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The Ask

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Re: The Ask

#61

Post by motoxpro »

LPisGood wrote: post #8
cweagans wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a theory. How close does the following describe you? * You're an engineer with 3-6 years of experience in a primarily IC role * Maybe you've done some tech lead stuff, but you've never actively worked in engineering management. * You feel that management (and HR for some reason?) is constantly in the way of you getting stuff done, and that your life would be easier if you could simply decline every meeting and…

For the sake of moving this along, that describes me perfectly. Please, continue.

Management advocates for AI because see ICs as commodities that just need to be coordinated to "do the thing." In this situation, remove the mid-managers, replace the ICs with AI, and use AI to enable them to coordinate the "workers." They forget that organizations exist to organize human output, which requires nuance, empathy, and communication.

ICs advocate for AI because they believe they are "doing the most valuable work." A rational AI would see that and let them do it. In this situation, remove the mid management, replace HR/marketing/sales/etc with AI and use AI to enable them to figure out what to build and they build twice as fast. They forget that the "rational" choice might not be what is best for them, their project, or their career.

Each one rebuts this with the way the system has failed them (managers feel that workers do everything BUT the work that moves the company forward, ICs feel like they can do everything BUT the work that moves the company forward)

Re: The Ask

#62

Post by motoxpro »

roenxi wrote: post #38
simonw wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A key job of management is to figure out what's actually going on, as opposed to just what people tell you is going on. LLMs are inherently gullible.

Human managers are inherently gullible; we've got no plausible path to unbias them. LLMs have at least one plausible path which is to train them to be a little bit cynical. We're not going to call it "management" necessarily, but there is no question that LLMs are going to take over decision making from managers eventually. Why choose a monkey guessing what the evidence says you should do when you could have an optim…

Interesting that humans can't be trained to improve ("be less biased") but AI can. I would say this is a much more damning conclusion for the AI replacing ICs than managers.

Whats easier, training AI to make good bets (what does that mean in business? Make the most money? Worker quality of life? World a better place?) or training it to get code to compile?

Re: The Ask

#63

Post by randallsquared »

whowasmark wrote: post #30
JSR_FDED wrote: post #2

This is either very profound or not at all. Can’t figure out which.

We never found out who Mark was. Or what the problem with Rachel was. Or what and why behind and ahead of the pressure to meet either were in place. So going with not at all. They've literally described their job as having too much cruft that could have been partially solved by the non-existence of their role.

If they aren't doing this role, then each of the 10 people they directly manage will end up doing 20% of it, and there will be another 30% that no one does and causes large but untraceable-to-this-absence issues in a year.

Re: The Ask

#64

Post by diatone »

roenxi wrote: post #38
simonw wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A key job of management is to figure out what's actually going on, as opposed to just what people tell you is going on. LLMs are inherently gullible.

Human managers are inherently gullible; we've got no plausible path to unbias them. LLMs have at least one plausible path which is to train them to be a little bit cynical. We're not going to call it "management" necessarily, but there is no question that LLMs are going to take over decision making from managers eventually. Why choose a monkey guessing what the evidence says you should do when you could have an optim…

If we can just simulate the business accurately enough we can solve having to interact with the market… which is also trying to solve interacting with us… We just need to do it more accurately…

Something tells me people will still be in the mix here.

Re: The Ask

#65

Post by throw0101c »

greekrich92 wrote: post #54
gjvc wrote: post #48

QUESTION / REQUEST / REQUIREMENT -- all nouns. Not "Ask". "Ask" is a verb.

