship” or “great artists steal”, but I wonder what he’d say now. Just fun to think about.

Not as an employee, but I've been an Apple developer since '86. Had fairly intimate relationships with them, at various points in my career.
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