This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
It’s hard for people who haven’t experienced the loss of experts to understand. Not a programmer but I worked in aerospace engineering for 35 years. The drive to transfer value to execs and other stakeholders by reducing the cost of those who literally make that value always ends costing more.
those executives act like parasites. They bring no value and just leech the life from the companies.
Executives think they are the most important part of the company. They are high level managers, that is all.
Well, yeah, but those costs are for tomorrow's executive to figure out, we need those profits NOW
It’s utterly bizarre. The customers lose out by receiving an inferior product at the same cost. The workers lose out by having their employment terminated. And even the company loses out by having its reputation squandered. The only people who gain are the executives and the ownership.
This is absolutely by design. The corporate raider playbook is well-read. See: Sears, Fluke, DeWalt, Boeing, HP, Intel, Anker, any company purchased by Vista (RIP Smartsheet, we barely knew ye), and so on. Find a brand with an excellent reputation, gut it, strip mine that goodwill, abandon the husk on a golden parachute, and make sure to not be the one holding the bag.
Boeing
Everyone. But Boeing did a pretty fucked up job of it.
Imagine a company that fires its software engineers, replaces them with AI-generated code, and then sits back, expecting everything to just work. This is like firing your entire fire department because you installed more smoke detectors. It’s fine until the first real fire happens.
Sure but they’re not going to fire all of them. They’re going to fire 90% then make 10% put out the fires and patch the leaks while working twice as many hours for less pay.
The company will gradually get worse and worse until bankrupt or sold and the c-suite bails with their golden parachutes.
This is a bad analogy.
It would be more akin to firing your fire departments, because you installed automatic hoses in front of everyone’s homes. When a fire starts, the hoses will squirt water towards the fire, but sometimes it’ll miss, sometimes it’ll squirt backwards, sometimes it’ll squirt the neighbour’s house, and sometimes it’ll squirt the fire.
The irony of using an AI generated image for this post...
AI imagery makes any article look cheaper in my view, I am more inclined to "judge the book by its cover".
Why would you slap something so lazy on top of a piece of writing you (assuming it isn't also written by AI) put time and effort into?
this post is about programmers being replaced by ai. the writer seems ok with artists being replaced.
Or the picture is a statement for why artists shouldn't be replaced either. Who can tell.
considering one of the other posts is about "democratizing AI" I lean towards my take.
I thought it was intentional AI slop
Yeah, I'm sure they left the spelling mistake in the image on purpose to get increased engagement from pedants like me. I'm sorry, it works on me.
As a software engineer, I’m perfectly happy waiting around until they have to re-hire all of us at consulting rates because their tech stacks are falling the fuck apart <3
This is prophetic and yet as clear as day to anyone who has actually had to rely on their own code for anything.
I have lately focused all of my tech learning efforts and home lab experiments on cloud-less approaches. Sure the cloud is a good idea for scalable high traffic websites, but it sure also seems to enable police state surveillance and extreme vendor lock-in.
It’s really just a focus on fundamentals. But all those cool virtualization technologies that enable ‘cloud’ are super handy in a local system too. Rolling back container snapshots on specific services while leaving the general system unimpacted is useful anywhere.
But it is all on hardware I control. Apropos of the article, the pendulum will swing back toward more focus on local infrastructure. Cloud won’t go away, but more people are realizing that it also means someone else owns your data/your business.
I think they were suckered in also by the supposed lower cost of running services, which, as it happens, isn't lower at all and in fact is more expensive. But you laid off the Datacenter staff so. Pay up, suckers.
Neat toolsets though.
Literally anybody who thought about the idea for more than ten seconds already realized this a long time ago; apparently this blog post needed to be written for the people who didn't do even that...
You underestimate the dumbassery of Pencil-Pushers in tech companies (& also how genuinely sub-human they can be)
MBAs are like surgeons; their every solution is to cut.
Although I agree, I think AI code generation is the follow up mistake. The original mistake was to offshore coding to fire qualified engineers.
Not all of offshore is terrible, that'd be a dumb generalization, but there are some terrible ones out there. A few of our clients that opted to offshore are being drowned is absolute trash code. Given that we always have to clean it up anyway, I can see the use-case for AI instead of that shop.
I think the core takeaway is your shouldn't outsource core capabilities. If the code is that critical to your bottomline, pay for quality (which usually means no contractors - local or not).
If you outsource to other developers or AI it means most likely they will care less and/or someone else can just as easily come along and do it too.
...shouldn't outsource core capabilities.
This right here.
What most people forget is that as a programmer/designer/etc, your job is to take what your client/customer tells you they want, listen to them, then try to give them what they ACTUALLY NEED, which is something that I think needs to be highlighted. Most people making requests to programmers, don't really even know what they want, or why they want it. They had some meeting and people decided that, 'Yes we need the program to do X!' without realizing that what they are asking for won't actually get them the result they want.
AI will be great at giving people exactly what they ask for...but that doesn't mean its what they actually needed...
Great points. Also:
... AI will be great at giving people exactly what they ask for ...
Honestly, I'm not even sure about this. With hallucinations and increasingly complex prompts that it fails to handle, it's just as likely to regurgitate crap. I don't even know if AI will get to a better state before all of this dev-firing starts to backfire and sour most company's want to even touch AI for most development.
Humans talk with humans and do their best to come up with solutions. AI takes prompts and looks at historical human datasets to try and determine what a human would do. It's bound to run into something novel eventually, especially if there aren't more datasets to pull in because human-generated development solutions become scarce.
I'm just a dabbler at coding and even i can see getting rid of programmers and relying to ai for it will lead to disaster. Ai is useful, but only for smallest scraps of code because anything bigger will get too muddled. For me, it liked to come up with its own stupid ideas and then insist on getting stuck on those so i had to constantly reset the conversation. But i managed to have it make useful little function that i couldnt have thought up myself as it used some complex mathematical things.
Also relying on it is quick way to kind of get things done but without understanding at all how things work. Eventually this will lead to such horrible and unsecure code that no one can fix or maintain. Though maybe its good thing eventually since it will bring those shitty companies to ruin. any leadership in those companies should be noted down now though, so they cant pretend later to not have had anything to do with it.
A reason I didn't see listed: they are just asking for competition. Yes by all means get rid of your most talented people who know how your business is run.
And can reproduce the whole business in a weekend with the help of AI. There are no moats anymore.
I wonder if there will eventually be a real Butlerian Jihad
Maybe after Herbert's idiot son dies and someone else gets the rights
I'm sorry, I mostly agree with the sentiment of the article in a feel-good kind of way, but it's really written like how people claim bullies will get their comeuppance later in life, but then you actually look them up later and they have high paying jobs and wonderful families. There's no substance here, just a rant.
The author hints at analogous cases in the past of companies firing all of their engineers and then having to scramble to hire them back, but doesn't actually get into any specifics. Be specific! Talk through those details. Prove to me the historical cases are sufficiently similar to what we're starting to see now that justifies the claims of the rest of the article.
Come back in 3 years and the "historical cases" will have appeared.
https://old.reddit.com/r/jobs/comments/1inh2hl/meta_just_laid_off_3600_peopleheres_why_this/
or just wait 14 hours
I'm fine with this. Let it all break, we've earned it.
