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).
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.
AI allows executives to spend R&D to create a flywheel which builds more, faster, without hiring more. It makes every individual employee able to deliver more.
ICs dislike this because it raises expectations and puts the spotlight on delivery velocity. In a manufacturing analogy, it’s the same as adding robots that enables workers to pack twice as many pallets per day. You work the same hours, but you’re more tired, and the company pockets the profits.
Software Engineers are experiencing, many for the first time in their careers, what happens when they lose individual bargaining power. Their jobs are being redefined, and they have no say in the matter - especially in the US where “Union” is a forbidden word.
ICs dislike this because executives haven't been shy that their goal in increasing productivity with LLMs is to reduce headcount. Additionally, we have 50 years of data showing that increased productivity only marginally increases pay, if at all - all the gains are captured by the executives.
The more appropriate tools for ICs are torches and pitchforks.
Software engineers tried to unionise in the late 90s and early 2000s and people like Steve Jobs illegally colluded with other tech leaders to kill the movement. They ended up paying out huge undisclosed sums to settle the lawsuits.
After that programmers fell into the situation you are describing - relatively high bargaining power and salaries. Hopefully now with the push for AI we will finally see another pro labor organisation effort !
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.
One hundred percent. Leadership consolidating around like the rebirth of offshoring.
For the record all your prompts are tracked and easily viewable by whoever oversees it at your company. Don't prompt more than you have to and certainly don't give it your best ids. This is value at scale.
What? Doesn't this boil down to "people like people who reliably get results", e.g., we live in a complicated nondeterministic world but we try and make it as deterministic as possible, except for some reason you focus on the nondeterministic part for managers, and "deterministic" part for engineers?
Not even sure if determinism is a good axis to analyze this problem. Also smells extremely like concept creep - do you mean "moving up the abstraction stack" as "non determinism" too?
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 me.
I think that the simple explanation for why executives are so hyped about AI is simply that they're not familiar with its severe current limitations. For example, Garry Tan seems to really believe he's generating 10KLOC of working code per day; if he'd been a working developer he would have known he isn't.
A friend of mine works at a place whose CEO has been completely one-shotted; he vibe-coded an app and decided this could multiply their productivity like a hundredfold. And now he's implementing an AI mandate for every employee, replete with tracking and metrics and the threat of being fired of you don't play ball.
I was explaining this to my wife, who asked, why doesn't the CEO understand the limitations and the drawbacks the programmers are experiencing. And I said—he doesn't care, because he's looking at what other businesses are doing, what they're writing about in Bloomberg and WSJ, what "industry best practice is", and where the money is going. Trillions of dollars are going in to revolutionizing every industry with AI. If you're a CEO and you're not angling to capture a piece of that, then the board is going to have some serious questions about your capability to lead the company. Executives are often ignorant of the problems faced by line workers in a way perhaps best explained by a particular scene from Swordfish (2001): "He lives in a world beyond your world..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOV6YelKJ-A The complaints of a few programmers just don't matter when you have millions or billions of capital at your command, and business experts are saying you can tenfold your output with half the engineering workforce.
Right now there are only two choices for programmers: embrace generative AI fully and become proficient at it. Instead of surfacing problems with it, offer solutions: how can we use AI to make this better? Or have a very, very hard time working in the field.
The premise is wrong. Plenty of ICs 'enamored' with AI.
If you are not, you either have a boring job or do not have any ideas that are worth prototyping asynchronously. Or haven't tried AI in the last ~3 months.
I think my job is a lot of fun and I'm not enamored with AI. Why would I want a robot to do the fun part for me? That's what makes it fun -- that I'm the one doing it.
You don't have to automate all of it, just whatever parts you do not consider fun so you can get to the fun parts with less friction.
But I suppose it depends on what you consider fun. I genuinely know people who love to meticulously write many many unit tests. I think that's great as a craft, but you probably can not expect to get paid for it, similar to how you likely can not be profitable by selling handmade shirts now unless you are already independently wealthy and well known.
When you analyze this as "Management loves AI" and "workers hate it" goes completely back to 'who owns the means of production?', and can be clearly seen within Marx's critique.
> When you analyze this as "Management loves AI" and "workers hate it" goes completely back to 'who owns the means of production?', and can be clearly seen within Marx's critique.
ICs see the teams being reduced as the individual productivity gets increased the amount of FTE per project goes down, and superfluous folks shown the door.
Meanwhile executives see the money related numbers go up.
In my systems programming job ICs have mostly avoided it because we don't have time to learn a new thing with questionable benefits. A lot of my team are really, really good programmers and like that aspect of the job. They don't want to turn any part of it over to a machine. Now if a machine could save us from ever dealing with Jira...
