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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

#261

Post by a96 »

ravenstine wrote: post #167
SoftTalker wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wrote my own CLI to make aspects of my job easier I mean, according to your employment agreement, that code is owned by your employer, since you wrote it as an employee for use at work. They could easily demand that you share it, if they knew it existed. This just illustrates that smart people figure out their own productivity/time-saving shortcuts at work, and little scripts and tools like this are part of it. H…

Yeah, well, I challenge them to do that. In the meantime, I'll keep it to myself.

Contracts vary, but here if your employer tells you to do work ("document and deliver a tool that does X") and you refuse, here that's grounds for warning process and dismissal as a breach of contract.

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

#262

Post by jen20 »

arkh wrote: post #92
embedding-shape wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Large enterprises need to learn how to ship software faster They haven't even learned that "less code is better" yet, I wouldn't hold my breathe waiting for them to suddenly learn "more advanced" things like that before they learn the basics.

With the factory allegory: code is stock. Stock costs and is a liability hence Lean manufacturing.

Worse: it's typically work in progress.

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

#263

Post by sdevonoes »

sanderjd wrote: post #234
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…

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, i…

That’s fine. Some people cannot (don’t want to) think about the more profound consequences of their actions. No one likes to stop for 10min and think deep about what they are actually doing. The easiest path is always to stay in “robot mode”: my boss pays me $ for my job… therefore I need to satisfy that contract. No time to think”

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

#264

Post by kakwa_ »

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?

Pretty standard in highly regulated fields like aerospace, finance/banking or industry.

Sometimes for good reasons, like thorough validation need or operational constraints like spaced-out maintenance windows.

Sometimes for bad reasons, like a complete absence of unit tests and very old and brittle code bases requiring a lot of manual QA and several iterations for a version to be in a releasable state.

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

#265

Post by a96 »

woeirua wrote: post #134

The hype is extreme right now and everyone is still trying to figure out how to use the tools. People who are further along the bleeding edge are trying to tear down all the process that we used to have to further improve velocity. After people go all the way to "dark factories" most companies will realize that they don't actually have any good ideas for what to build, and honestly never did. They've been coasting fo…

Enshittification of the AI clouds will also pick up speed. Tokens will get more costly, terms and tiers will turn worse etc. And there will be more security incidents on all fronts.

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

#266

Post by ninjagoo »

QuercusMax wrote: post #248
ninjagoo wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how much time is left on the cycle Ooh, new requirement! Set timer on phone when setting timer on machine...

Ah, but my washer and dryer love to lie to me and add 20 minutes to the cycle because they're "eco-friendly". And this is mostly to help my wife who has a brain injury and can't remember to set a timer.

> this is mostly to help my wife who has a brain injury

Sorry to hear that. Hope things get better. Don't know if your wife's case fits, but the brain has a lot of plasticity; fingers-crossed.

> my washer and dryer love to lie to me and add 20 minutes to the cycle

We're going to have to assign a business analyst here to capture the full slate of requirements before we start development, i.e., armchair suggestions :-) I don't think agile is working very well here

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

#267

Post by mplanchard »

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".

There are a lot of potential reasons.

Here’s a thought: consider the potentially analogous case of performance-enhancing drugs for athletes. The drugs unambiguously make them better at their jobs, but the drugs have severe long-term health costs and wreak havoc on the fairness of the playing field. It’s easy to see why an athlete might choose not to use them, even when others are.

Of course, those negative factors alone are not enough to dissuade people en masse who want to get a leg up on their competitors, so the use of performance-enhancing drugs must be further restricted by institutional bans.

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

#268

Post by woodydesign »

ap99 wrote: post #38
woodydesign wrote: post #19

Great article. The part that stood out to me is the shift in how organizations define work. In the old model, performance and OKRs were anchored in disciplines, job titles, and role-specific expectations. In the AI era, those boundaries are starting to collapse. The deeper issue is psychological and organizational: people are constantly negotiating the line between “this is my job” and “this is not my responsibility.…

Well, that's fine until your teammate does all of those things by default and gaps show up between them and the rest of the team.

[dead]

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

#269

Post by thfuran »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #91
LeCompteSftware wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I definitely saw people have concerns about vimrc files and their personal library of shell scripts well before 2020, and I've seen people early in their career get burned by sharing it too. They had a tool that made them productive, it got…

Is it actually their IP? Every dev job I’ve seen has wording in the employment contract that grants the employer ownership of anything developed on company time or company hardware. So unless they made those helpful scripts off the clock on a personal computer, they probably always belonged to the employer.

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

#270

Post by thfuran »

alaudet wrote: post #42
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 sadly have to agree with this. In a collaborative "give and take" world sharing is good. In an environment that takes only, all you have left is your own intellectual property. It is your own most vital asset worth protecting. Shouldn't be like this, but it is.

But if you made it at work, it’s not your intellectual property.
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