10 ms·

Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

109 points by johnjwang 6mo ago

FrustratedMonky 6mo ago
Is it really a mystery? A hot take? Executives see this as way to replace labor. The labor sees themselves being replaced. This is a story as old as the hills.
yieldcrv 6mo ago
> I think there’s pretty clearly a divide in AI perception between executives and individual contributors (ICs). Narrator: there is not
bitwize 6mo ago
AI is the much-hoped-for MBA's Stone, the magical substance which transmutes engineering work (costly) into managerial work (valuable).
monarchwadia 6mo ago
The premise is incorrect. Plenty of ICs are enamored with AI. And plenty of executives are skeptical of it.
try-working 6mo ago
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.
- kubb 6mo ago
  You're right, execs keep trying to fit the LLM square peg into the "inteligent agent" round hole. Developers use it, for groking a codebase, for implementing boilerplate, for debugging. They don't need juniors to do the grunt work anymore, they can build and throw away, the language and technology moats get smaller. The value of low level managers, whose power came from having warm bodies to do the grunt work, diminishes. The bean counters will be like when does it pay for itself. Will it? IDK, IDC.
  - TheGRS 6mo ago
    Validation efforts likely become more necessary, so costs rise in another area. And product managers find they still need someone to translate the requirements well because LLMs are too agreeable. Cost optimization still needs someone to intervene as well. I know there's an attempt to shift the development part from developers to other laypeople, but I think that's just going to frustrate everyone involved and probably settle back down into technical roles again. Well paid? Unclear.
- simianwords 6mo ago
  > For them it's chat + magic, and then it does everything Look, I know that we like poking fun at some people but generally I haven't seen execs saying this.
  - try-working 6mo ago
    I've seen literally every company in the world launch a chat bot as their AI strategy. I've also had clients who "wanted to do something with AI", and they would only be happy when they saw a chat UI. I built Semantic Search. Improves business performance significantly without changing the UI. Nobody is impressed because you cannot show it around and talk about it. It looks the same. It has to look like real AI, they say.
exolymph 6mo ago
People who will get paid more if AI eliminates jobs (in theory, anyway — execs aren't necessarily owners) versus people whose jobs will be eliminated.
- withinboredom 6mo ago
  The funny thing is that AI can probably replace the exec’s job before it can replace a devs job.
  - xixixao 6mo ago
    What do you think the exec job is? What do they do every day, every working hour? And how will AI replace that?
    - withinboredom 6mo ago
      It’s not a mystery… I can tell you what I do most days, and probably 80% of it is communication. An AI could do that. That communication is to learn what is going on up, down, and across the org. I mostly want to make sure we aren’t doing redundant work — though sometimes that is useful, and making sure timelines aren’t slipping. Oh, and dealing with conflicts. The other 20% is writing: policies, SOPs, audits, grants, performance reviews, etc. I could probably automate over half my job in n8n in a weekend… hmm… actually might try that.
      - atomic_reed 6mo ago
        [dead]
    - enoint 6mo ago
      I’m in a heavily-regulated sector, fully remote. If left alone, our junior exec: - needs a digest of where chat activity is hottest. Maybe he lurks, occasionally he gets into conversations about what’s going on in another department. - needs some warning if the Microsoft systems are under attack or strain. The Linux systems have not needed attention; the jargon is unfamiliar. - occasionally brings up hypothetical radical changes in strategy. I think of these as multivariate tests. Maybe I reply, “Plenty of Kubenetes developers available right now” might communicate that some small team would be ahead of us on some solved problem. I’m surprised that: - he has no concern that competition even exists. No awareness that our competition demos at conferences; why they’d choose to spend time that way. - no interest in the big accounts we don’t have. If it would take a big lift, what would engineering need? If it would take a small lift, what non-engineering is blocking? No interest. - person-to-person networking is effective at all. I just can’t imagine any value in two execs meeting without hours of preparation. I’ve seen BI tooling around each of these. I wonder if a daily “facts of our department” slide to begin each meeting, if that would replace/augment 51% of visible exec.
paxys 6mo ago
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).
- afavour 6mo ago
  I hope that’s exaggeration because being unable to operate without it means you’re going to do a terrible job of reviewing the code it’s producing.
  - bpt3 6mo ago
    It's not. Most developers are pretty bad at their job, and already can't review code very effectively. They just create even more slop currently, which will be the case until someone realizes they aren't needed to produce slop at all.
  - kolinko 6mo ago
    Since the November/December Opus and Claude Code, I found I don't need to read the code any more. Architecture overview sure, and testing yes, but not reading the code directly any more. Me (and my friends similarly) inspect code indirectly now - telling agents to write reports about certain aspects of the code and architecture etc.
    - lunar_mycroft 6mo ago
      I've seen the code these models produce without a human programmer going over the results with care. It's still slop. Better slop than in the past, but slop none the less. If you aren't at minimum reading the code yourself and you're shipping a significant amount of it, you're either effectively the first person to figure out the magic prompt to get the models to produce better code, or you're shipping slop. Personally, I wouldn't bet on the former.
      - seba_dos1 6mo ago
        Yeah, these models have definitely become more useful in the last months, but statements like "I don't need to read the code any more" still say more about the person writing that than about agents.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
ackshuallytho 6mo ago
Devs think it will save time and execs think it will save money. But because time is money, I think all the benefits go to the dev. The exec still needs the dev regardless
booleandilemma 6mo ago
Why would ICs be enamored with something quite literally designed to replace them?
fcarraldo 6mo ago
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.
- politelemon 6mo ago
  > it’s the same as adding robots that enables workers to pack twice as many pallets per day. It isn't this. This is the executive's misinterpretation.
  - fcarraldo 6mo ago