That said, I have begun using AI for some things and it is starting to be useful. It's still 50/50 though, with many hallucinations that waste time but some cases where it caught very simple bugs(syntax or copy/paste errors). I think the experience of, say, systems programmers is very different vs python/web folks though. AI does a great job for my helper scripts in Python.
Management needs to take their own medicine though. They continue to refuse to leverage AI to do things it could actually be good at. I give a duplicate status to management 3x/week now. Why? AI could handle tracking and summarizing it just fine. It could also produce my monthly status for me.
AI has freed me from a vicious cycle that I had been corralled into as an explicit attrition tactic, and which almost ended with me being used non-consensually for reproductive purposes on at least one occasion.
It accomplished this not simply by eliminating my overpaid bullshit job as parasite attractor; but by putting an end to its pathetic semblance of a premise: building software to be used by, uh, someone? for, uh, something?
The various entities requesting the work (or, in later years, the layers of barely-sentient intermediaries between me and said entities) were hardly if ever clear on how exactly this was supposed to produce value; but now they're free, too! Free from having to even try to understand how answering that question is relevant, emdash - so in the end it worked out for them as well!
I am finally at liberty to do something worthwhile with my life, and while at this point I realize it'll take me some time to even remember what "worthwhile" even was (or whether such a thing still exists in your imaginary world of personalized sensory bubbles), I do sleep a rich REM sleep knowing society is now capable of digging its own grave without my assistance. Seriously, I was looking at my bank account and getting a little worried.
I am told that mine is a minority position: if you happen to be the kind of person who believes that more is better, no matter more of what, rest assured you and your eventual progeny will be quite safe - for a while, anyway - in your new role as AI trainer (or is it AI fodder, let's let the market decide!)
Well, turns out when we are all busy looking the part, it becomes impossible for anyone to actually play the part; but also nobody notices, so this is fine too!
Just one request on my part: if possible, do shut up while figuring out how to better turn yourself and our world into paperclips, alright? Besides the ones that you recognize as people, a whole bunch of other people do live on this here planetation - and I hear they find all the AI blather to be mighty annoying.
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 into 1! No one has the pipeline built up. So not sure how it fits into the overall company strategy. It’s only helping to fire people now that’s it?
In addition to reason in the article, one thing I’ve noticed among some executives and product managers is their experience using LLM coding tools causes them to lose respect for human software engineers. I’ve seen managers lose all respect for engineering excellence and assume anything they want can be shat out by an LLM on a short deadline. Or assume because they were able to vibe code something trivial like a blog they don’t need to involve engineers in the design of anything, rather they should just be code monkeys that follow whatever design the product managers vibed up. It is really demoralizing to be talked to as if the speaker is promoting an LLM.
Reads like an extended slop LinkedIn post. The author poses a question with an obvious answer yet answers with the most galaxy brain take possible while dropping in some academic concepts to make themselves sound like a thought leader despite probably only taking an intro class in college 10+ years ago.
They don’t have to use the tech, except maybe superficially. They are either being explicitly mislead by salespeople or like others have mentioned, it simply is a vehicle to confirm their own biases or annoyance at having to pay peons. It’s up to the grunts to actually make this work.
It’s like Marc Andressen bloviating about how AI will replace everyone except him.
To be fair, some of this is understandable. At some level, you’re just going to see some things as a bullet point in a daily/monthly/quarterly report and possibly a 10 minute presentation. You’re implicitly assuming that the folks under you have condensed this information into something meaningful.
70 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 82.8 ms ] threadLook, I know that we like poking fun at some people but generally I haven't seen execs saying this.
But because time is money, I think all the benefits go to the dev. The exec still needs the dev regardless
ICs dislike this because it raises expectations and puts the spotlight on delivery velocity. In a manufacturing analogy, it’s the same as adding robots that enables workers to pack twice as many pallets per day. You work the same hours, but you’re more tired, and the company pockets the profits.
Software Engineers are experiencing, many for the first time in their careers, what happens when they lose individual bargaining power. Their jobs are being redefined, and they have no say in the matter - especially in the US where “Union” is a forbidden word.
The more appropriate tools for ICs are torches and pitchforks.
After that programmers fell into the situation you are describing - relatively high bargaining power and salaries. Hopefully now with the push for AI we will finally see another pro labor organisation effort !
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.
For the record all your prompts are tracked and easily viewable by whoever oversees it at your company. Don't prompt more than you have to and certainly don't give it your best ids. This is value at scale.
