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

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

#61

Post by temp8830 »

01100011 wrote: post #44
paxys wrote: post #5

You must be living in a different universe if you think ICs aren't enamored by AI. Every developer I know basically can't operate now without Claude Code (or equivalent).

What do you work on? I find people tend to omit that on HN and folks dealing with different roles end up yelling at each other because those details are missing. Being an embedded sw engineer writing straight C/ASM is, for instance, quite different from being a frontend engineer. AI will perform quite differently in each case.

AI is very good at writing C and asm. It even writes good Verilog. Unfortunately.

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

#62

Post by phyzome »

paxys wrote: post #5

You must be living in a different universe if you think ICs aren't enamored by AI. Every developer I know basically can't operate now without Claude Code (or equivalent).

So what you're saying is that now the worst devs can produce code faster and their velocity is no longer limited by their incompetence.

Why is this supposed to be a good thing?

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

#63

Post by staticassertion »

garciasn wrote: post #58
orochimaaru wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 artis…

I wonder if your background just has you fooled. I worked on a data science team and code was always a commodity. Most data scientists know how to code in a fairly trivial way, just enough to get their models built and served. Even data engineers largely know how to just take that and deploy to Spark. They don't really do much software engineering beyond that.

I'm not being precious here or protective of my "art" or whatever. But I do find it sort of hilarious and obvious that someone on a data science team might not understand the aesthetic value of code, and I suspect anyone else who has worked on such a team/ with such a team can probably laugh about the same thing - we've uh... we've seen your code. We know you don't value aesthetic code lol. Single variable names, `df1`, `df2`, `df3`.

I'm not particularly uncomfortable at the moment because understanding computers, understanding how to solve problems, understanding how to map between problems and solutions, what will or won't meet a customer's expectations, etc, is still core to the job as it always has been. Code quality is still critical as well - anyone who's vibe-coded >15KLOC projects will know that models simply can not handle that scale unless you're diligent about how it shoul dbe structured.

My job has barely changed semantically, despite rapid adoption of AI.

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

#64

Post by TheGRS »

kubb wrote: post #11
try-working wrote: post #6

I'm an IC and I love it. Executives have the wrong concept of AI. For them it's chat + magic, and then it does everything. You can't work with people who have incorrect concepts about how the world works. Best ignore them.

You're right, execs keep trying to fit the LLM square peg into the "inteligent agent" round hole. Developers use it, for groking a codebase, for implementing boilerplate, for debugging. They don't need juniors to do the grunt work anymore, they can build and throw away, the language and technology moats get smaller. The value of low level managers, whose power came from having warm bodies to do the grunt work, dimini…

Validation efforts likely become more necessary, so costs rise in another area. And product managers find they still need someone to translate the requirements well because LLMs are too agreeable. Cost optimization still needs someone to intervene as well.

I know there's an attempt to shift the development part from developers to other laypeople, but I think that's just going to frustrate everyone involved and probably settle back down into technical roles again. Well paid? Unclear.

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

#65

Post by detourdog »

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…

I'm sure an IC is not an integrated circuit or independent contractor. So what is it?

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

#66

Post by Esophagus4 »

peacebeard wrote: post #57
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…

> AI tools demo really well

Yes, and they work really well for small side projects that an exec probably used to try out the LLM.

But writing code in one clean discrete repo is (esp. at a large org) only a part of shipping something.

Over time, I think tooling will get better at the pieces surrounding writing the code though. But the human coordination / dependency pieces are still tricky to automate.

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

#67

Post by gerdesj »

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.

MD here, of a really small company (and I'm not a doctor).

I'm (mildly) excited by LLMs because I love a new shiny tool that does appear to have quite some utility.

My analogy these days is a screwdriver. Let's ignore screw development for now.

The first screwdrivers, which we still use, are slotted and have a habit of slipping sideways and jumping (camming out). That's err before LLMs ... something ... something.

Fast forward and we have Philips and Pozi and electric drivers. Yes there were ratchet jobs, and I still have one but the cordless electric drilldriver is nearly as magical as the Dr Who sonic effort! That's your modern LLM that is.

Now a modern drilldriver can wrench your wrist if you are not careful and brace properly. A modern LLM will hallucinate like a nineties raver on ecstasy but if you listen carefully and phrase your prompts carefully and ignore the chomping teeth and keep them hydrated, you may get something remarkable out of the creature 8)

Now I only use Chat at the totally free level but I do run several on-prem models using ollama and llama.cpp (all compiled from source ... obviously).

I love a chat with the snappily named "Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-UD-Q4_K_XL" but I'm well aware that it is like an old school Black and Decker off of the noughties and not like my modern De Walt wrist knackerers. I've still managed to get it to assist me to getting PowerDNS running with DNSSEC and LUA and configuring LACP and port channel/trunking and that on several switch brands.

You?

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

#68

Post by garciasn »

staticassertion wrote: post #63
garciasn wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 artis…

I wonder if your background just has you fooled. I worked on a data science team and code was always a commodity. Most data scientists know how to code in a fairly trivial way, just enough to get their models built and served. Even data engineers largely know how to just take that and deploy to Spark. They don't really do much software engineering beyond that. I'm not being precious here or protective of my "art" or…

I understand that you’re trying to apply your experience to what we do as a team and that makes sense; but, we’re many many stddev beyond the 15K LOC target you identified and have no issues because we do indeed take care to ensure we’re building these things the right way.

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

#69

Post by ilaksh »

Executive's job is to increase profit. Reduction in employees is a primary way to do that. AI is the most promising way to reduce the need for employees.

Executives do not need actively functional systems from AI to help with their own daily work. Nothing falls over if their report is not quite right. So they are seeing AI output that is more complete for their own purposes.

But also, AI is good enough to accelerate software engineering. To the degree that there are problems with the output, well, that's why they haven't fired all the the engineers yet. And executives never really cared about code quality -- that is the engineers' problem.

What I'm trying to build for my small business client right now is not engineering but still requires some remaining employees. He's already automated a lot of it. But I'm trying to make a full version of his call little center that can run on one box like an H200. Which we can rent for like $3.59/hr. Which if I remember correctly is approximately the cost of one of his Filipino employees.

Where we are headed is that the executives are themselves pretty quickly going to be targeted for replacement. Especially those that do not have firm upper class social status that puts them in the same social group as ownership.

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

#70

Post by lunar_mycroft »

kolinko wrote: post #42
afavour wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope that’s exaggeration because being unable to operate without it means you’re going to do a terrible job of reviewing the code it’s producing.

Since the November/December Opus and Claude Code, I found I don't need to read the code any more. Architecture overview sure, and testing yes, but not reading the code directly any more. Me (and my friends similarly) inspect code indirectly now - telling agents to write reports about certain aspects of the code and architecture etc.

I've seen the code these models produce without a human programmer going over the results with care. It's still slop. Better slop than in the past, but slop none the less. If you aren't at minimum reading the code yourself and you're shipping a significant amount of it, you're either effectively the first person to figure out the magic prompt to get the models to produce better code, or you're shipping slop. Personally, I wouldn't bet on the former.
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