    Sure, but perception is reality and the executives will aim to realize this by throwing considerable amounts of capital behind it. Whether it’s achievable is really not known, yet.
- atmavatar 6mo ago
  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.
  - dragonwriter 6mo ago
    > all the gains are captured by the executives. No, they are captured disproportionately by the haut bourgeois capitalists. The two groups overlap to an extent (when major capitalist are nominally employed by a firm they invest in, it is usually as an executive), but executives qua executives (that is, in their role as top level managerial employees) are not the main beneficiaries of increased productivity.
comrade1234 6mo ago
What's an IC?
- budman1 6mo ago
  Individual Contributor. Directly creates work, not a supervisor.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- dataking 6mo ago
  An individual contributor. Someone who delivers technical work without managing people. It is an alternative to being promoted into a management role.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
SirensOfTitan 6mo ago
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.
- argee 6mo ago
  Jeff Bezos famously said “your margin is my opportunity,” I feel like Steve Jobs could’ve just as easily said “your slop is my opportunity.” (And he sort of did with “insanely great”)
- echelon 6mo ago
  Work is delivering value. Yes, we have craftsmanship, but at the end of the day everything is ephemeral and impermanent and the world continues on without remembering us. I think both the IC and executive are correct in superposition.
  - bitwize 6mo ago
    Indeed. Even the ur-craftsman, John Carmack, says that delivering value to customers is pretty much the only thing that matters in development. If AI lets you do that faster, cheaper, you'd be a fool not to use it. There's a reason why it's virtually a must in professional software engineering now.
    - glouwbug 6mo ago
      Right, but Carmack has always delivered. I need someone without Carmack’s ability to show me what value they can deliver with AI
      - whattheheckheck 6mo ago
        They cant, its your job to train them or take their salary
internet2000 6mo ago
ICs are too.
sigbottle 6mo ago
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?
pron 6mo ago
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.
- orochimaaru 6mo ago
  And one executive talks to other executives not to their engineers. I think this is more peer pressure than anything else.
  - pydry 6mo ago
    They're oddly credulous of the shovel salesmen in the gold rush, too. E.g. when Jensen Huang said that you need to pair your $250k engineer with $250k of tokens.
  - garciasn 6mo ago
    I lead a team of Data Engineers, DevOps Engineers, and Data Scientists. I write code and have done so literally for my entire life. AI-assisted codegen is incredible; especially over the last 3-4m. I understand that developers feel their code is an art form and are pissed off that their life’s work is now a commodity; but, it’s time to either accept it and move on with what has happened, specialize as an actual artist, or potentially find yourself in a very rough spot.
    - staticassertion 6mo ago
      I wonder if your background just has you fooled. I worked on a data science team and code was always a commodity. Most data scientists know how to code in a fairly trivial way, just enough to get their models built and served. Even data engineers largely know how to just take that and deploy to Spark. They don't really do much software engineering beyond that. I'm not being precious here or protective of my "art" or whatever. But I do find it sort of hilarious and obvious that someone on a data science team might not understand the aesthetic value of code, and I suspect anyone else who has worked on such a team/ with such a team can probably laugh about the same thing - we've uh... we've seen your code. We know you don't value aesthetic code lol. Single variable names, `df1`, `df2`, `df3`. I'm not particularly uncomfortable at the moment because understanding computers, understanding how to solve problems, understanding how to map between problems and solutions, what will or won't meet a customer's expectations, etc, is still core to the job as it always has been. Code quality is still critical as well - anyone who's vibe-coded >15KLOC projects will know that models simply can not handle that scale unless you're diligent about how it shoul dbe structured. My job has barely changed semantically, despite rapid adoption of AI.
kerblang 6mo ago
I'm not gonna say "incorrect" like the absolutists. It's an interesting hypothesis, at least. But I will insist that executives are more driven by FOMO than a teenager.
fooker 6mo ago
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.
- pjmlp 6mo ago
  They are, until HR comes for them.
- maplethorpe 6mo ago
  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.
  - fooker 6mo ago
    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.
mystraline 6mo ago
IC is a strange relabeling of a "worker". 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.
- tayo42 6mo ago
  Ic differentiates a lot of more then worker and not worker. Middle management and even a level or two above aren't anything special. Ic can refer to people leading, without direct reports, making 500k+ in comp.
- simianwords 6mo ago
  > 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.
pjmlp 6mo ago
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.
01100011 6mo ago
Eh... 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.
indistinction 6mo ago
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.
yalogin 6mo ago
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?
- skillina 6mo ago
  Iterating an existing product takes time, but creating a clean room clone of an existing product could be accelerated significantly with AI. We could be moving towards an environment where bigtech falls back on one of its core competencies (scale) and hoards infra while small startups pay them compute and inference costs to undercut existing consumer-facing software on price.
  - yalogin 6mo ago
    I don’t follow, do you mean to say that meta will become an infra provider instead of the full experience?
    - skillina 6mo ago
      I can’t say who will win or lose. The value of a social network has as much to do with its userbase than its tech, so maybe Meta has a different path. Alphabet and Microsoft are who I really have in mind here.
MarkSweep 6mo ago
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.
strange_quark 6mo ago
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.
Eufrat 6mo 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.
- awesomeMilou 6mo ago
  > It’s like Marc Andressen bloviating about how AI will replace everyone except him. 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.
dlcarrier 6mo ago