The nouning of verbs is a very annoying type of corpo speak

“Verbing weirds language.” — Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes, https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25

Re: The Ask

#66

Post by clueless »

This is unrelated to this article, but I see such simple titles posted on HN often and given how many articles I read per day on HN, I don't know if it's worth me reading or not until I click it. I wish we had a feature on HN that semantically defined who the intended audience for an article is, specially for such opaque titles. Something like the following (used gemini for this):

Here are the 1-2 tags defining the intended audience for each article on the front page:

Five frontier LLMs disagree on 67% of 1k real-world fact-check claims Tags: AI Researchers, Machine Learning Engineers

YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos Tags: Digital Content Creators, General Tech Consumers

A Eureka machine that thinks like nature and explores what AI cannot Tags: Computer Scientists, AI Researchers

AMD pulls a bait-and-switch on Linux users with Vivado licensing changes Tags: Linux Users, Hardware Engineers

I analysed 20 years of my chats Tags: Data Enthusiasts, Hobbyist Programmers

I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit Tags: Tech Entrepreneurs, Product Managers

Hallucinate – Massively Multiplayer Online Rave Tags: Gamers, Creative Coders

AI sticker shock hits corporate America Tags: Corporate Executives, IT Managers

SimCity 3k in 4k (2025) Tags: Retro Gamers, Game Developers

Rapira (Рапира) – Soviet programming language interpreter Tags: Programming Historians, Language Enthusiasts

What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications Tags: Mobile Developers, Privacy Advocates

Commission fines Temu €200M for breaching the Digital Services Act Tags: E-commerce Professionals, Tech Policy Analysts

Ruby vs. Java vs. TypeScript: my experience on building a Cowork DOCX plugin Tags: Software Engineers, Web Developers

I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum) Tags: Network Enthusiasts, Maker/DIY Community

More Whimsical OEIS Sequences Tags: Mathematicians, Recreational Math Enthusiasts

Libwce: The entropy layer of a wavelet codec, on its own Tags: Compression Engineers, Systems Programmers

The Ask (the article you previously asked about) Tags: Engineering Managers, Tech Leaders

Seeing Around Corners Using Smartphone-Grade Lidar Tags: Computer Vision Researchers, Optics Engineers

Rust (and Slint) on a Jailbroken Kindle Tags: Hardware Hackers, Rust Developers

DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode Tags: Search Engine Marketers, Privacy Advocates

Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025) Tags: AI Prompt Engineers, NLP Researchers

Go: Support for Generic Methods Tags: Go Developers, Systems Programmers

Biff is a command line datetime Swiss army knife Tags: System Administrators, CLI Power Users

FBI Arrests CIA Official with $40M in Gold Bars in His Home Tags: General Audience, Intelligence Buffs

RamAIn (YC W26) Is Hiring Tags: Job Seekers, AI Engineers

Warm up your MacBook (2019) Tags: Mac Users, Hardware Hobbyists

Incident with Pull Requests, Issues, Git Operations and API Requests (GitHub) Tags: DevOps Engineers, Software Developers

A New Typst Template for Pandoc (2025) Tags: Academic Writers, Technical Writers

Stress disrupts hippocampal integration of overlapping events, memory inference Tags: Neuroscientists, Psychology Researchers

Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term Tags: Tech Finance Enthusiasts, General Tech Consumers

Re: The Ask

#69

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

redelbee wrote: post #51

I understand the following isn’t the point of this piece and yet I still can’t help wondering: How much better off we would all be if “senior management” stopped playing these games to get things done and instead spent most of that time really considering the things getting done and whether they are ultimately good for individuals and society at large. We don’t need another product from the “fruit company” and we cer…

There's an intuitive appeal in having a coordination mechanism where good leaders decide which problems are important to work on and then get the smart people to work on those problems. But historically, societies structured that way haven't worked well; they struggle to get good signals on whether the solutions make sense, and the coordination mechanisms are vulnerable to subversion by bad leaders. The Soviet Union famously forbade anyone from researching genetics for decades because a crank named Trofim Lysenko who didn't think it was real happened to become politically popular.

Re: The Ask

#70

Post by throwway120385 »

redelbee wrote: post #51

I understand the following isn’t the point of this piece and yet I still can’t help wondering: How much better off we would all be if “senior management” stopped playing these games to get things done and instead spent most of that time really considering the things getting done and whether they are ultimately good for individuals and society at large. We don’t need another product from the “fruit company” and we cer…

We flipped from an Epicurean mindset to a Stoic or Nihilistic mindset. IOW, we stopped talking about helping people lead good lives and started talking about how we can all weather stress and work hard and deprive ourselves of good things to build something. Or we're talking about how nothing matters so why bother?
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