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How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

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Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#211

Post by alkonaut »

worriedformyjob wrote: post #13

Obviously using a throwaway here. Our board members got it into their heads that successful companies must have an AI "play", so they instructed the CEO to invest about 10% of our development budget on AI. We are doing absolutely inane projects that have no hope of succeeding. We serve a niche industry where certified professionals have to do certain tasks personally, instead of being able to delegate to secretaries.…

Many of us have been there. I think what struck me was how low the treshold really is for what's accepted as "AI" in most industries.

Do this:

1. make something that has some "modern" AI such as deep learning in it, but that doesn't do anything much useful (because that's almost impossible in most cases). E.g. predict something trivial based on a time series, and repoort it. We all know how hard this is, so just take some hello world ML project and change some inputs.

2. Find some easy project that actually makes business sense, and that isn't yet done, and can be done with simple logic or some old school "traditional" ML or constraint solving e.g. a scheduling/optimization problem.

3. Make sure these efforts are "merged" so that the fancy AI tech AND the measurable good outcome is the same project. The "AI" moonshot of the company.

4. You can now say you are doing "AI", you have measurable success.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#212

Post by fancyfish »

denkmoon wrote: post #53

I am currently employed to develop an entire data analytics system because a government department can't get their firewall rules right. None of the members of this government department want a bespoke system, they want to use tools they are familiar with but due to the firewall rules this isn't possible.

It truly is fascinating, the world of tools and ecosystems built up to sidestep inane security rules in organizations.

Spoken from experience, this includes things like Anaconda in orgs where devs can’t use just any Python packages, or scripts from the internet copied and pasted into files because the firewall blocks git cloning. One could even consider AWS as a platform for devs to get around InfoSec red tape and have some semblance of control. The goal as a dev here is to fight the fewest fights to make tools available, by getting access to the biggest “bundles” of tooling they can.

In such organizations, there is either no concept of cost/benefit of overly restrictive firewall rules, etc, or the culture is such that the security team has become entrenched and unquestionable.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#213

Post by tome »

Apocryphon wrote: post #89

Don't want this to turn into a big politics tangent, but I've thought that one use case for a tech workers union is to be able to push back against questionable business decisions from management. I've seen places where engineers and other ICs, some team leads and managers, those with far more experience and clout at me, voice skepticism against questionable product decisions coming from upper management, only to rec…

> People imagine tech unions will just be a rehash of Industrial Era blue collar unions, but they have the potential to be something more- a way for the rank and file to finally have the clout to push back against bad engineering decisions from poor leadership.

They probably ought to promote those organisations under a different name then.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#214

Post by kevsim »

This article makes me feel very fortunate to work the way we do in my company. We have tight feedback loops with our users, we plan work together as a team (not just a PM dictating things), we're not forced to give finger-in-the-air estimates (we work on stuff until it's good enough to ship and then ship it) and we follow up with analytics and user interviews to figure out if we achieved the outcome we were after. We rinse and we repeat.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#215

Post by arethuza »

bob33212 wrote: post #63
reading-at-work wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we all know the project will fail unless someone develops well-perfoming, human-level AGI before Q4/2020 This is hilarious, and makes me wonder how many similar corporate AI initiatives are under way in the world right now.

I have had a couple conversations where a business guy starts off with a decent idea then he says something like "the cognitive AI module will fill out your expense report after watching you do it for a couple weeks". What the fuck? If I had the ability to code a cognitive AI module which could do that I would not be building it for you, I would solve self driving and license the software for billions.

I had a moment like that once where the product manager said something like "at this stage of the process the software will go off and find the documents specifically relevant to this stage" - and I was like pointing out we could do a search but that might bring back irrelevant stuff or fail to find relevant stuff - he insisted that it would automatically find just the exact documents people would need at that stage in the process.

It was an "AI complete" feature as up to that point it required someone who knew what they were doing to decide what documents were actually relevant - not "close enough".

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#216

Post by brain5ide »

fxtentacle wrote: post #157
hieunc229 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business guys usually comes together and brag about their works. Quite often, they start to talk about things they heard but don’t understand much. And the other one hear about it, get excited, but also don’t understand much. Then on the meeting, he brought the idea up and convince everyone to do it. The next you know, you’re pulling your hair out trying to understand what is going on

Yes, the best salesperson is usually the one least concerned with reality. Or as one VC put it: Never let facts get in the way of a good story.

Him selling you that as an original was an instance of that itself as it's a Mark Twain quote. Funny how that works.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#217

Post by [deleted] »

petre wrote: post #121
vxNsr wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solve self driving? How bout market prediction and just play the market forever. Why would you risk failure when you can just do nothing and make trillions?

Financier Martin Armstrong claims to have exactly such a system but it doesn't predict the market, it only makes quite accurate market forecasts.

[deleted]

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#218

Post by C1sc0cat »

buu700 wrote: post #146
noizejoy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The story would probably make little sense to most HN readers, since it's very old and what was very non-obvious back then, became very obvious 5 years later. Around 1994/95 client/server was unassailable in board rooms (much like AI is now). And after initially speaking up against it, I ended up shutting up about my criticism of that architectural approach, since it would have just gotten me fired. So I ended up sne…

This may be a stupid question, but what does "client/server" mean in this context? I would interpret it to mean any networked or Internet-based application that has both client- and server-side logic, which obviously isn't anything special in 2020, but it sounds like you're referring to something else that would now be considered outdated?

Something like Oracle forms with a custom clinet application talking to a database server.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#219

Post by brain5ide »

hef19898 wrote: post #194
RhodesianHunter wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago at a small company after a round of golf with some other shmuck, our CEO told us we needed SSO via OAuth, because that's how we can convince people we're secure. How soon could we get it developed? Spare no expense! We had a single website with an already written to OWASP standards login, no external API or plans for any.

What always drives me crazy about instances like this, is that managers and the c-level seem to be much more willing to listen to some "random" guy or blog over their own people. People they hired, people that have a much better understanding of the issue, the processes and so on. This effect is by no means limited to tech. And engineers, regardless of type, are by no means immune to that as soon as they reach higher…

They're just seeking some outside the box solutions. If you don't course correct, how do you know/show that you're driving?

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#220

Post by C1sc0cat »

noizejoy wrote: post #137
lstamour wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somehow PC Mag seems like the best reference here: https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/clientserver It’s hard to see the hype up close sometimes. The closest analogy I can think of and it’s an older one might be how in the mid-2000s everyone needed to make a “Web 2.0 mash-up” or how for awhile everyone needed “social” (remember Ping?)... if you were stuck with a stack based on jQuery and global variables, good lu…

The PC Mag article seems mostly pretty accurate - however, I’d argue that the web isn’t classic client/server, since the server sends the code to the client just in time. Classic client/server had a totally different code deployment mechanism. It was a full app installation every time - often via sneaker network, since few corporate networks had enough bandwidth to deploy new apps over their network. And installation…

I remember just before my first web project. I worked on a Oracle client server project (SMDS management tool) and to install the client, you installed about 4 products via 14 floppy disks one after the other on the client PC.

Took two days for two of us to install it on five or six client PC's

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