It's part of the standard technology buzzword rotation: embedded/cloud/IoT --> AI --> quantum… When the company originally known as C3 Energy changes their name to C3.quantum, you'll know where on to the next buzzword.
Aperocky 6mo ago
IC here enamored with LLM - my implementation speed used to be a bottleneck of what I can do both professionally and personally, and now only thoughts and idea are the limit. That is incredibly exciting. Thoughts and idea as in "I will implement this in this structure, with these tradeoff, and it will work with these 4 APIs and have no extra features and here's how I'm (or LLM with tools is) going to run it and test it". Thoughts and idea not as in "build facebook" - a lot of people think AI can do that, it won't (but might pretend to) and it will just lead to failure. My competitive edge did not diminish, it expanded.
- 000ooo000 6mo ago
  >My competitive edge did not diminish, it expanded. Reality check: LLMs are available to everyone, dev or otherwise, so your 'competitive edge' is indeed diminished if you believe LLMs are all that.
  - Aperocky 6mo ago
    Of course it is generally available, but I can use it to get 50x gain whereas for others it maybe 3x or even negative.
legitster 6mo ago
- You need something done - You ask someone to do it - You check their work and they made some mistakes, but it's good enough to use - You ultimately don't know if they're doing the best at their job but you have regular performance check-ins to be safe As ICs we can complain all we want about the quality of AI, but as far as your manager goes - you using AI is not that much different to them having an employee.
3form 6mo ago
There are two views, non-technical and technical. For non-technical, the current meteoric rise of AI is due to the fact that AI is generally synonymous to "it can talk". It has never _really_ spoken to the wider audience that the image recognition, or various filters, or whatever classifiers they could have stumbled upon are AI as well. What we have, now, is AI in the truest sense. And executives are primarily non-technical. As for the technical people, we know how it works, we know how it doesn't work, and we're not particularly amused.
fwip 6mo ago
Real answer - it's because an LLM is better than you at the things you suck at. For executives, that's writing code. For ICs, it's other stuff.
DGAP 6mo ago
Well I'm not looking forward to being out of a job and health insurance.
LgWoodenBadger 6mo ago
Because it’s a mythical silver bullet of increased output combined with reduced costs. It makes me think of an executive I once reported to who “increased velocity” by changing the utilization rate on a spreadsheet from 75% to 80%.
ilaksh 6mo ago
Executive's job is to increase profit. Reduction in employees is a primary way to do that. AI is the most promising way to reduce the need for employees. Executives do not need actively functional systems from AI to help with their own daily work. Nothing falls over if their report is not quite right. So they are seeing AI output that is more complete for their own purposes. But also, AI is good enough to accelerate software engineering. To the degree that there are problems with the output, well, that's why they haven't fired all the the engineers yet. And executives never really cared about code quality -- that is the engineers' problem. What I'm trying to build for my small business client right now is not engineering but still requires some remaining employees. He's already automated a lot of it. But I'm trying to make a full version of his call little center that can run on one box like an H200. Which we can rent for like $3.59/hr. Which if I remember correctly is approximately the cost of one of his Filipino employees. Where we are headed is that the executives are themselves pretty quickly going to be targeted for replacement. Especially those that do not have firm upper class social status that puts them in the same social group as ownership.
- enoint 6mo ago
  Best comment here. I’ve never met someone with that status choosing to be an engineer. And I’m unsurprised that an upper class executive is preoccupied about $30/day in labor margin.
LowLevelKernel 6mo ago
IC’s aren’t? Really?
4d4m 6mo ago
The implementation is harder than watching a few youtube videos on it
skeletoncrew2 6mo ago
I’d posit that AI is good at tasks that managers have to do: it is a world composited primarily of processes and procedures set up by humans, about other humans. In other words it is just like an ai trained on text. At the worker level you have to interact with the real, outside world in some way. If I could have AI take the wheel for every share point tracker management manages to cook up, I’d be raving about it too.
bad_username 6mo ago
I do not think most executives are particularly enamored with AI. They are being mostly driven by the fear of missing out. More precisely, their thought process is: if they bet on AI and fail, they can plausibly claim that it was the technology's fault (not good enough, poorly suited for the business, etc). But if they skip on AI by choice, and their competition succeeds, they will be blamed personally. The more hyped a technology is, the stronger this calculus is for the managers. It's like Pascal's wager in a way.
keeda 6mo ago
Look at any of the large developer surveys out there, AI adoption is up to 80 - 90%; ICs absolutely are enamored with AI too. HN, and social media in general, is largely an echo chamber of the loudest voices that tend to skew negative, but does not reflect the broader reality. If HN were to be believed, most of Big Tech would be dead instead of thriving more than ever. That said, the central point of the TFA is spot-on, though it could be made more generally, as it applies to engineering as well as management: uncertainty rises sharply the higher you climb the corporate and/or seniority ladder. In fact, the most important responsibility at higher levels is to take increasing ambiguity and transform it into much more deterministic roles and tasks that can be farmed out to many more people lower on the ladder. The biggest impact of AI is that most deterministic tasks (and even some suprisingly ambiguous ones) are now spoken for. This happens to be at the bread and butter of the junior levels, and is where most of the job displacement will happen. I would say the most essential skill now is critical thinking, and the most essential personality trait is being comfortable with uncertainty (or as the LinkedInfluencers call it, "having a growth mindset.") Unfortunately, most of our current educational and training processes fail to adequately prepare us for this (see: "grade inflation") so at a minimum the fix needs to start there.
LogicFailsMe 6mo ago
