Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I'm OK being left behind, thanks

shkspr.mobi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

671–680 of 800 posts

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#671

Post by johnnyanmac »

_doctor_love wrote: post #625
HolyLampshade wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool Cloud had a very similar vibe when it was really running advertising to CIO/CTOs hard. Everything had to be jammed into the cloud, even if it made absolutely no sense for it to be run there. This seems to come pretty frequently from visionless tech execs. They need to justify their existence to their boss, and thus try to show how innovative and/or co…

> Cloud had a very similar vibe when it was really running advertising to CIO/CTOs hard. Everything had to be jammed into the cloud, even if it made absolutely no sense for it to be run there. 100% accurate - some of us are old enough to have lived through a few of the mini-revolutions in between the mega-revolutions of Internet/Web in the 1990s and now AI/LLM in the 2020s. We are in the "stupid phase" of adoption st…

I think the feel bad moment here is how impersonal everything got in 3 decades. During the dotcom bust you still had to meet and talk to people to get interviews started.

Now you can make a perfectly tailored resume, apply to 50 jobs in a day, and it's not unexpected to not get any response from those in 2 weeks. You don't know if it's your resume, the company, or the economy. And no one wants to admit the latter two are problems.

Not to mention the utter disrespect these days. There's no decorum in many of these "professional" settings, when normally you want your interview process to show off your best face.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#672

Post by oro44 »

throwaway29130 wrote: post #305
afpx wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really insane what is happening. My wife manages 70 software developers. Her boss mandated that managers replace 50% of the staff with AI within a year. And, she's scrambling trying to figure out if any of the tools actually work and annoying her team because she keeps pushing AI on them. Unsurprisingly it's only slowed things down and put her in a terrible position.

Brutal. But probably all too common. One of my clients has very suddenly gone all-in on agentic AI and they're in this crazy hurry. (Probably the most annoying part is they want to automate stuff that I built a POC for using GPT-4o, two years ago - at the time they saw no use for it, but now they're all-in on the hype.) This started literally two weeks ago and a couple of days ago I talked to one of the admin people…

[flagged]

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#673

Post by oro44 »

diehunde wrote: post #312
augusto-moura wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I get a bit annoyed is companies forcing AI tools, getting usage metrics and actively hunting the engineers that don't use the tool "enough", I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool. Even in the past, aside from technical limitaions, you were not required to use enough of a tool. It just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors…

As an employee of a big tech company doing this, it's all fear mongering. We are being told that if everyone doesn't use these tools, our competitors will wipe the floor with us because they are using them and will ship features 10x faster. But many engineers are suspicious as well.

Hook line and sinker..

Right so you are going to be left behind whilst the ground keeps shifting under you, given the models are non-deterministic and continuously changing?

There was a big rush of prompt engineers. Where are they now? Nobody even referse to 'prompt engineering' anymore.

The best thing to do is wait for steady-state. Whats going on is insane... a slow implosion of the code base.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#674

Post by lostmsu »

jghn wrote: post #278
irishcoffee wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I distinctly remember staring at my check/bank/debit card laying on the desk in front of my keyboard, all the info punched in to buy $500 of bitcoin for something like $0.29 a coin. Didn't pull the trigger. I just tell myself I'd have sold them when they doubled in price or they'd have been hacked in one of the mt. gox attacks and I'd have lost them anyways. Today it would be about 120m. Oh well.

Same. there's no chance I'd have the riches associated with those coins. Or at least that's how I manage to sleep at night. There was a local food delivery service at the time that accepted bitcoin. Can you imagine looking back on life and realizing you spent the equivalent of $1M on a burrito?

> Or at least that's how I manage to sleep at night.

Admirable self-reflection.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#675

Post by oro44 »

zrail wrote: post #483
diehunde wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an employee of a big tech company doing this, it's all fear mongering. We are being told that if everyone doesn't use these tools, our competitors will wipe the floor with us because they are using them and will ship features 10x faster. But many engineers are suspicious as well.

