“Every single Monday was called ‘AI Monday,’” Vaughan said, with his mandate for staff that they could work only on AI. “You couldn’t have customer calls; you couldn’t work on budgets; you had to only work on AI projects.” He said this happened across the board, not just for tech workers, but also for sales, marketing, and everybody else at IgniteTech. “That culture needed to be built. That was the key.”

  • Chaotic Entropy@feddit.uk
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    Vaughan was surprised to find it was often the technical staff, not marketing or sales, who dug in their heels. They were the “most resistant,” he said, voicing various concerns about what the AI couldn’t do, rather than focusing on what it could. The marketing and salespeople were enthused by the possibilities of working with these new tools, he added.

    So the people that had an actual idea of what the implications of using it might be weren’t on board? Huh. Weird.

    • abigscaryhobo@lemmy.world
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      23 days ago

      “All the engineers said my “screen door on a submarine” was “stupid” and would “sink the ship”, so I fired them and hired new engineers!”

      • CEO of now defunct “Screen Door Subs Inc.”
      • greasewizard@slrpnk.net
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        speaking of submarines, this is the exact line of thinking that turned an idiot CEO into a paste at the bottom of the ocean

      • AbidanYre@lemmy.world
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        I told AI to build me a submarine out of titanium carbon fiber.

        • Stockton Rush (if he were alive today)
          • AbidanYre@lemmy.world
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            Damnit, I knew that too. I stopped skimming too early in the Wiki paragraph.

            The entire pressure vessel for the crew used five major components: two hemispherical titanium end caps, two matching titanium interface rings, and the 142 cm (56 in) internal diameter, 2.4-meter-long (7.9 ft) carbon fiber-wound cylindrical hull.[15] The forward hemispherical end cap could be detached from its interface ring, becoming a hatch that allowed crew members to enter the crew compartment before a mission, and exit at its conclusion.[3]

    • Kissaki@feddit.org
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      Sales and marketing is often mostly bullshitting anyway. It also has a lot less risk and constraints associated to generated text having issues. Not surprised they were more on board. The tool is more fitting for those use cases anyway.

      • Soup@lemmy.world
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        They’re also the people who build their career on never stirring the pot so they can make their clients feel special. They’re built to be sycophants and their jobs are, and this isn’t even necessarily a bad thing, a little more nebulous which means they’d feel the effects much less strongly.

    • boogiebored@lemmy.world
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      Seeing these kinds of people harness AI is so embarrassing. They feel empowered while doing some of the whackest stuff. In the end, it is still technical style work snd they are still awful at it.

    • Kissaki@feddit.org
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      rather than focusing on what it could

      When you’re driving a car down the ski jumping ramp.

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    Nota bene: Not just laid off, replaced. With other people.

    Basically spent a ton of money and talent and business disruption to turn over 80% of his workforce for shits and gigs.

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      Wtf it just opened a video in full screen on iOS right away. When I closed it and wanted to scroll down I was suddenly dragging an icon. When tapping this icon it opens some „my personas“ dialog which I don’t even understand what it is supposed to be? What even is this shit ass site?

      Edit: page title is „Home V2“ lol

      Edit 2: Of course this site is made using Elementor, hence the bad performance and buggy layout.

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        That’s actually somewhat of a Safari bug.

        Safari has this tendency of opening videos in full screen, if the video is natively embedded (not using a third party video player component), is set to auto play, and isn’t flagged specifically for not opening automatically in full screen (this is a Safari specific flag that no other browser requires as no other browser has this stupid default behaviour).

        • Pechente@feddit.org
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          Definitely not great behavior but considering Safari makes up a bunch of their users, they should have really added the playsinline attribute to the video to prevent this. But since this site is made using a pretty crappy site builder, they probably cannot change this until Elementor fixes this bug.

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    The question I put to management is “What do you want me to use AI for?”

    I can’t get a consistent answer. Lots of stuff unrelated to my job duties. “Well, it’s so easy to make Facebook ads!” - “You know that’s not a thing I do, right?”

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      Yeah, my boss told he’s under pressure from upper management and customers to add AI in our app. His answer is always “to do what?”. So far, nobody has provided an answer, but whenever we get one we’ll be happy to implement it.

    • Chaotic Entropy@feddit.uk
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      An “enterprise-software powerhouse”, allegedly. Basically they bought an AI startup and decided that this was their entire personality now.

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    A company so small it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. No discernible products.

    Any poly market bets on how long this company actually lasts?

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      Their website barely even works it honestly looks like a scam organisation. I can’t find any description of what it is that they actually do which makes me believe that they don’t do anything.

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    He REALLY hates paying employees and wants their pennies in his treasure horde, we get it.

    He will be shocked when he discovers the shareholders don’t want to pay him, either. He’ll be like “what?!?! AI doing MY job? This is a travesty!” and then they will have robot security drag him out of the building screaming.

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    “That culture needed to be built. That was the key.”

    “Like, I’m not gonna be able to replace these losers if they don’t fix this piece of shit tech for me, will I?”

    • Bleys@lemmy.world
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      From the article:

      Vaughan was surprised to find it was often the technical staff, not marketing or sales, who dug in their heels. They were the “most resistant,” he said, voicing various concerns about what the AI couldn’t do, rather than focusing on what it could. The marketing and salespeople were enthused by the possibilities of working with these new tools, he added.

      Not surprising the people with technical skills that aren’t actually replaceable by LLMs would be against forced AI adoption. Good luck maintaining a code base created with vibe coding. Meanwhile the CEO probably looks at ChatGPT and realizes it could basically do everything he already does (write emails and make high level decisions without actually having to worry about their implementation) and then incorrectly thinks it’s the case for everyone else.

      • Atropos@lemmy.world
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        I deal with this at work. Two engineers love AI, myself and the other engineer hate it. We’re mechanical. It’s funny when a material standard doesn’t exist…

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      Prediction markets have outperformed CEOs for decades and still haven’t replaced them, for the same reason WfH hasn’t replaced offices. Everything is a monopoly or oligopoly now, with no need to efficiently maximize profits. It’s entirely a matter of control.

  • Tattorack@lemmy.world
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    “I am bad at managing my finances, and eventually need to get bailed out by the government, or end up next to the homeless guy I used to make fun of”.

    • This guy.
  • mad_djinn@lemmy.world
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    that writer’s name is all you need to know. always look at the writer’s name and their previous work to identify industry shills