I think ICs are threatened because they're told from day one how they are at will employees that can be terminated at any time with or without cause. On top of that, places like Amazon extol the virtues of only working on projects that can be completed with entirely fungible staffing and Google tries ever so hard to electroplate this steaming turd of an ideology with iron pyrite calling fungibles "generalists." So along comes AI coding agents, which I love as an IC because it excels at tedious work I'd rather not have to do in the first place, yet I get why others see it as a threat. But I really think it's no more of a threat than any other empty promise to cut costs with the silver bullet of the month and we just have to let the loudmouths insist otherwise until the industry figures out this isn't a magic black box. They never learn, do they? Maybe their jobs depend on never learning.
adxl 6mo ago
Admit to having drank the koolaide, it is the first step. I wrote an entire system with tech I barely understand (duckdb), next.js etc, made 7 to 10 iterations per day, and multiple new functions and integrations in hours all while doing my main job. What does the code look like ???. It works, I do not care. Can the AI modify it in under 5 minutes, yes. New features that would take minimal a week, got done in 2 to 3 minutes. Did the AI ever complain, no it did not. Anyone who thinks they will be hand coding going forward is completely fooling themselves. The AI tests better than most engineers. When asked it builds flawless test harnesses and even suggests better solutions. Never going back.
analog31 6mo ago
I think one reason for the excitement is that the “software crisis” is real, painful, and costly. Thus it’s tempting to grasp for a shiny new silver bullet that might have a chance of solving it. I’m neither a developer nor an executive, but from my vantage point the software crisis has to do with the fact that software development presents an existential risk to any organization that engages in it. It seems to be utterly resilient to estimation, and projects can run late by months or even years with no good explanation except “it’s management’s fault.” This has been discussed at length. If I had a good answer, “I wouldn’t still be working here” as the saying goes. But half a century after The Mythical Man Month, it still reads like it was written yesterday, and “no silver bullets” seems to ring true. In my view, the software crisis will be resilient. Throwing more code, or more code per day, at a late project will make it later. There will be a grace period while the pace of coding seems exciting, but then the reality will set in: “We haven’t shipped a product.” And it will be management’s fault.
bentt 6mo ago
Because now you need less programmers. It is self explanatory.
tdsanchez 6mo ago
Because like everything else in technology, executive don’t understand it beyond a first order level and assign their own value system to it. It seems like magic TO THEM because they’ve never been able to orchestrate such capability without friction until now and that is the shadow of 20 years of search and semantic search stagnation mostly due to Google.
UtopiaPunk 6mo ago
I don't buy it. Executives worry about labor costs, ARR, RoI, etc. The grandest promises of AI are that executives will make a lot more money with a lot fewer employees. Of course they are pushing it! ICs worry about doing their job (either doing it well because they care about their craft, or doing it good enough because they need to pay bills). AI doesn't really promise them anything. Maybe they automate some of their tasks away, but that just means they will take on more tasks. For practically any IC, there is no increase in wealth nor reduction in labor time. There is only a new quiet lingering threat that they might be laid off if an executive determines they're not needed anymore. That's the difference in enthusiasm about AI.
simianwords 6mo ago
I liked the article but it misses one point. ICs take pride in some types of expertise they have accumulated over the years. AI kinda nullifies this. For instance, if I worked with Python/Django for ~5-10 years I might have become a sort of expert in Django. I know exactly the utility methods, conventions to use etc. But there's little need for such expertise with AI.
prewett 6mo ago
> individual contributors are evaluated by their execution on deterministic tasks. Ha! Apparently the author hasn't been asked "how long will it take to code this?" yet... And isn't a common developer complaint that management does not know how to evaluate them, and substitutes things like how quickly a task gets completed, with the result that some guy looks amazing while his coworkers get stuck with all his technical debt?
ken47 6mo ago
Because the majority of executives think AI is a magical black box, I’d reckon.
rudolftheone 6mo ago
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jeremie_strand 6mo ago
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spl757 6mo ago
Because executives have been misinformed about it's reliability, or lack thereof, and are stupid? Just a guess. e: typo
datahack 6mo ago
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readthemanual 6mo ago
I do think the difference is also dictated by how non-deterministic the job output of execs and ICs can be. For example, if exec will use slightly different words to communicate the thought, there won't be a critical error in understanding. While if IC will get the syntax wrong or deletes the wrong service accidentally, this service (or connected ones) might stop working entirely.
quaddoggy 6mo ago
> It doesn't help that the west has a clear bias wherein moving "up" is moving away from the work. Curious how you verify this behavior would be unique to the West?
camgunz 6mo ago
It's yet another "silver bullet". That's why management loves it and engineers are like "it's just a tool, we still need code review."
scorpionfeet 6mo ago
Odd. In my industry every IC is using Ai (embedded software). Maybe we shouldn’t generalize?
cedws 6mo ago
Because they don’t work with it. It’s a simple as that. I don’t trust people who don’t work with a terminal these days, the further they get from a terminal, the less grounded their views are. They rely on hearsay and CEO hype. To make matters worse, they say whatever they think will earn them a bonus/promotion, which leads to a cascade of BS down the chain. I seriously doubt Satya Nadella is sitting down for hours a day to use Copilot to draft detailed documents. He's being fed fantastical stories by his lackeys telling him what he wants to hear.
lowbloodsugar 6mo ago
For ICs the midwit meme applies here. The really terrible programmers love AI because they aren’t smart enough to determine how bad the code it generates for them really is. The middling programmers are just smart enough to know that it generates bad code for them, and that confirms their world view and they stop there. The great programmers sit down and figure out how to use it effectively.
mbrumlow 6mo ago
Idk about you. But I know lots of well qualified ICs who are enamored with AI. They are also boring it to build and fix things that would take months, in just days.

