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Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

johnjwang.com

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Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

#51

Post by 3form »

There are two views, non-technical and technical.

For non-technical, the current meteoric rise of AI is due to the fact that AI is generally synonymous to "it can talk". It has never _really_ spoken to the wider audience that the image recognition, or various filters, or whatever classifiers they could have stumbled upon are AI as well. What we have, now, is AI in the truest sense. And executives are primarily non-technical.

As for the technical people, we know how it works, we know how it doesn't work, and we're not particularly amused.

Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

#52

Post by Aperocky »

pron wrote: post #18

As someone who's both an IC and leads other developers I disagree with the explanation. As a technical lead, with people I can much better predict the quality of the outcome than with LLMs, and the "failure modes" are much more manageable. As a programmer, I am actually more impressed with AI agents but in an informed and qualified way. Their debugging ability wows me; their coding ability disappoints and frustrates…

pass a certain LOC number, the utility become negative (unless they were pure tests).

Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

#54

Post by withinboredom »

xixixao wrote: post #45
withinboredom wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny thing is that AI can probably replace the exec’s job before it can replace a devs job.

What do you think the exec job is? What do they do every day, every working hour? And how will AI replace that?

It’s not a mystery… I can tell you what I do most days, and probably 80% of it is communication. An AI could do that. That communication is to learn what is going on up, down, and across the org. I mostly want to make sure we aren’t doing redundant work — though sometimes that is useful, and making sure timelines aren’t slipping. Oh, and dealing with conflicts.

The other 20% is writing: policies, SOPs, audits, grants, performance reviews, etc.

I could probably automate over half my job in n8n in a weekend… hmm… actually might try that.

Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

#55

Post by pydry »

orochimaaru wrote: post #43
pron wrote: post #18

As someone who's both an IC and leads other developers I disagree with the explanation. As a technical lead, with people I can much better predict the quality of the outcome than with LLMs, and the "failure modes" are much more manageable. As a programmer, I am actually more impressed with AI agents but in an informed and qualified way. Their debugging ability wows me; their coding ability disappoints and frustrates…

And one executive talks to other executives not to their engineers. I think this is more peer pressure than anything else.

They're oddly credulous of the shovel salesmen in the gold rush, too.

E.g. when Jensen Huang said that you need to pair your $250k engineer with $250k of tokens.

Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

#57

Post by peacebeard »

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #13

I think executives are excited about AI because it confirms their worldview: that the work is a commodity and the real value lies in orchestration and strategy. It doesn't help that the west has a clear bias wherein moving "up" is moving away from the work. Many executives often don't know what good looks like at the detail level, so they can't evaluate AI output quality.

This is definitely part of it.

I think another part of it is that AI tools demo really well, easily hiding how imperfect and limited they are when people see a contrived or cherry-picked example. Not a lot of people have a good intuition for this yet. Many people understand "a functional prototype is not a production app" but far fewer people understand "an AI that can be demonstrated to write functional code is not a software engineer" because this reality is rapidly evolving. In that rapidly evolving reality, people are seeing a lot of conflicting information, especially if you consider that a lot of that information is motivated (eg, "ai is bad because it's bad to fire engineers" which, frankly, will not be compelling to some executives out there). Whatever the new reality is going to be, we're not going to find out one step at a time. A lot of lessons are going to be learned the hard way.

Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

#58

Post by garciasn »

orochimaaru wrote: post #43
pron wrote: post #18

As someone who's both an IC and leads other developers I disagree with the explanation. As a technical lead, with people I can much better predict the quality of the outcome than with LLMs, and the "failure modes" are much more manageable. As a programmer, I am actually more impressed with AI agents but in an informed and qualified way. Their debugging ability wows me; their coding ability disappoints and frustrates…

And one executive talks to other executives not to their engineers. I think this is more peer pressure than anything else.

I lead a team of Data Engineers, DevOps Engineers, and Data Scientists. I write code and have done so literally for my entire life. AI-assisted codegen is incredible; especially over the last 3-4m.

I understand that developers feel their code is an art form and are pissed off that their life’s work is now a commodity; but, it’s time to either accept it and move on with what has happened, specialize as an actual artist, or potentially find yourself in a very rough spot.

Re: Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

#60

Post by pigpop »

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #13

I think executives are excited about AI because it confirms their worldview: that the work is a commodity and the real value lies in orchestration and strategy. It doesn't help that the west has a clear bias wherein moving "up" is moving away from the work. Many executives often don't know what good looks like at the detail level, so they can't evaluate AI output quality.

The reasons given in the article are much more compelling.
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