- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
You must log in or # to comment.
“We were still required to find some ways to use AI. The one corporate AI integration that was available to us was the Copilot plugin to Microsoft Teams. So everyone was required to use that at least once a week. The director of engineering checked our usage and nagged about it frequently in team meetings.”
The managerial idiocy is astounding.
It’s pretty easy to set up a cron job to fire off some sort of bullshit LLM request a handful of times a day during working hours. Just set it and forget it.
you could probably even get copilot to write it!
You can even schedule it within copilot
The software engineer acknowledged that AI tools can help improve productivity if used properly, but for programmers with relatively limited experience, he feels the harm is greater than the benefit. Most of the junior developers at the company, he explained, don’t remember the syntax of the language they’re using due to their overreliance on Cursor.
Good luck for the future developers I guess.
companies that’ve spent money on AI enterprise licenses need to show some sort of ROI to the bean-counters. Hence, mandates.
Can’t wait for AI bubble to pop. If this continues, expect more incidents/outages due to AI generated slop code in the future.
From what I see, the current is beginning to turn a little toward valuing senior devs more than ever, because they can deal with the downsides of AI. Junior devs, on the other hand, cannot, and their simpler coding work is also more easily replaced by AI. So we’ll see fewer junior dev jobs, but seniors might do fine. I’m not sure that’s good news for the profession as a whole, but its been an extremely long gold rush into software and online services so some correction probably won’t be the end of the trade.
Oh and yes senior devs are still hounded to use AI, because it will get them further, faster. And there are no more junior devs to help. In the hands of a skilled dev, AI tools can be powerful, and they can spare some toil, and help them find their feet in less familiar frameworks and in foreign codebases.
The problems in software still remain the same though:
(1) Bureaucracy
(2) Needless process
(3) Pointy headed managers
(4) Siloed teams
(5) Product people who have no idea what they want to build
(6) Shitty, poorly performing legacy code nobody wants to touch
Honestly, AI is just the latest thing that can boost your productivity at starting up some random app. But that was never the difficult part anyway.
This, so much this.
When I think about what limited my performance in the last year it was mostly:
- Having to get 5 signatures before I am allowed the budget to install some FOSS software on my work PC that the corporation has already approved for use on work PCs
- Spending 8 months working on a huge feature that was scrapped after 8 months of development
- Being told that no, we cannot work on another large feature request (of which there are many in the pipeline) because our team said we can only fit that scrapped feature into this year and we are not allowed to replan based on the fact that the feature we were supposed to work on got scrapped by business
And then they tell us to return to office and use AI for increasing efficiency.
It’s all an elaborate play performed by upper management to feign being in control and being busy with something. Nobody is actually interested in producing a product, they all just want to further their own position.
The problem is the N+2 is in on it too. And so on. “It just works!”
We are pushing our product managers to communicate their requirements with live prototypes rather than PRDs and mockups. It forces them to actually think their ideas through, and even allows them to get some hallway feedback before even bothering an eng. This might help with #5. But I’ve never had sympathy for engineers who think all the process around them is net negative, because nothings ever stopped engineers from striking out on their own, without all that, and making great businesses. If your PM and VPs are bringing you down, go it alone. If you can’t pull that together into a paycheck then maybe it’s not all as useless as some say.
But I’ve never had sympathy for engineers who think all the process around them is net negative, because nothings ever stopped engineers from striking out on their own, without all that, and making great businesses.
Not all process is pointless, but needless process by definition is. There are also a shit ton of things that stop engineers from “striking out on their own”.
If your PM and VPs are bringing you down, go it alone. If you can’t pull that together into a paycheck then maybe it’s not all as useless as some say.
The whole talk of “go[ing] it alone” kinda strikes me as “bootstrapping”, libertarian non-sense.
I don’t want to do marketing, sales, finance, legal, and product bullshit myself. That’s why I’m an employee.
Two things can be true at the same time, for instance, a company can have a lot of bloated, needless process that stifles people and still pull in enough money to be able to pay for their employees to live a life.
With the amount of market concentration there is in every sector as far as the eye can see, nearly every software-producing company has a cash cow of some sort, and then has a bunch of complete money losers that are subsidized by that cash cow.
So, it’s completely possible that the company overall fully sucks and hasn’t developed anything new of value to someone in decades, but the legacy business keeps the miserable employees from the bread line.
To return to the point, AI doesn’t solve any of this or even help with it.
Code is the easiest thing as a dev. AI wont help me because Im already a good coder. Its the interconnectedness between services, dependencies in ownership (who do I talk to when a gateway error occurs vs a a 401 or 403 etc), etc that are the hard problems. Getting the right people together to solve the thing, you know? AI doesnt fix that.
These scummy fucks even put it as a requirement in job descriptions these days
What even is the requirement? “Must be able to ask a chatbot to do stuff”?
He also said the AI-generated code is often full of bugs. He cited one issue that occurred before his arrival that meant there was no session handling in his employer’s application, so anybody could see the data of any organization using his company’s software.
It’s only financial software, NBD.
Well to be fair, financial data should be public, it would stop so many crimes, so much corruption.
Maybe AI saw the problems that hidden financial data causes and just decided to do the world a favor!
As per usual, those pushing for AI the most are the ones who don’t fucking use it.
Is AI good for printing out the syntax, or an example of a library you haven’t used before?
Sure, sometimes yes. Sometimes no.
Should it be a requirement to be a regular part of software development?
No. AI hallucinates very often and is imitative in nature, not innovative.
More generally, noone should be required to do anything particular until it affects the team. Forcing people to work a certain way is beyond stupid.
I’ve been refusing to use any AI tools at all and luckily my manager respects that, even if he uses AI for basically everything he does. If the company ever decides to mandate it I’ll just have the AI write all my code and commit it with no checks. With the worker’s rights here, it’ll take several months to fire me anyways.
This is just history repeating itself. A while ago it was typewriter repair persons vs. the keyboard. New tech won and time marched on. Having said that…fuck AI.