109 points by johnjwang 6mo ago

Is it really a mystery? A hot take? Executives see this as way to replace labor. The labor sees themselves being replaced. This is a story as old as the hills.

yieldcrv 6mo ago

> I think there’s pretty clearly a divide in AI perception between executives and individual contributors (ICs). Narrator: there is not

bitwize 6mo ago

AI is the much-hoped-for MBA's Stone, the magical substance which transmutes engineering work (costly) into managerial work (valuable).

monarchwadia 6mo ago

The premise is incorrect. Plenty of ICs are enamored with AI. And plenty of executives are skeptical of it.

try-working 6mo ago

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.

kubb 6mo ago
You're right, execs keep trying to fit the LLM square peg into the "inteligent agent" round hole. Developers use it, for groking a codebase, for implementing boilerplate, for debugging. They don't need juniors to do the grunt work anymore, they can build and throw away, the language and technology moats get smaller. The value of low level managers, whose power came from having warm bodies to do the grunt work, diminishes. The bean counters will be like when does it pay for itself. Will it? IDK, IDC.
- TheGRS 6mo ago
  Validation efforts likely become more necessary, so costs rise in another area. And product managers find they still need someone to translate the requirements well because LLMs are too agreeable. Cost optimization still needs someone to intervene as well. I know there's an attempt to shift the development part from developers to other laypeople, but I think that's just going to frustrate everyone involved and probably settle back down into technical roles again. Well paid? Unclear.
simianwords 6mo ago
> For them it's chat + magic, and then it does everything Look, I know that we like poking fun at some people but generally I haven't seen execs saying this.
- try-working 6mo ago
  I've seen literally every company in the world launch a chat bot as their AI strategy. I've also had clients who "wanted to do something with AI", and they would only be happy when they saw a chat UI. I built Semantic Search. Improves business performance significantly without changing the UI. Nobody is impressed because you cannot show it around and talk about it. It looks the same. It has to look like real AI, they say.

exolymph 6mo ago

People who will get paid more if AI eliminates jobs (in theory, anyway — execs aren't necessarily owners) versus people whose jobs will be eliminated.

withinboredom 6mo ago
The funny thing is that AI can probably replace the exec’s job before it can replace a devs job.
- xixixao 6mo ago
  What do you think the exec job is? What do they do every day, every working hour? And how will AI replace that?
  - withinboredom 6mo ago
    It’s not a mystery… I can tell you what I do most days, and probably 80% of it is communication. An AI could do that. That communication is to learn what is going on up, down, and across the org. I mostly want to make sure we aren’t doing redundant work — though sometimes that is useful, and making sure timelines aren’t slipping. Oh, and dealing with conflicts. The other 20% is writing: policies, SOPs, audits, grants, performance reviews, etc. I could probably automate over half my job in n8n in a weekend… hmm… actually might try that.
    - atomic_reed 6mo ago
      [dead]
  - enoint 6mo ago
    I’m in a heavily-regulated sector, fully remote. If left alone, our junior exec: - needs a digest of where chat activity is hottest. Maybe he lurks, occasionally he gets into conversations about what’s going on in another department. - needs some warning if the Microsoft systems are under attack or strain. The Linux systems have not needed attention; the jargon is unfamiliar. - occasionally brings up hypothetical radical changes in strategy. I think of these as multivariate tests. Maybe I reply, “Plenty of Kubenetes developers available right now” might communicate that some small team would be ahead of us on some solved problem. I’m surprised that: - he has no concern that competition even exists. No awareness that our competition demos at conferences; why they’d choose to spend time that way. - no interest in the big accounts we don’t have. If it would take a big lift, what would engineering need? If it would take a small lift, what non-engineering is blocking? No interest. - person-to-person networking is effective at all. I just can’t imagine any value in two execs meeting without hours of preparation. I’ve seen BI tooling around each of these. I wonder if a daily “facts of our department” slide to begin each meeting, if that would replace/augment 51% of visible exec.

paxys 6mo ago

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).

afavour 6mo ago
I hope that’s exaggeration because being unable to operate without it means you’re going to do a terrible job of reviewing the code it’s producing.
- bpt3 6mo ago
  It's not. Most developers are pretty bad at their job, and already can't review code very effectively. They just create even more slop currently, which will be the case until someone realizes they aren't needed to produce slop at all.
- kolinko 6mo ago
  Since the November/December Opus and Claude Code, I found I don't need to read the code any more. Architecture overview sure, and testing yes, but not reading the code directly any more. Me (and my friends similarly) inspect code indirectly now - telling agents to write reports about certain aspects of the code and architecture etc.
  - lunar_mycroft 6mo ago
    I've seen the code these models produce without a human programmer going over the results with care. It's still slop. Better slop than in the past, but slop none the less. If you aren't at minimum reading the code yourself and you're shipping a significant amount of it, you're either effectively the first person to figure out the magic prompt to get the models to produce better code, or you're shipping slop. Personally, I wouldn't bet on the former.
    - seba_dos1 6mo ago
      Yeah, these models have definitely become more useful in the last months, but statements like "I don't need to read the code any more" still say more about the person writing that than about agents.

deleted 6mo ago

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ackshuallytho 6mo ago

Devs think it will save time and execs think it will save money. But because time is money, I think all the benefits go to the dev. The exec still needs the dev regardless

booleandilemma 6mo ago

Why would ICs be enamored with something quite literally designed to replace them?

fcarraldo 6mo ago

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.