It's baffling, to be honest. I'm at a fintech that is currently pushing very hard at this, but in the same breath talking about how we're not a pure software play. I just don't understand where they're coming from.

irrational exuberance

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#676

Post by johnnyanmac »

hibikir wrote: post #273
augusto-moura wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I get a bit annoyed is companies forcing AI tools, getting usage metrics and actively hunting the engineers that don't use the tool "enough", I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool. Even in the past, aside from technical limitaions, you were not required to use enough of a tool. It just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors…

It's using a bad tool to try to aim at something reasonable-ish: Developers not taking advantage of the tools in places where it's very easy to get use out of them. I have coworkers like that: One spent 3 days researching a bug that Claude found in 10 minutes by pointing it at the logs in the time window and the codebase. And he didn't even find the bug, when Claude nailed it in one. But is this something that is bes…

> But execs in many places like easy, visible metrics, whether they are actually helping or not.

Most execs didn't get where they were by being truly helpful and adding value to the company. They played the game long enough to know that politics trumps accomplishments. The rest from there is the ability to weave a good story (be it slightly or completely exaggerated).

It's not even about trust. It's about incentives in a structure that is dog-eat-dog. Rugged individualism in a corporate structure is a self defeating prophecy. But it's inevitable when executives extract from the company instead of rising the tides for all ships. And shareholders reward it.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#677

Post by AnimalMuppet »

sarchertech wrote: post #574
diehunde wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an employee of a big tech company doing this, it's all fear mongering. We are being told that if everyone doesn't use these tools, our competitors will wipe the floor with us because they are using them and will ship features 10x faster. But many engineers are suspicious as well.

I’m at a big tech company top and essentially no one is a true believer more than 3 or 4 levels down from the top. We’re all just trying to keep our use metrics high enough to not get noticed. But for those top layers, I’ve never seen so much FOMO in all my life. We’re a very slow moving company but they act like we’ve got 2 weeks to go “AI first” or we’re dead in the water. I’ve never seen such a successful hype cyc…

Maybe AI is really good for vibe-coding bots that amplify FOMO?

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#678

Post by oro44 »

zephen wrote: post #536
dakolli wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of these occulted skills, that we literally can't explain why they work are akin to gamblers superstitions. If I write something this way, it works. Its like a gambler who think they order in which the push the buttons on the slot machine makes a difference. Kind of weird tools also incorporate addictive gambling game's UX design. They're literally allowing you to multiply your output: 3x, 4x, 5x (run it 5 times…

> All of these occulted skills, that we literally can't explain why they work are akin to gamblers superstitions. Yes, it's hard to see how, at this moment in time, "Anybody can write code with an LLM" is so different from "Anybody can make money in the stock market." The underlying mechanisms are completely different, of course, and the putative goal of the LLM purveyors is to make it where anybody really can write…

Broadly speaking, LLMs are destined to fail.

Why? Because all the folks involved have created a technology in search for a problem to solve. That never, ever works. Steve Jobs of all people left this piece of wisdom behind. Its amazing how few actually apply it.

The internet was never this - its origins go back to the need to able to transmit data - darpa. And this is what we still do now...

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#679

Post by Copernicron »

jmalicki wrote: post #579
tehjoker wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So just run a new study this year. I do think the tools have improved, but it should show up empirically. The only people for whom the urgency of "right now" is present is for the C-suite and investor class who are fighting to make sure they survive, but it might also be a crisis of their own making. Don't confuse your identity as a worker with the identity of the capitalist class.

You should be able to just develop software on your cellphone, right? Do you have an empirical study to support that your employer should buy you a laptop and possibly a monitor or two to help your productivity? If there's no study, why should we believe it? It's like "A study found that parachutes were no more effective than empty backpacks at protecting jumpers from aircraft." https://www.npr.org/sections/health-sh…

> Oh, there's one important detail here. The drop in the study was about 2 feet total, because the biplane and helicopter were parked.

I don't think that's making the argument you think it is.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#680

Post by oro44 »

leptons wrote: post #654
laserlight wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If people really counted [...] Exactly. I counted and reported my results in a previous thread [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47272913

I've started "racing" Claude when I have a somewhat simple task that I think it should be able to handle. I spend a few minutes writing out detailed instructions, which I already knew because I had to do initial discovery around the problem domain to understand what the goal was supposed to be. It took a while to be thorough enough writing it down for Claude, which is time I did not need to spend if I had just starte…

Interesting stuff. Thx for sharing!
Post reply on HN