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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?

#71

Post by indistinction »

gerdesj wrote: post #67
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. Fa…

>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)

Like what - the world's most advanced blowjob?

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

#72

Post by Esophagus4 »

phyzome wrote: post #62
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?

Come on man, that’s not what GP is saying.

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

#73

Post by _dwt »

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…

> literally

You were either a very talented baby or we’re justified in questioning your ability to assess the correctness of nitpicky formalisms.

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

#75

Post by TheGRS »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #21
exolymph wrote: post #4

People who will get paid more if AI eliminates jobs (in theory, anyway — execs aren't necessarily owners) versus people whose jobs will be eliminated.

No, execs aren't owners, but... if an exec can deliver the same or better results with fewer employees, aren't they a better exec? And if so, aren't they worth more money? (Yeah, I know, there's lots of instances of execs who got paid huge amounts of money and delivered abysmal results...)

Boards aren't exactly dummies either. If they can see their exec isn't necessary I think they'd make moves to eliminate the positions. But that's in a world where reality meets the hype, and I don't think we're there yet. It gets weirder to think that then anyone with access to the tools and some capital could reasonably make their own company to battle it out with the big guys, but that future is a lot hazier.

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

#76

Post by narag »

withinboredom wrote: post #16
exolymph wrote: post #4

People who will get paid more if AI eliminates jobs (in theory, anyway — execs aren't necessarily owners) versus people whose jobs will be eliminated.

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

It's absolutely replacing their jobs, but not their positions. They use it extensively to create all the paperwork, communications, emails, translations... and they work fine for these tasks so they think it's equally useful for everything.

I believe that it's pretty close to the article thesis, just more prosaic.

And yes, the AI works great for some programming tasks, just not for everything or completely unsupervised.

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

#78

Post by skillina »

yalogin wrote: post #38

The bigger question is if AI helps cut down the time of development by 10x (assume for this conversation), and the products are released immediately, will companies keep pushing products/functionalities out every week/month? They still have to wait and see adoption, feedback etc to see if it works or not. Sure ai speeds up development but to what end? It’s not like meta is going to compress 5yrs or instagram features…

Iterating an existing product takes time, but creating a clean room clone of an existing product could be accelerated significantly with AI. We could be moving towards an environment where bigtech falls back on one of its core competencies (scale) and hoards infra while small startups pay them compute and inference costs to undercut existing consumer-facing software on price.

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

#79

Post by garciasn »

_dwt wrote: post #73
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…

> literally You were either a very talented baby or we’re justified in questioning your ability to assess the correctness of nitpicky formalisms.

Funny.

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

#80

Post by yalogin »

skillina wrote: post #78
yalogin wrote: post #38

The bigger question is if AI helps cut down the time of development by 10x (assume for this conversation), and the products are released immediately, will companies keep pushing products/functionalities out every week/month? They still have to wait and see adoption, feedback etc to see if it works or not. Sure ai speeds up development but to what end? It’s not like meta is going to compress 5yrs or instagram features…

Iterating an existing product takes time, but creating a clean room clone of an existing product could be accelerated significantly with AI. We could be moving towards an environment where bigtech falls back on one of its core competencies (scale) and hoards infra while small startups pay them compute and inference costs to undercut existing consumer-facing software on price.

I don’t follow, do you mean to say that meta will become an infra provider instead of the full experience?
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