politelemon 6mo ago
> it’s the same as adding robots that enables workers to pack twice as many pallets per day. It isn't this. This is the executive's misinterpretation.
- fcarraldo 6mo ago
  Sure, but perception is reality and the executives will aim to realize this by throwing considerable amounts of capital behind it. Whether it’s achievable is really not known, yet.
atmavatar 6mo ago
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.
- dragonwriter 6mo ago
  > all the gains are captured by the executives. No, they are captured disproportionately by the haut bourgeois capitalists. The two groups overlap to an extent (when major capitalist are nominally employed by a firm they invest in, it is usually as an executive), but executives qua executives (that is, in their role as top level managerial employees) are not the main beneficiaries of increased productivity.

comrade1234 6mo ago

What's an IC?

budman1 6mo ago
Individual Contributor. Directly creates work, not a supervisor.
deleted 6mo ago
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dataking 6mo ago
An individual contributor. Someone who delivers technical work without managing people. It is an alternative to being promoted into a management role.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

SirensOfTitan 6mo ago

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.

argee 6mo ago
Jeff Bezos famously said “your margin is my opportunity,” I feel like Steve Jobs could’ve just as easily said “your slop is my opportunity.” (And he sort of did with “insanely great”)
echelon 6mo ago
Work is delivering value. Yes, we have craftsmanship, but at the end of the day everything is ephemeral and impermanent and the world continues on without remembering us. I think both the IC and executive are correct in superposition.
- bitwize 6mo ago
  Indeed. Even the ur-craftsman, John Carmack, says that delivering value to customers is pretty much the only thing that matters in development. If AI lets you do that faster, cheaper, you'd be a fool not to use it. There's a reason why it's virtually a must in professional software engineering now.
  - glouwbug 6mo ago
    Right, but Carmack has always delivered. I need someone without Carmack’s ability to show me what value they can deliver with AI
    - whattheheckheck 6mo ago
      They cant, its your job to train them or take their salary

internet2000 6mo ago

ICs are too.

sigbottle 6mo ago

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?

pron 6mo ago

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.

orochimaaru 6mo ago
And one executive talks to other executives not to their engineers. I think this is more peer pressure than anything else.
- pydry 6mo ago
  They're oddly credulous of the shovel salesmen in the gold rush, too. E.g. when Jensen Huang said that you need to pair your $250k engineer with $250k of tokens.
- garciasn 6mo ago
  I lead a team of Data Engineers, DevOps Engineers, and Data Scientists. I write code and have done so literally for my entire life. AI-assisted codegen is incredible; especially over the last 3-4m. I understand that developers feel their code is an art form and are pissed off that their life’s work is now a commodity; but, it’s time to either accept it and move on with what has happened, specialize as an actual artist, or potentially find yourself in a very rough spot.
  - staticassertion 6mo ago
    I wonder if your background just has you fooled. I worked on a data science team and code was always a commodity. Most data scientists know how to code in a fairly trivial way, just enough to get their models built and served. Even data engineers largely know how to just take that and deploy to Spark. They don't really do much software engineering beyond that. I'm not being precious here or protective of my "art" or whatever. But I do find it sort of hilarious and obvious that someone on a data science team might not understand the aesthetic value of code, and I suspect anyone else who has worked on such a team/ with such a team can probably laugh about the same thing - we've uh... we've seen your code. We know you don't value aesthetic code lol. Single variable names, `df1`, `df2`, `df3`. I'm not particularly uncomfortable at the moment because understanding computers, understanding how to solve problems, understanding how to map between problems and solutions, what will or won't meet a customer's expectations, etc, is still core to the job as it always has been. Code quality is still critical as well - anyone who's vibe-coded >15KLOC projects will know that models simply can not handle that scale unless you're diligent about how it shoul dbe structured. My job has barely changed semantically, despite rapid adoption of AI.

kerblang 6mo ago

I'm not gonna say "incorrect" like the absolutists. It's an interesting hypothesis, at least. But I will insist that executives are more driven by FOMO than a teenager.

fooker 6mo ago

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.

pjmlp 6mo ago
They are, until HR comes for them.
maplethorpe 6mo ago
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.
- fooker 6mo ago
  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.

mystraline 6mo ago

IC is a strange relabeling of a "worker". 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.

tayo42 6mo ago
Ic differentiates a lot of more then worker and not worker. Middle management and even a level or two above aren't anything special. Ic can refer to people leading, without direct reports, making 500k+ in comp.
simianwords 6mo ago
> 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.

pjmlp 6mo ago

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.

01100011 6mo ago

Eh... 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.

indistinction 6mo ago

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.

yalogin 6mo ago

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?

skillina 6mo ago
Iterating an existing product takes time, but creating a clean room clone of an existing product could be accelerated significantly with AI. We could be moving towards an environment where bigtech falls back on one of its core competencies (scale) and hoards infra while small startups pay them compute and inference costs to undercut existing consumer-facing software on price.
- yalogin 6mo ago
  I don’t follow, do you mean to say that meta will become an infra provider instead of the full experience?
  - skillina 6mo ago
    I can’t say who will win or lose. The value of a social network has as much to do with its userbase than its tech, so maybe Meta has a different path. Alphabet and Microsoft are who I really have in mind here.

MarkSweep 6mo ago

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.

strange_quark 6mo ago

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.

Eufrat 6mo 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.

awesomeMilou 6mo ago
> It’s like Marc Andressen bloviating about how AI will replace everyone except him. 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.

dlcarrier 6mo ago

It's part of the standard technology buzzword rotation: embedded/cloud/IoT --> AI --> quantum… When the company originally known as C3 Energy changes their name to C3.quantum, you'll know where on to the next buzzword.

