This reads like they don't want AI, they just want tooling. More, better tooling. AI is just a scapegoat/easy out for writing more tooling that makes them more efficient.
AI-First Company Memos
51–60 of 216 posts
Re: AI-First Company Memos
#52I work for a large tech company, and our CTO has just released a memo with a new rubric for SDEs that includes "AI Fluency". We also have a dashboard with AI Adoption per developer, that is being used to surveil the teams lagging on the topic. All very depressing. A friend of mine is an engineer of a large pre-IPO startup, and their VP of AI just demanded every single employee needs to create an agent using Claude. T…
I mean get onboard or fall behind, that's the situation we're all in. It can also be exciting. If you think it's still just slop and errors when managed by experienced devs, you're already behind.
The obvious pulling ahead from early AI adopters/forcers will happen any moment now... any moment
Re: AI-First Company Memos
#53I work for a large tech company, and our CTO has just released a memo with a new rubric for SDEs that includes "AI Fluency". We also have a dashboard with AI Adoption per developer, that is being used to surveil the teams lagging on the topic. All very depressing. A friend of mine is an engineer of a large pre-IPO startup, and their VP of AI just demanded every single employee needs to create an agent using Claude. T…
I'm so glad I'm nearer the end of my career than the beginning. Can't wait to leave this industry. I've got a stock cliff coming up late this summer, probably a good time to get out and find something better to do with my life.
Then, you might even tinker with some AI stuff on your own terms, you never know. :)
Or install a landline (over 5G because that's how you do it nowadays) and call it a day. :-)
Re: AI-First Company Memos
#54I work for a large tech company, and our CTO has just released a memo with a new rubric for SDEs that includes "AI Fluency". We also have a dashboard with AI Adoption per developer, that is being used to surveil the teams lagging on the topic. All very depressing. A friend of mine is an engineer of a large pre-IPO startup, and their VP of AI just demanded every single employee needs to create an agent using Claude. T…
I mean get onboard or fall behind, that's the situation we're all in. It can also be exciting. If you think it's still just slop and errors when managed by experienced devs, you're already behind.
I try these things a couple times a month. They're always underwhelming. Earlier this week I had the thing work tells me to use (claude code sonnet 4? something like that) generate some unit tests for a new function I wrote. I had a number of objections about the utility of the test cases it chose to write, but the largest problem was that it assigned the expected value to a test case struct field and then... didn't actually validate the retrieved value against it. If you didn't review the code, you wouldn't know that the test it wrote did literally nothing of value.
Another time I asked it to rename a struct field across a the whole codebase. It missed 2 instances. A simple sed & grep command would've taken me 15 seconds to write and do the job correctly and cost $~0.00 compute, but I was curious to see if the AI could do it. Nope.
Trillions of dollars for this? Sigh... try again next week, I guess.
Re: AI-First Company Memos
#55Whatever happened to "show, don't tell"? Other productivity boosters certainly didn't need such memos; they were naturally adopted because the benefits were unambiguous. There were no "IDE-first company memos" or "software framework-first company memos"; devs organically picked these up because the productivity gains were immediately self-evident.
On the other hand, there were surely memos like "our facility will be using electric power now. Steam is out". Sometimes execs do set a company's direction.
Re: AI-First Company Memos
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
This feels like a construction company demanding that everyone, from drywaller to admin assistant, go out and buy a drill.
Can I modify your example to: Demanding everyone, from drywaller to admin assistant go out and buy a purple colored drill, never use any other colored drill, and use their purple drill for at least fifty minutes a day (to be confirmed by measuring battery charge).
Better, yeah.
Re: AI-First Company Memos
#57Whatever happened to "show, don't tell"? Other productivity boosters certainly didn't need such memos; they were naturally adopted because the benefits were unambiguous. There were no "IDE-first company memos" or "software framework-first company memos"; devs organically picked these up because the productivity gains were immediately self-evident.
People will voluntarily adopt modest productivity boosters that don't threaten their job security. They will rebel against extraordinary productivity boosters that may make some of their skills obsolete or threaten their career.
Re: AI-First Company Memos
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm so glad I'm nearer the end of my career than the beginning. Can't wait to leave this industry. I've got a stock cliff coming up late this summer, probably a good time to get out and find something better to do with my life.
Then, you might even tinker with some AI stuff on your own terms, you never know. :) Or install a landline (over 5G because that's how you do it nowadays) and call it a day. :-)
> Then, you might even tinker with some AI stuff on your own terms, you never know
Indeed! I'm not like dead set against them. I just find they're kind of a bad tool for most jobs I've used them for and I'm just so goddamn tired of hearing about how revolutionary this kinda-bad tool is.
Re: AI-First Company Memos
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is absolutely the norm across corporate America right now. Chief AI Czars enforcing AI usage metrics with mandatory AI training for anyone that isn't complying. People with roles nowhere near software/tech/data are being asked about their AI usage in their self-assessment/annual review process, etc. It's deeply fascinating psychologically and I'm not sure where this ends. I've never seen any tech theme pushed to…
> FOMOing at the mouth This is a great line - evocative, funny, and a bit o wordplay. I think you might be right about the behavior here; I haven't been able to otherwise understand the absolute forcing through of "use AI!!" by people and upon people with only a hazy notion of why and how. I suppose it's some version of nuclear deterrence or Pascal's wager -- if AI isn't a magic bullet then no big loss but if it is t…
I think one thing that I noticed this week in terms of "eye of the beholder" view on AI was the Goldman press release.
Apparently Anthropic has been in there for 6 months helping them with some back office streamlining and the outcome of that so far has been.. a press release announcing that they are working on it!
A cynic might also ask if this is simply PR for Goldman to get Anthropic's IPO mandate.
I think people underestimate the size/scope/complexity of big company tech stacks and what any sort of AI transformation may actually take.
It may turn into another cottage industry like big data / cloud / whatever adoption where "forward deployed / customer success engineers" are collocated by the 1000s for years at a time in order to move the needle.
Re: AI-First Company Memos
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can I modify your example to: Demanding everyone, from drywaller to admin assistant go out and buy a purple colored drill, never use any other colored drill, and use their purple drill for at least fifty minutes a day (to be confirmed by measuring battery charge).
Better, yeah.
Awesome, with that new policy we'll be sure to justify my purple drill evangelist role by showing that our average employee is dependent on purple drills for at least 1/8th of their workload. Who knew that our employees would so quickly embrace the new technology. Now the board can't cut me!