Not even sure if determinism is a good axis to analyze this problem. Also smells extremely like concept creep - do you mean "moving up the abstraction stack" as "non determinism" too?
I think that the simple explanation for why executives are so hyped about AI is simply that they're not familiar with its severe current limitations. For example, Garry Tan seems to really believe he's generating 10KLOC of working code per day; if he'd been a working developer he would have known he isn't.
I was explaining this to my wife, who asked, why doesn't the CEO understand the limitations and the drawbacks the programmers are experiencing. And I said—he doesn't care, because he's looking at what other businesses are doing, what they're writing about in Bloomberg and WSJ, what "industry best practice is", and where the money is going. Trillions of dollars are going in to revolutionizing every industry with AI. If you're a CEO and you're not angling to capture a piece of that, then the board is going to have some serious questions about your capability to lead the company. Executives are often ignorant of the problems faced by line workers in a way perhaps best explained by a particular scene from Swordfish (2001): "He lives in a world beyond your world..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOV6YelKJ-A The complaints of a few programmers just don't matter when you have millions or billions of capital at your command, and business experts are saying you can tenfold your output with half the engineering workforce.
Right now there are only two choices for programmers: embrace generative AI fully and become proficient at it. Instead of surfacing problems with it, offer solutions: how can we use AI to make this better? Or have a very, very hard time working in the field.
But I will insist that executives are more driven by FOMO than a teenager.
If you are not, you either have a boring job or do not have any ideas that are worth prototyping asynchronously. Or haven't tried AI in the last ~3 months.
But I suppose it depends on what you consider fun. I genuinely know people who love to meticulously write many many unit tests. I think that's great as a craft, but you probably can not expect to get paid for it, similar to how you likely can not be profitable by selling handmade shirts now unless you are already independently wealthy and well known.
When you analyze this as "Management loves AI" and "workers hate it" goes completely back to 'who owns the means of production?', and can be clearly seen within Marx's critique.
How? Marx's critique doesn't land here at all.
Meanwhile executives see the money related numbers go up.
Narrator: there is not
In my systems programming job ICs have mostly avoided it because we don't have time to learn a new thing with questionable benefits. A lot of my team are really, really good programmers and like that aspect of the job. They don't want to turn any part of it over to a machine. Now if a machine could save us from ever dealing with Jira...
That said, I have begun using AI for some things and it is starting to be useful. It's still 50/50 though, with many hallucinations that waste time but some cases where it caught very simple bugs(syntax or copy/paste errors). I think the experience of, say, systems programmers is very different vs python/web folks though. AI does a great job for my helper scripts in Python.
Management needs to take their own medicine though. They continue to refuse to leverage AI to do things it could actually be good at. I give a duplicate status to management 3x/week now. Why? AI could handle tracking and summarizing it just fine. It could also produce my monthly status for me.
It accomplished this not simply by eliminating my overpaid bullshit job as parasite attractor; but by putting an end to its pathetic semblance of a premise: building software to be used by, uh, someone? for, uh, something?
The various entities requesting the work (or, in later years, the layers of barely-sentient intermediaries between me and said entities) were hardly if ever clear on how exactly this was supposed to produce value; but now they're free, too! Free from having to even try to understand how answering that question is relevant, emdash - so in the end it worked out for them as well!
I am finally at liberty to do something worthwhile with my life, and while at this point I realize it'll take me some time to even remember what "worthwhile" even was (or whether such a thing still exists in your imaginary world of personalized sensory bubbles), I do sleep a rich REM sleep knowing society is now capable of digging its own grave without my assistance. Seriously, I was looking at my bank account and getting a little worried.
I am told that mine is a minority position: if you happen to be the kind of person who believes that more is better, no matter more of what, rest assured you and your eventual progeny will be quite safe - for a while, anyway - in your new role as AI trainer (or is it AI fodder, let's let the market decide!)
Well, turns out when we are all busy looking the part, it becomes impossible for anyone to actually play the part; but also nobody notices, so this is fine too!
Just one request on my part: if possible, do shut up while figuring out how to better turn yourself and our world into paperclips, alright? Besides the ones that you recognize as people, a whole bunch of other people do live on this here planetation - and I hear they find all the AI blather to be mighty annoying.
It’s like Marc Andressen bloviating about how AI will replace everyone except him.
To be fair, some of this is understandable. At some level, you’re just going to see some things as a bullet point in a daily/monthly/quarterly report and possibly a 10 minute presentation. You’re implicitly assuming that the folks under you have condensed this information into something meaningful.
It's honestly insane that they think this.
They really don't understand that they're building something they cannot possibly control, if it turns out to be what they're envisioning.