Aperocky 6mo ago

IC here enamored with LLM - my implementation speed used to be a bottleneck of what I can do both professionally and personally, and now only thoughts and idea are the limit. That is incredibly exciting. Thoughts and idea as in "I will implement this in this structure, with these tradeoff, and it will work with these 4 APIs and have no extra features and here's how I'm (or LLM with tools is) going to run it and test it". Thoughts and idea not as in "build facebook" - a lot of people think AI can do that, it won't (but might pretend to) and it will just lead to failure. My competitive edge did not diminish, it expanded.

000ooo000 6mo ago
>My competitive edge did not diminish, it expanded. Reality check: LLMs are available to everyone, dev or otherwise, so your 'competitive edge' is indeed diminished if you believe LLMs are all that.
- Aperocky 6mo ago
  Of course it is generally available, but I can use it to get 50x gain whereas for others it maybe 3x or even negative.

legitster 6mo ago

- You need something done - You ask someone to do it - You check their work and they made some mistakes, but it's good enough to use - You ultimately don't know if they're doing the best at their job but you have regular performance check-ins to be safe As ICs we can complain all we want about the quality of AI, but as far as your manager goes - you using AI is not that much different to them having an employee.

3form 6mo ago

There are two views, non-technical and technical. For non-technical, the current meteoric rise of AI is due to the fact that AI is generally synonymous to "it can talk". It has never _really_ spoken to the wider audience that the image recognition, or various filters, or whatever classifiers they could have stumbled upon are AI as well. What we have, now, is AI in the truest sense. And executives are primarily non-technical. As for the technical people, we know how it works, we know how it doesn't work, and we're not particularly amused.

fwip 6mo ago

Real answer - it's because an LLM is better than you at the things you suck at. For executives, that's writing code. For ICs, it's other stuff.

DGAP 6mo ago

Well I'm not looking forward to being out of a job and health insurance.

LgWoodenBadger 6mo ago

Because it’s a mythical silver bullet of increased output combined with reduced costs. It makes me think of an executive I once reported to who “increased velocity” by changing the utilization rate on a spreadsheet from 75% to 80%.

ilaksh 6mo ago

Executive's job is to increase profit. Reduction in employees is a primary way to do that. AI is the most promising way to reduce the need for employees. Executives do not need actively functional systems from AI to help with their own daily work. Nothing falls over if their report is not quite right. So they are seeing AI output that is more complete for their own purposes. But also, AI is good enough to accelerate software engineering. To the degree that there are problems with the output, well, that's why they haven't fired all the the engineers yet. And executives never really cared about code quality -- that is the engineers' problem. What I'm trying to build for my small business client right now is not engineering but still requires some remaining employees. He's already automated a lot of it. But I'm trying to make a full version of his call little center that can run on one box like an H200. Which we can rent for like $3.59/hr. Which if I remember correctly is approximately the cost of one of his Filipino employees. Where we are headed is that the executives are themselves pretty quickly going to be targeted for replacement. Especially those that do not have firm upper class social status that puts them in the same social group as ownership.

enoint 6mo ago
Best comment here. I’ve never met someone with that status choosing to be an engineer. And I’m unsurprised that an upper class executive is preoccupied about $30/day in labor margin.

LowLevelKernel 6mo ago

IC’s aren’t? Really?

4d4m 6mo ago

The implementation is harder than watching a few youtube videos on it

skeletoncrew2 6mo ago

I’d posit that AI is good at tasks that managers have to do: it is a world composited primarily of processes and procedures set up by humans, about other humans. In other words it is just like an ai trained on text. At the worker level you have to interact with the real, outside world in some way. If I could have AI take the wheel for every share point tracker management manages to cook up, I’d be raving about it too.

bad_username 6mo ago

I do not think most executives are particularly enamored with AI. They are being mostly driven by the fear of missing out. More precisely, their thought process is: if they bet on AI and fail, they can plausibly claim that it was the technology's fault (not good enough, poorly suited for the business, etc). But if they skip on AI by choice, and their competition succeeds, they will be blamed personally. The more hyped a technology is, the stronger this calculus is for the managers. It's like Pascal's wager in a way.

keeda 6mo ago

Look at any of the large developer surveys out there, AI adoption is up to 80 - 90%; ICs absolutely are enamored with AI too. HN, and social media in general, is largely an echo chamber of the loudest voices that tend to skew negative, but does not reflect the broader reality. If HN were to be believed, most of Big Tech would be dead instead of thriving more than ever. That said, the central point of the TFA is spot-on, though it could be made more generally, as it applies to engineering as well as management: uncertainty rises sharply the higher you climb the corporate and/or seniority ladder. In fact, the most important responsibility at higher levels is to take increasing ambiguity and transform it into much more deterministic roles and tasks that can be farmed out to many more people lower on the ladder. The biggest impact of AI is that most deterministic tasks (and even some suprisingly ambiguous ones) are now spoken for. This happens to be at the bread and butter of the junior levels, and is where most of the job displacement will happen. I would say the most essential skill now is critical thinking, and the most essential personality trait is being comfortable with uncertainty (or as the LinkedInfluencers call it, "having a growth mindset.") Unfortunately, most of our current educational and training processes fail to adequately prepare us for this (see: "grade inflation") so at a minimum the fix needs to start there.

