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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

#211

Post by saxelsen »

sdevonoes wrote: post #200
sanderjd wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Im your CEO. I see you and the rest of your peers have doubled your productivity in the last 2 months because of claude. Good job! Now since we don’t really need to go that faster, ill fire half of you so I and my investors friends can make more profit. Now of course, you may think you are such a good engineer that companies will kill for you… perhaps that’s true now, but its not true for 90% of the engineers out the…

In reality, I think it's more likely that the lay-offs will be when the marginal rate of growth slows down. Once executives see that growth doesn't change much when hiring, they stop hiring, and once they see that growth doesn't decrease much when firing, they start firing.

There's still an opportunity for engineers to eat their bosses lunch and just start their own company. It's never been easier to start a lower cost competitor.

Employment isn't a social law of nature: it's a transaction of money for "units of work", just like the business might have with other vendors. Governments should be making it easier to become a vendor.

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

#212

Post by Terr_ »

recursive wrote: post #204
SoftTalker wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> story points = number of days to implement Some variant of this has been the case in every agile team I've ever worked on.

No one's ever been able to explain story points to me without saying something like "Story points are kind of like how long it will take to implement, except it's not that". So what is it then? All the explanations and examples are in units of time, but with a disclaimer saying that the true nature of story points is not time-based, except for the fact that they can only be explained in terms of time.

IANAScrumlord, but ideally story points are like a foreign currency: It's both normal and healthy for exchange rates to constantly fluctuate, and every country (team) has it's own units for capturing guesswork and confidence and quality/speed mix.

The managerial goal is to take near-past moving average rates (from completed tickets) and use them to forecast near-future expectations. 1.0 of Team Alpha's points might mean 4 hours this week... but anybody who shows up six months later expecting exactly the same rate is foolish, doubly-so if they expect it to be the same across teams, or after a big change in staff or tooling or project.

______

Other musings: Whenever a manager says "my current estimate of the rate is X pts/hr, use that when sizing", I feel it's a mistake. I kills off the intuition you really want to capture. Team members ought to be comparing expected tasks to past tasks.

Also, the goal of "accurate scheduling predictions" exists in conflict with "measure employee output". Trying to use your point-system for one generally harms the other.

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

#213

Post by AngryData »

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…

Yeah, if there is no gain then employees shouldn't be giving any more than exactly what they were hired for. Most big companies are and should be treated as adversarial, because they won't think twice about dropping your ass, you are just a name in the HR departments computers to anyone you don't directly work with every single day. I think a lot of tech employees bought into all the bullshit because they made such good money and were for awhile uncommonly skilled. But their uncommon skill sets have become more and more common while the actual knowledge needed by individual employees has dropped. All the garbage conditions many game programmers and artists have to deal with? Yeah that is coming for the entire tech industry, and that isn't the low point, that is the shit pile just picking up speed. It should be obvious looking at almost every other industry after a few decades.

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

#214

Post by tweetle_beetle »

recursive wrote: post #204
SoftTalker wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> story points = number of days to implement Some variant of this has been the case in every agile team I've ever worked on.

No one's ever been able to explain story points to me without saying something like "Story points are kind of like how long it will take to implement, except it's not that". So what is it then? All the explanations and examples are in units of time, but with a disclaimer saying that the true nature of story points is not time-based, except for the fact that they can only be explained in terms of time.

I once met someone who refused to engage with leadership using his team's story points as a direct measure of productivity. To make it harder to extract the data and compare against other teams, they moved to using names of animals to represent types of task associated with differing amounts of uncertainty.

I've also seen a supplier who was asked to provide some kind of tracking, where literally nothing existed. Their delivery team produced reports with story points per person, per task, per sprint. Every sprint, every person hit their target month after month after month. They were asked to stop.

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

#215

Post by Izkata »

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #76
olsondv wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May not have been clear. My job is not AI development. I have features to deliver. The ask from employer is to add the AI knowledge sharing on top of it. They don’t pay for that. When layoffs come, it wouldn’t save me from missed deliverables.

I refuse to use LLMs and don't have a job, so I'm just some guy. What I find strange about this is that in 2020 nobody would be this openly cynical and selfish about, say, good Python idioms, a useful emacs configuration, git shortcuts, etc. This attitude of "your job is to deliver value for the customer, anything else is a distraction, and if you share your hard-earned value-delivery techniques with others then you…

Those are completely different from a tool you wrote yourself: Where do they get support when something goes wrong?

This mindset has always existed in the area we're talking about, and not because it's sharing something to speed up with. It's because we don't want to get stuck doing a second job supporting the tool.

I've built all sorts of random tools for myself over the years and haven't shared a single thing, but share the tips and tricks like your examples all the time.

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

#216

Post by AngryData »

c-linkage wrote: post #93
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…

In my place of employment, anything I create while on company time or using company resources is the property of my employer. So while it might be nice to say I won't share, boss-man can certainly make it so I must share.

They can't force you to share what they don't know about or don't understand.

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

#218

Post by koonsolo »

sdevonoes wrote: post #200
sanderjd wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Im your CEO. I see you and the rest of your peers have doubled your productivity in the last 2 months because of claude. Good job! Now since we don’t really need to go that faster, ill fire half of you so I and my investors friends can make more profit. Now of course, you may think you are such a good engineer that companies will kill for you… perhaps that’s true now, but its not true for 90% of the engineers out the…

So now your competitors go twice as fast as you. Good luck with that.

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

#219

Post by djeastm »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #25
rogerthis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That already happens here. I am old dev who was the goto guy for people with certain business and technical questions. Not anymore (which is part good, as I'm interrupted much less, and part bad, as sometimes they regard the wrong answer as truth).

You could vibe yourself up an AMA tool where people can submit questions, an agent goes to work on them, then the question and agent answer sit in a queue waiting for you to provide a review and give your weigh-in.

I think this is what people are paid by the hour to do as AI trainers at Mercor, etc.

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

#220

Post by __loam »

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…

Every line of code is a liability
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