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CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

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Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#291

Post by Nasrudith »

ACCount37 wrote: post #74
socketcluster wrote: post #65

Wow the token leaderboard idea is nuts. It's similar to trying to measure the productivity of software engineers based on number of lines of code.

The message isn't subtle, and isn't meant to be: "we don't care how, but we expect you to stick your nose into AI tools and find some way to fit them into your workflow". Which indicates: the management believes there are productivity gains from AI use, but adoption lags due to inertia and reluctance to change existing workflows.

It also indicates several different levels of 'cannot manage their way outside a paper bag'. If you had a construction foreman who decided because nailguns would be the way of the future vs hammers, therefore the metrics would be based on the number of nails used and wound up with thoroughly nailed pieces of lumber but no houses built, he belongs fired as a complete incompetent who has absolutely no business on a job site.

Due diligence, judgement, and ability to know what the hell is going on are essential skills for management. The token metrics are a complete abdication of all of the above. It isn't a cream you just slather on to boost productivity.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#292

Post by DanielHB »

onion2k wrote: post #224
hintymad wrote: post #109

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 work on a 10+ year old codebase, there are some weeks I barely change any code.

Sometimes it takes hours of discussion and tracking down decision-makers just to figure out what the intended behavior is.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#293

Post by outime »

scubadude wrote: post #147
habosa wrote: post #138

I saw someone on Xitter say "Any CEO who wants to replace jobs with AI should first have to replace their own assistant with AI" and I think that's the perfect rule. Every AI demo is some version of a personal assistant, surely AI can do that job right? I think we'd get zero volunteers from CEOs who have assistants. (Note: this is not meant to be an insult to human assistants! I think they do a valuable job and shoul…

It's the eating your own dog food. The Open AI guy said it's now better than doctors (he said it, not me lol). He's replaced his doctor, right?

I don't think that's a fair comparison since LLMs can't e.g. prescribe medical tests or medication. That's not something I'd be looking for anyway, but we should at least compare apples to apples.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#294

Post by Nasrudith »

armada651 wrote: post #21
nitwit005 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not exactly a misconception, when companies are pitching AI as a full and complete replacement for human employees. People are just reading the billboards on the side of the road.

I always found advertisements for AI to be so strange, why would you advertise your AI to the public as a danger for humanity that will also put everyone out of work? Such advertising would only appeal to sociopaths, but of course that's because it's intended to appeal to CEOs.

It is just some chuunibyou bullshit to say "Look at how powerful my LLM is!". It is a dumbass publicity stunt, you're just reading into your preconceptions hard.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#296

Post by vanuatu »

hintymad wrote: post #227
vanuatu wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Boris also says he stops using /plan, he writes loop to write prompt, and he simply asks AI to come up with solutions. He also said many times that his agents would comb their emails, slack channels, and Github issues to come up with things to do. When we combine what he has said, it's hard not to have the impression that he was implying full autonomy of their agents. The only that the engineers need to do is to buil…

Yes, there will always be some human bottleneck when it comes to abstract software

i also run loops that comb through slack / github to auto-propose a fix & have another agent auto-review, but you need the human to stamp, and they fail in subtle ways architecturally

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#297

Post by everdrive »

matwood wrote: post #236
willio58 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CEOs do get there with lots of politics in almost all cases. It’s all about who’s ass you kiss and who’s ass you don’t and if you’re lucky with timing things might just fall into place. I think it’s exceedingly rare that a CEO is actually competent at their job. In most cases it’s the labor class propping the company up, and in some cases the workers are doing so against the wishes of the CEO. Not that executives wan…

> CEOs do get there with lots of politics in almost all cases. I know this can be hard for engineers to sometimes accept, but relationships (aka politics) are a key part of business. Rarely is one technical solution absolutely superior to another, making purchasing decisions come down to relationships. Politics is also about compromise and managing a bunch of differing opinions/desires, which is one of the key skills…

More engineers understand this than you may think. Many just dislike it. It doesn't fit with their disposition (for better or for worse) -- but they are not confused about the facts.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#299

Post by everdrive »

firefax wrote: post #124
everdrive wrote: post #11

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.

What skills? I've met several. Most of them got into a prestigious school on legacy, paid for by wealthy parents. Many were above average IQ, but by no means geniuses. They had access to computers earlier than others, due to said affluence. They seem unable or unwilling to comprehend they're overwhelmingly on average, "nepo babies" to steal a term from the world of entertainment.

Quite frankly speaking and acting as if you are from the upper crust is itself a criteria for success. It might be fine to say that this is not a skill, but people can definitely tell and they select for it.

I spent most of my time in government, and I was quite shocked in private industry how enthusiastically nearly everyone had taken to the class divide. It was a bit like A Brave New World. Even when resenting it, the lower class totally bought into the mythos of the upper class. It was very clear I would never be an executive at my company, but at the same time, my particular company was riddled with incompetent and corrupt executives.

I didn't feel or sound like one of them, and I refused to lie or bullshit. And every one of them could tell, and it forever marked me as an outsider.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#300

Post by everdrive »

59nadir wrote: post #91
everdrive wrote: post #11

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's not difficult at all to become one, and the work involved in being a CEO is not particularly difficult in comparison to senior technical work at all. The only thing that is harder about being a CEO is the responsibility. I'm sure being the CEO of Microsoft or whatever is plenty difficult and demanding in many ways, but most CEOs are not that, and speaking just from experience most CEOs and CTOs are clueless moro…

It's difficult in the sense that it's rare and much of it is out of your hands. That's a very different kind of difficulty than honing a technical skill. I'm happy to call it something other than difficult, but most of those engineers would not succeed in becoming CEOs -- whether or not they would actually do a good job at it.
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