LogicFailsMe 6mo ago

I think ICs are threatened because they're told from day one how they are at will employees that can be terminated at any time with or without cause. On top of that, places like Amazon extol the virtues of only working on projects that can be completed with entirely fungible staffing and Google tries ever so hard to electroplate this steaming turd of an ideology with iron pyrite calling fungibles "generalists." So along comes AI coding agents, which I love as an IC because it excels at tedious work I'd rather not have to do in the first place, yet I get why others see it as a threat. But I really think it's no more of a threat than any other empty promise to cut costs with the silver bullet of the month and we just have to let the loudmouths insist otherwise until the industry figures out this isn't a magic black box. They never learn, do they? Maybe their jobs depend on never learning.

adxl 6mo ago

Admit to having drank the koolaide, it is the first step. I wrote an entire system with tech I barely understand (duckdb), next.js etc, made 7 to 10 iterations per day, and multiple new functions and integrations in hours all while doing my main job. What does the code look like ???. It works, I do not care. Can the AI modify it in under 5 minutes, yes. New features that would take minimal a week, got done in 2 to 3 minutes. Did the AI ever complain, no it did not. Anyone who thinks they will be hand coding going forward is completely fooling themselves. The AI tests better than most engineers. When asked it builds flawless test harnesses and even suggests better solutions. Never going back.

analog31 6mo ago

I think one reason for the excitement is that the “software crisis” is real, painful, and costly. Thus it’s tempting to grasp for a shiny new silver bullet that might have a chance of solving it. I’m neither a developer nor an executive, but from my vantage point the software crisis has to do with the fact that software development presents an existential risk to any organization that engages in it. It seems to be utterly resilient to estimation, and projects can run late by months or even years with no good explanation except “it’s management’s fault.” This has been discussed at length. If I had a good answer, “I wouldn’t still be working here” as the saying goes. But half a century after The Mythical Man Month, it still reads like it was written yesterday, and “no silver bullets” seems to ring true. In my view, the software crisis will be resilient. Throwing more code, or more code per day, at a late project will make it later. There will be a grace period while the pace of coding seems exciting, but then the reality will set in: “We haven’t shipped a product.” And it will be management’s fault.

bentt 6mo ago

Because now you need less programmers. It is self explanatory.

tdsanchez 6mo ago

Because like everything else in technology, executive don’t understand it beyond a first order level and assign their own value system to it. It seems like magic TO THEM because they’ve never been able to orchestrate such capability without friction until now and that is the shadow of 20 years of search and semantic search stagnation mostly due to Google.

UtopiaPunk 6mo ago

I don't buy it. Executives worry about labor costs, ARR, RoI, etc. The grandest promises of AI are that executives will make a lot more money with a lot fewer employees. Of course they are pushing it! ICs worry about doing their job (either doing it well because they care about their craft, or doing it good enough because they need to pay bills). AI doesn't really promise them anything. Maybe they automate some of their tasks away, but that just means they will take on more tasks. For practically any IC, there is no increase in wealth nor reduction in labor time. There is only a new quiet lingering threat that they might be laid off if an executive determines they're not needed anymore. That's the difference in enthusiasm about AI.

simianwords 6mo ago

I liked the article but it misses one point. ICs take pride in some types of expertise they have accumulated over the years. AI kinda nullifies this. For instance, if I worked with Python/Django for ~5-10 years I might have become a sort of expert in Django. I know exactly the utility methods, conventions to use etc. But there's little need for such expertise with AI.

prewett 6mo ago

> individual contributors are evaluated by their execution on deterministic tasks. Ha! Apparently the author hasn't been asked "how long will it take to code this?" yet... And isn't a common developer complaint that management does not know how to evaluate them, and substitutes things like how quickly a task gets completed, with the result that some guy looks amazing while his coworkers get stuck with all his technical debt?

ken47 6mo ago

Because the majority of executives think AI is a magical black box, I’d reckon.

rudolftheone 6mo ago

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jeremie_strand 6mo ago

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spl757 6mo ago

Because executives have been misinformed about it's reliability, or lack thereof, and are stupid? Just a guess. e: typo

datahack 6mo ago

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readthemanual 6mo ago

I do think the difference is also dictated by how non-deterministic the job output of execs and ICs can be. For example, if exec will use slightly different words to communicate the thought, there won't be a critical error in understanding. While if IC will get the syntax wrong or deletes the wrong service accidentally, this service (or connected ones) might stop working entirely.

quaddoggy 6mo ago

> It doesn't help that the west has a clear bias wherein moving "up" is moving away from the work. Curious how you verify this behavior would be unique to the West?

camgunz 6mo ago

It's yet another "silver bullet". That's why management loves it and engineers are like "it's just a tool, we still need code review."

scorpionfeet 6mo ago

Odd. In my industry every IC is using Ai (embedded software). Maybe we shouldn’t generalize?

cedws 6mo ago

Because they don’t work with it. It’s a simple as that. I don’t trust people who don’t work with a terminal these days, the further they get from a terminal, the less grounded their views are. They rely on hearsay and CEO hype. To make matters worse, they say whatever they think will earn them a bonus/promotion, which leads to a cascade of BS down the chain. I seriously doubt Satya Nadella is sitting down for hours a day to use Copilot to draft detailed documents. He's being fed fantastical stories by his lackeys telling him what he wants to hear.

lowbloodsugar 6mo ago

For ICs the midwit meme applies here. The really terrible programmers love AI because they aren’t smart enough to determine how bad the code it generates for them really is. The middling programmers are just smart enough to know that it generates bad code for them, and that confirms their world view and they stop there. The great programmers sit down and figure out how to use it effectively.

mbrumlow 6mo ago

Idk about you. But I know lots of well qualified ICs who are enamored with AI. They are also boring it to build and fix things that would take months, in just days.