AI: Confidently Incorrect

Kinda like Wal-Mart trying to “save money” with self check out and now they are walking it back.

Or more generalized: management going all-in with their decisions, forgetting there is a sweet spot for everything, and then backtracking losing employee time and company money. Sometimes these cause huge backlash, like Wells Fargo pushy sales practices, or great loses, like Meta with Metaverse

As a senior developer, my most productive days are genuinely when I remove a lot of code. This might seem like negative productivity to a naive beancounter, but in fact this is my peak contribution to the software and the organization. Simplifying, optimizing, identifying what code is no longer needed, removing technical debt, improving maintainability, this is what requires most of my experience and skill and contextual knowledge to do safely and correctly. AI has no ability to do this in any meaningful way, and code bases filled with mostly AI generated code are bound to become an unmaintainable nightmare (which I will eventually be paid handsomely to fix, I suspect)

Hiring people at lower wages that is.

It's technically closer to Schrodinger's truth. It goes both ways depending on "when" you look at it. Publicly traded companies are more or less expected to adopt AI as it is the next "cheap" labor... so long as it is the cheapest of any option. See the very related: slave labor and it's variants, child labor, and "outsourcing" to "less developed" countries.

The problem is they need to dance between this experimental technology and ... having a publicly "functional" company. The line demands you cut costs but also increase service. So basically overcorrection hell. Mass hirings into mass firings. Every quarter / two quarters depending on the company... until one of two things becomes true: ai works or ai no longer is the cheapest solution. I imagine that will rubberband for quite some time. (saas shit like oracle etc)

In short - I'd not expect this to be more than a brief reprieve from a rapidly drying well. Take advantage of it for now - but I'd recommend not expecting it to remain.

At least in my area they've decided to walk back the walk back.

They went from "Self checkouts are now only for ten items or less" to "Self checkouts are permanently closed" and now they've gone to "Self checkouts can be used for any number of items and also we added four more".

The power to fire lies within the leadership themselves though...
Oh, you mean an actual fire?! I like your way of thinking.

That's what I suspect. ChatGPT is never wrong, and even if it doesn't know, it knows and still answers something. I guess its no different for source code: always add, never delete.

They should have just asked me. I knew that would be the result years ago. Writing has been on the screaming wall of faces while the faces also screamed it.

You son of a bitch, I'm in!

Nah, I came here to make this comment and you already have it well in hand. It's not really any different other than the marketing spin, though. Companies have always had bad code and hired specialists to sort it out. And over half of the specialists suck, too, and so the merry-go-round spins.

A lot of bosses think developers’ entire job is just churning out code when it’s actually like 50% coding and 50% listening to stakeholders, planning, collaborating with designers, etc.

A lot of leadership is incompetent. In a reasonable, just, world they would not be in these decision making positions.

Verbose blogger Ed Zitron wrote about this. He called them "Business Idiots": https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

Jup. But the same goes for developers that go way too fast when setting up a project or library. 2-3 months in and everything is a mess. Weird function names, all one letter vars, no inversion of control, hardcoded things etc. Good luck fixing it.

Productivity will go up, wages will remain the same, and no additional time off will be given to employees. They’ll merely be required to produce 4x as much and compensation will not increase to match.

It seems the point of all these machines and automation isn’t to make our individual lives easier and more prosperous, but instead to increase and maximize shareholder value.

The line demands you cut costs but also increase service.

The line demands it go up. It doesn't care how you get there. In many cases, decreasing service while also cutting costs is the way to do it so long as line goes up.

See: enshittification

I worked in one of these companies. Within months, we went from a company I would be proud to recommend to friends to a service I would never use myself, just due to the horrendous route they took to hire overseas support.

The line of tech work I was in required about a month of training after passing the interview process, and even then you had to take a test at the end to prove you’d absorbed the material before you ever speak to a customer.

When they outsourced, they just bought a company of like 30 people in an adjacent industry and gave them a week of training. Our call queues were never worse and every customer was angry with everyone by the time they talked to someone who had training.

I don’t blame the overseas agents. I blame all the companies that treat them like cattle.

jobs are for suckers, be a consultant and charge triple

I'm absolutely not charismatic enough to pull that off.

It’s Microsoft would make most sense its mangement decisions considering recently theyve pulled all the stops out to guarantee the software cant be shittier. They even made all there software spyware now.

Ah so AI does create jobs, it’s the Zorg logic