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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

#271

Post by graphememes »

hunterpayne wrote: post #233
graphememes wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. An…

>You as the CEO know nothing about how your business works. That's too broad of a statement and quite honestly, in my opinion and experience, wrong. There may be some who this does apply to but the vast majority that I know, it does not, and when you get to companies that are actually doing firings based on this its even less.

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

#272

Post by butlike »

ambicapter wrote: post #177
butlike wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unshipped code can't break. How is it a liability and not an asset? The money maker is making money and the changes that potentially would interfere with that are held up at the gate. Seems like a good thing from a business perspective.

You spent money making it, and now it's not making any money. It's pure liability (in the accounting sense, not the legal liability sense).

It's potentially making money if I don't have to lie to the board/shareholders about having new features and ideas "in the works." New features show growth, life, progress of the business. If those features are being worked on then the business isn't stagnating. The actuality becomes all upside: risk to the money-maker is averted, and shareholder's fears are allayed with "Loud announcement, quiet rollout"-style features.

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

#273

Post by woodydesign »

ohnei wrote: post #82
woodydesign wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part I push back on is the idea that expertise is easy to learn in just a few weeks. Take Andrej Karpathy as an example. Even if I knew exactly what tools he uses and what his workflow looks like, I still would not be able to produce anything close to what he can produce in a few weeks. And he is not standing still either—he is evolving at the same time. A lot of real expertise is not in the visible/system-able w…

Sure but here you are not talking about the 100000+ local firm experts for windows networking or coding with agents you are talking about the people who can rewrite the best advice that makes those local experts out of date where their small experiences probably don't make up for not having integrated X, Y or Z yet.

[dead]

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

#274

Post by QuercusMax »

ninjagoo wrote: post #266
QuercusMax wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)…

You see, you're trying to paint the bike shed after I've already built a pole barn for my ATVs.

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

#275

Post by agentictrustkit »

SoftTalker wrote: post #137
SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. So much of Management (both mid and executive) still considers Software as if it were an assembly line; "We make software just like how Ford makes cars". Code as a product. Which isn't to say that most software development isn't woefully ineff…

"We make software just like how Ford makes cars". People who say this kind of thing probably have no idea how Ford makes cars either. The assembly line is the last step. All the research, design, engineering, and testing happens before any sheet metal is stamped out. So the comparison might be more true than not, but unknowingly.

Yeah I don't think enough people talk about this. AI makes your existing process faster, but it doesn't make a broken process correct. We've seen this at every inflection point — cloud, agile, microservices, now AI. My bet is that the orgs that wil win are the ones NOT with the best models but those that know how to ship! If your lead time from commit to prod is six months, all Cursor does is let you write the wrong thing faster.

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

#276

Post by Henchman21 »

jorisw wrote: post #257
Henchman21 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked who hadn’t read that in an engineering meeting recently. No one had heard of it. Now, I have been in tech for my entire life. That book was given to me in 1993 as I was just starting out in college. NO ONE in my meeting was familiar with the title or author. I felt a little more impending doom upon realizing that.

Does everyone need to have read it though, in order to understand its premise? Surely they were at least aware of the basic premise that adding people doesn’t necessarily speed up delivery?

In a meeting where "adding more people to speed up delivery" was exactly the topic and the reason I brought up the book, nah.

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

#277

Post by alaudet »

thfuran wrote: post #270
alaudet wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm talking about your personal knowledge base and your processes for getting stuff done, you take that with you when you leave and it belongs to you. Of course what you create belongs to your employer.

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

#278

Post by anthuswilliams »

p1necone wrote: post #239
patch_dev wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'r…

I'd also add that top-heavy engineering organizations are sometimes incapable of delivering anything useful because everyone wants to work on the hard problems, establish the frameworks, define the processes, and so on, and no one wants to operate the damn business. It's good to have a mix of perspectives in a team.

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

#279

Post by asdfman123 »

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?

> hiring a junior/intern has never been great ROI

Yes, exactly. It's been a problem for a while, and it's worse now.

I'm worried it will go from "it's hard for juniors" to "it's nearly impossible for juniors."

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

#280

Post by tardedmeme »

a96 wrote: post #261
ravenstine wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

His employer didn't tell him to do that.

You have to get used to acting within the grey area and playing politics. Your counterparty (your employer) certainly does. Every businessperson is good at it, or they wouldn't be successful.

In any transactional relationship - which employment is - when you want to do something, don't think: I can't do this because they wouldn't like it. Instead think: what are the likely consequences of doing this? Are they positive or negative for me, on net?

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