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When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing

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

#231

Post by kj4211cash »

samothrace wrote: post #143
kj4211cash wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a "two timelines" approach going on and I'm curious if others are seeing the same. There are official "Engineering-supported" services. There development speed is not the bottleneck. Engineers demand clean requirements that take forever to show up. Testing and deployment scheduling also take forever post-development. Important people are so fed-up that they've started hiring people to vibe code and develop se…

Sounds like your company has bad or missing business analysts and/or product owners. Someone's supposed to be working between the stakeholders and engineering to develop those requirements and commit resources for testing. These "important people" are re-inventing the wheel and will be mired just as bad or worse until they figure this out.

I agree with you in general. And have a good chuckle when the vibe coders get derailed by some roadblock that would've been obvious to a professional engineer. But it's a bit one-sided to say that we have bad or missing analysts and product. Even good product can't keep up with how fast AI allows you to go. At an established company, maybe you shouldn't go as fast as AI allows you to go, but try telling that to the "important people."

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

#232

Post by Andrex »

turblety wrote: post #210
sdevonoes wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Is this a thing? Are there companies out there that don't want to go faster?

The market can sneeze and suddenly there's a wave of hiring freezes, sounds plausible to me.

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

#233

Post by hunterpayne »

graphememes wrote: post #225
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…

This is a really bad take, many on hackernews have a very skewed idea of what a CEO thinks about its employees it seems, or why firings happen in the first place. Quite honestly the firings that are happening are the ones who are not adopting the technologies, if you're doing this you're quite literally just putting yourself in scope. Just read coinbase today. They are culling those who are not adopting the future be…

"Quite honestly the firings that are happening are the ones who are not adopting the technologies, "

And there is why the hate exists. You as the CEO know nothing about how your business works. You neither actually try to understand nor do you have the technical background to understand. So you substitute gamed numbers. And in doing this, you setup your company to tank the industry that props up the world economy. And then act like you are the rational one while doing this. There is nothing rational about how most CEOs act. There is a reason why companies do better under dev founders than any other circumstance. There is a reason why dev CEOs do better than non-dev CEOs. Yet despite this, you will tank both your company and a substantial part of the industry just so you can get yours. That's why you are getting the hate. Ignorant indifference is just as objectionable as the caricature of a CEO you see in these posts.

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

#234

Post by sanderjd »

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…

I understand and share your concerns but (without thinking I'm such a good engineer that companies will kill for me), I just don't share your conclusion.

To me, it's pretty simple. I have things to do. This makes it easier for me to do those things. Sometimes that means I can do more things, and sometimes it means I can spend less time on my work, and often both.

I have no idea what the future will hold. But to me, it would be very odd to avoid using extremely useful tools for my current work, because of that uncertainty about the future.

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

#235

Post by sanderjd »

recursive wrote: post #223
sanderjd wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Some of us still haven't figured out how to hold it right. So on average it doesn't make anything easier. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it just fails. Net effort change for me is about a wash. I know this is different from most peoples' experience, and I don't know I suck at using it. But I'm not generally inclined to use it much as a result.

Yep I understand this. But what I don't understand is, "wow this is incredibly useful! ... but I'm not gonna use it".

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

#236

Post by sanderjd »

zbentley wrote: post #190
sanderjd wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1. Communicate with people about what to build, fix, or improve, and about our progress with current ongoing work.

2. Figure out what components already exist and what new things we need to build and how things should be integrated.

3. Actually build the things according to what was figured out in the previous step.

4. Review my own work and other people's work.

5. Release things and make sure they work.

6. Respond to emergent issues in things that have been released.

I find the current generation of AI tooling to be very useful for all of these tasks. Less so for task #1 than the others.

What are other people doing that is different?

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

#237

Post by ninjagoo »

thisisit wrote: post #110
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…

My larger enterprise world today AI adoption seems to have taken a turn for the worse. Finance folks reached out asking if they could vibe code their own app using Copilot/Cursor/Claude for finance planning purpose. And because they know my management freezes whenever there are whispers of "our CFO said so" they even paraded that reasoning - "our CFO "tested" Lovable and he is convinced and asking us to vibe code the…

> Finance folks reached out asking if they could vibe code their own app using Copilot/Cursor/Claude for finance planning purpose.

Having worked with these finance apps (Hyperion, Axiom, Workday etc), they're very data heavy and getting good performance out of them requires real engineering, so much so that they come with their own spreadsheet software to handle the multi-dimensional multi-million-row datasets (along with many other requirements like auditability, version control, workflow, consolidation etc) that excel just can't handle with all its limitations.

On the other hand, there's the 'Let Them' theory [1].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Let-Them-Theory-Life-Changing-Million...

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

#238

Post by an0malous »

patch_dev wrote: post #230
asdfman123 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's a "tragedy of the commons" problem, for lack of a less dramatic phrase. If you ran a software company, would you want to train juniors who are slower than AI and much more expensive? Who would just jump ship in two years? It wouldn't make sense to. "Someone" should do it: someone other than you.

I see this take all the time, but hiring a junior/intern has never been great ROI, so I hear. Why did we ever do it in the past? Its not like it was ever likely that hiring a junior means getting an employee for life. Could it be that the economic and shareholder pressures are requiring this rather than it being a logical thing?

People used to stay at companies longer than a couple years

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

#239

Post by p1necone »

patch_dev wrote: post #230
asdfman123 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's a "tragedy of the commons" problem, for lack of a less dramatic phrase. If you ran a software company, would you want to train juniors who are slower than AI and much more expensive? Who would just jump ship in two years? It wouldn't make sense to. "Someone" should do it: someone other than you.

I see this take all the time, but hiring a junior/intern has never been great ROI, so I hear. Why did we ever do it in the past? Its not like it was ever likely that hiring a junior means getting an employee for life. Could it be that the economic and shareholder pressures are requiring this rather than it being a logical thing?

Anecdotal counterpoint, the best teams I've been on have always had a good mix of a couple of really senior/decent intermediate people and a few either totally fresh grads or juniors (at the beginning of the project). Those fresh people have a good chance of becoming pretty formidable pretty quickly with the right mentoring, and without them seniors have a tendency to just remain experts on whatever tech stack they're familiar with but not think out of the box.

Hiring a mediocre senior is much worse than hiring a grad because they will never get any better, and it's very hard to know at hiring time that they're mediocre.

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

#240

Post by recursive »

sanderjd wrote: post #235
recursive wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us still haven't figured out how to hold it right. So on average it doesn't make anything easier. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it just fails. Net effort change for me is about a wash. I know this is different from most peoples' experience, and I don't know I suck at using it. But I'm not generally inclined to use it much as a result.

Yep I understand this. But what I don't understand is, "wow this is incredibly useful! ... but I'm not gonna use it".

It's not actually useful for me. But I still use it anyway.
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