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When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

robert-glaser.de

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Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#181

Post by [deleted] »

herpderperator wrote: post #168
asdfman123 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) The game is not ending, it's changing. AI can sling a lot of code but we still need engineers that actually understand what the hell is going on. That's always been the bottleneck. It could eliminate junior positions, but seniors are fine for now. 2) It's been a hard lesson for me to learn because I'm naturally a contrarian, but you are hired to do what management wants you to do. If you resist, your best bet is t…

If you eliminate juniors over the next few years, there will be no seniors for the future when the current seniors retire.

[deleted]

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#182

Post by stronglikedan »

ravenstine wrote: post #32
olsondv wrote: post #6

The post hits the nail on the head with the messy middle. There is simply no motivation to develop this sort of intelligence loop as a dev who has their own responsibilities which their job depend on. Management can ask as nicely as they want, but I’m not going to selflessly share my productivity gains with the broader company for free. I might share a tool if it’s useful. All the learning of how to wrangle AI or set…

It kinda racks my brain how a lot of people don't think this way. For example, way before the current state of AI, I wrote my own CLI to make aspects of my job easier and easier to write scripts to automate; some colleagues have noticed my tool and said I should share it, and my diplomatically worded answer is no. I don't share it with anyone because of the negative return in both supporting it and everyone else bein…

> I don't share it with anyone because of the negative return in both supporting it and everyone else being able to be as productive as I am.

That sounds like a toxic environment. Sharing those types of things is how I got the recognition to get ahead in my career and I have never once regretted it.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#183

Post by KellyCriterion »

JohnMakin wrote: post #115
highfrequency wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s wrong with the finance team (vibe) coding a janky prototype for planning?

prototypes/mvp's often become the production version

...and are often still in place when the "magic guy who built it" left long time ago...

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#184

Post by lobb-deep »

stronglikedan wrote: post #182
ravenstine wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It kinda racks my brain how a lot of people don't think this way. For example, way before the current state of AI, I wrote my own CLI to make aspects of my job easier and easier to write scripts to automate; some colleagues have noticed my tool and said I should share it, and my diplomatically worded answer is no. I don't share it with anyone because of the negative return in both supporting it and everyone else bein…

> I don't share it with anyone because of the negative return in both supporting it and everyone else being able to be as productive as I am. That sounds like a toxic environment. Sharing those types of things is how I got the recognition to get ahead in my career and I have never once regretted it.

At least at the Fortune 500 level, there are only toxic environments. And job security has never been weaker.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#185

Post by pesus »

CoffeeOnWrite wrote: post #112
hnthrow0287345 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't share that with a manager even if they asked. If management were tech competent, they could proactively find inefficiencies themselves and allocate time to it instead of letting developers do all of the thinking for them. If they gave immediate raises or bonuses for stuff like this, then things would change.

Do y'all non-sharers not have equity in your companies?

The average dev probably doesn't have any significant amount of equity in their company. The stock price at my company going up just means my quarterly checks are going to be $4 instead of $3.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#186

Post by thephyber »

ambicapter wrote: post #161
Brian_K_White wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not true at all. In software, the factory line is nothing but cp or httpd and neither costs nor produces any value. In cars, the factory line both costs and produces all the value.

Really? So all the designers and engineers at Ford who don't have an iota of a car built by the time they're done with their work aren't producing any value?

Marketing and finance are also very large components of cost and value, respectively.

It was a short pithy sentence, but it does have a kernel of truth to it.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#187

Post by QuercusMax »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #127
palmotea wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So much of Management (both mid and executive) still considers Software as if it were an assembly line; "We make software just like how Ford makes cars". Code as a product. Which, it should be noted, is the dumbest idea ever . The Ford assembly line makes more-or-less identical copies of the same design. How do you do that with software? The cp command. If someone thinks like that, they probably read some business…

Precisely, cars are more-or-less identical copies, at each position along the assembly line its just one of a handful of variants of the step that needs to be executed. Software is less like an assembly line and more like plumbing: Some people design which type of pipe needs to be routed from here to there. The implementor actually pipes the outputs of one function, in a variable, and then taps it off as an argument…

The plumber who has a robot who can make perfectly measured custom one-off tools and specially constructed piping runs inside your walls is going to have super powers compared to somebody who has to go to home depot and assemble a bunch of PVC pipes or whatever.

Just the other day I needed to make a calibration interface for a home automation app (pointing a dumb webcam at my washer and dryer so I can tell if they're done without running up and down two flights or stairs). I just wanted to be able to look at the whole scene and manually pick the ROI to extract and display on my home dashboard. So I asked the AI to build me a stupid little web UI where I can just click to select the ROI center, and what it built me in 10 seconds was perfect for my needs.

Was it pretty? Not really. Was it what I would have built myself? Not quite - but it solved the problem I had without me needing to remember or look up how to do all the specifics.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#188

Post by zbentley »

mattmcknight wrote: post #36
pards wrote: post #7

In my large enterprise world, AI adoption hasn't made it outside of the development teams - only developers have access to Github Copilot. Code takes 6-12 months to make it from commit to production. Development speed was never the bottleneck; it's all the other processes that take time: infra provisioning, testing, sign-offs, change management, deployment scheduling etc. AI makes these post-development bottlenecks w…

"release train" ... "learn how to ship software faster" SAFe is poison.

What do release trains have to do with SAFe? I've worked in a few places that have the notion of a release train (roughly a mutex for "changes being shipped and a burn-in window afterwards" plus some optional batching of changes based on risk level or urgency). Only one of them even gave lip service to SAFe; others had different methodologies/levels of devops for releases/"Agile"-ness (whatever that means).

Release trains seemed like a mechanical release implementation detail in all cases; not the product or requirement of a given SDLC or process brand.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#189

Post by zbentley »

ge96 wrote: post #119
pards wrote: post #7

In my large enterprise world, AI adoption hasn't made it outside of the development teams - only developers have access to Github Copilot. Code takes 6-12 months to make it from commit to production. Development speed was never the bottleneck; it's all the other processes that take time: infra provisioning, testing, sign-offs, change management, deployment scheduling etc. AI makes these post-development bottlenecks w…

> Code takes 6-12 months to make it from commit to production. That seems wild, niche/highly specialized field?

Incredibly common outside of startups and low-risk small-to-medium sized webtech shops.

Re: When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

#190

Post by zbentley »

sanderjd wrote: post #172
dakiol wrote: post #126

If you're a regular engineer like me, there's no real upside to using AI in a company setting. They're boiling us. Of course, the HN elite (investors, execs, celebrities, and top-tier engineers) will say otherwise because "how can you be against innovation man?" AI/LLMs aren't innovation the way TCP/IP, linux, or postgres were. To be clear: claude/codex/gemini/grok/whatever exist for profit, to squeeze the last drop…

Seems like the upside is that it makes the job way easier? What am I missing?

What do you do all day at your job?

Serious question. I think the reason that there's such a disconnect among AI-for-work users about whether it's a panacea or bullshit accelerator is that different software developers have massively different duties and conceptions about what their job is or should be.

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