221–230 of 337 posts
There are a lot of bad CEOs, though. It's a lot like a politician -- it's quite difficult to become a CEO, and the skills to make it to that position don't always intersect nicely with the skills necessary to actually do the job well.
It literally just requires filing an LLC or Corporation. There are several SaaS companies that will do it for you.
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…
In that sense Altman and Dario et. al. were extremely successful in their cringeworthy campaign to establish themselves as priests of a new machine god religion. Even the people who don't want it believed them.
The good news is at least this year companies are starting to get a little more thoughtful about why they're paying for AI and what specific business function it serves.
Realities:
1. AI is a tool. You don't replace a job with a tool, just like you don't replace an apple with a sock. It was always an error of classification to think this way.
2. AI is a useful tool. For every CEO who thinks it justifies mass layoffs, there are dozens of people who don't want to admit that it does have a lot of utility. Anyone who isn't figuring out where this tool can make them more productive will have a hard time down the line imho.
3. We can infer from the priors that jobs will continue to be a thing, just like they still were after the inventions of printing presses, cars, power looms, etc. but there will be some pretty massive churn, some roles maybe disappearing entirely, new ones getting created, same goes for skill sets.
4. Businesses will use this churn to the best of their ability to either reduce costs or increase output. That second part is the key the AI haters don't seem to recognize. Thanks to competition, not every business wants to just fire everyone. Yeah, America's financialized and monopolized and less competitive than it used to be, but still, plenty of businesses will repurpose their budgets to produce more and expand.
So in terms of real specific and concrete things I've seen so far.
If you're in customer support that's a pretty rough spot, a well designed RAG system can turn 20 minutes of research into 20 seconds. Customer support budgets flow downstream from actual usage/customer base so if they can do more with less people will get laid off, they don't expand scope, they automate and cut the budget.
If you're a developer, your position's a lot more secure than that, coding agents are pretty incredible but they are simply not at a point where they can think through architectural decisions, and they occasionally go off the rails and trash everything. These things need to be operated and steered. Yes that's 100% the future of the profession and I'm sorry if someone doesn't like that, being a blacksmith who forges metal things by hand is also very niche these days, kind of sad if you loved blacksmithing but it happens. Devs also have to be aware that a PM/product owner can likely do some of their job now and I think any dev whose preference was to avoid thinking about customer or business requirements is going to find his utility is shrinking. A mass shrinking of the profession is unlikely but things will change and the only rational paths forward honestly are to retire or to figure out now how you fit in, it's a career opportunity if you get ahead of the curve even.
Lastly there is a whole other domain now which for lack of a good term I'll refer to as "prompt engineering," it requires some level of systems design thinking, but basically no programming expertise. The best candidate for this work is a person who possesses business process knowledge as well as systems oriented thinking. Maybe these jobs will end up finding a home in the IT department or something. As an economy we're barely recognizing them yet but I see that in engineering we can increasingly implement places for a prompt input, and then hand some workflow/business domain decisions off to someone who understands them better and they just tweak their prompts over time to get a great system. Pretty sure new jobs will be created and formalized around this over time.
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/…
Even if that were 100% true, it only collapses the coding effort to near zero. Anyone who's built and shipped a real product should know that coding is maybe 50% of the work, and on a mature product it can be much less.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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/…
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. Even if that were 100% true, it only collapses the coding effort to near zero. Anyone who's built and shipped a real product should know that coding is maybe 50% of the work, and on a mature product it can be much less.
i dont write code by hand anymore but shipping something people want is as hard (or maybe harder?) as its ever been
>> Yes, the tools are powerful, but a CEO who thinks they replace the work of employees is simply a bad CEO. This is a broad generalization of employees. There will be some "routine tasks" that can be done by AI, now that is a lot more powerful. There won't be as many employees needed for routine work - for example L1 and L2 support work. For example, many companies had ML engineers building models for various models…
If L2 support work is the example then I doubt we’re near replacement. L2 issues are already involved in some way often revealing some kind of system failure, requiring context and exploration to understand, and judgement (and perhaps even system overrides) to fix. I could see “automated L2 is the new L1” improvements, but without a big capability jump and/or a resource bonfire, I don’t think even frontier models wou…
This is at a well-known tech company operating at massive scale (and resulting complexity).
L1/L2 tech support is completely dead within a couple years. The delay is only around how long it takes people to realize.
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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. Even if that were 100% true, it only collapses the coding effort to near zero. Anyone who's built and shipped a real product should know that coding is maybe 50% of the work, and on a mature product it can be much less.
even boris says they need people with judgment to manage the agents i dont write code by hand anymore but shipping something people want is as hard (or maybe harder?) as its ever been
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Care to share some sources that corroborate any of these claims and explains how the dots connect?
Consumption by the top 10% of earners: https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-ri... As for services increasingly unaffordable by the workers providing them, that's Baumol's cost disease ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect ) I don't have any sources regarding someone preferring humans for certain services over robots, just intuition there, and the fact that consuming human labor and time i…
This is not the case. These countries don’t operate/exist in isolation. They are part of global economy. But if this tech has a global scale effect, then the dots are not really connecting. You’re also forgetting the “revolt” factor.
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Knowing which ass to kiss at the right time is an important skill not everyone has.
I wonder if business schools could ever start actually teaching this skill. So far they just largely operate as scams, held up purely by prestige and network value