Summarizer

Ends when you tell them "this AI shit is ridiculous so we are choosing a different vendor"

Everyone's job is to please their manager. Their job is shipping functional product features only if that's what their manager likes. In functional companies, that should be the case. There aren't many functional companies.

> Everyone's job is to please their manager. Indeed. I've spent my professional career seeking out positions at companies of increasing prestige and technical renown, each with a higher reputation for professionalism and performance than the last. And yet this invariant has held in every position. As far as I can tell, the only difference between each company has been the quality of the manager I was supposed to please, which I have noticed (perhaps predictably) is not strongly correlated with the company's reputation or success.

Don't forget that they're also functionally structured. The managers don't own products or features, they manage functions (engineering, sales, design). And in practice, they usually only manage people, with little control over the function. So the managers aren't particularly interested or tied to shipping product features. The PM maybe, but they don't have reports or own much.

> And in practice, they usually only manage people … I usually differentiate between real managers who exist to make decisions, versus those who manage people. The latter are “overseers” not managers.

The last place I worked for, if it happened with someone new in the company or the team, I would find a polite way to say "do your job and fix this shit" and it worked. Some people have put me on their blacklists after these interactions, sure, but they're the exact people I don't want to work with again. The important thing here is that I've never done someone else's work for free.

You tell Claude to review it and if it breaks something you blame Claude. No one can get mad at you for it because they don't want to look like luddites.

The US reinventing the worst parts of Soviet but putting a glossy and chipper veneer on it.

Unfortunately, there is pressure to treat this stuff in good faith. Maybe the PR author really did write all this. Maybe they really did spend 6 hours writing this document. So, I approach it in good faith, but I do get upset when people say "I'll ask claude". You need to be the intermediary, I can also prompt claude and read back the result. If you are going to hire an employee to do work on your behalf, you are responsible for their performance at the end of the day. And that's what an AI assistant is. The buck stops with you. But I don't think people understand that and that they don't understand they aren't adding value. At some point, you have to use your brain to decide if the AI is making sense, that's not really my job as the code/doc reviewer. I want to have a conversation with you , not your tooling, basically.

> If you are going to hire an employee to do work on your behalf, you are responsible for their performance at the end of the day. So, what you are saying is that I should fire the bottom N% of underperforming agent instances? You know, like employers do as opposed to taking any responsibility?

> I do get upset when people say "I'll ask claude" The dude is just acting like a manager with a technical employee (agent) who does the hands-on work. If you are upset about this you should be hopping mad about the whole manager-director-VP-SVP hierarchy above this dude.

it actually insane that this sort of thing is tolerated. Its a culture thing and frankly just rude. My org is pretty AI-pilled and this type of behavior will just not fly. I need to be assured im talking to a human who is using their brain.

This is happening at my place as well. I am a senior leader, but I find it hard to push back on this. I something looks plausible and everyone has reacted with a thumbs up (but probably only skimmed the document), when is the first one saying “what is this shit?” The length itself is not an indicator per se, but you can sense when it is not honest. If others do not have a sense for it, it seems like complaining about something new.

Or maybe you are part of the problem they are describing.

Counter-question: if quite a lot of things have also been like this before to a lesser degree, should we not oppose efforts to make everything like this to a greater degree ?

Things have probably always been like that, agree. I often try to see AI as a catalyst, that accelerates what already is. In a good culture, with high competence and trust this can yield increased output (to some degree at least) and in a bad culture it will accelerate and expedite the dominating traits instead.

Honestly, the most impactful thing I've seen AI do for any workplace is serve as the ultimate excuse for whatever pet thing someone's wanted to do, that can't stand on its own merits, and what they really need is a solid excuse. Rewrite that old crunchy system that has had 0 incidents in the last year and is also largely "done" (not a lot of new requirements coming in, pretty settled code/architecture)? It's actually one of our most stable systems. But someone who doesn't even write code here thinks the code is yucky! But that doesn't convince the engineers who are on-call for it to replace it for almost no reason. Well guess what. We can do it now, _because AI!!!_ (cue exactly what you think happens next happening next) Need to lay off 10% of staff because you think the workers are getting too good of a deal? AI. Need to convince your workers to go faster, but EMs tell you you can't just crack the whip? AI mandates / token spend mandates! Didn't like code reviews and people nitpicking your designs? Sorry, code reviews are canceled, because of AI. Don't like meetings or working in a team? Well now everyone is a team of 1, because of AI. Better set up some "teams" full of teams of 1, call them "AI-first" teams, and wait what do you mean they're on vacation and the service is down? Etc. And they don't even care that these things result in the exact negative outcomes that are why you didn't do them before you had the excuse. You're happy that YOUR thing finally got done despite all the whiners and detractors. And of course, it turns out that businesses can withstand an absurd amount of dysfunction without really feeling it. So it just happens. Maybe some people leave. You hire people who just left their last place for doing the thing you just did and now maybe they spend a bit of time here. And the game of musical chairs, petty monarchies, and degenerate capitalism continues a bit longer. Big props to the people who managed to invent and sell an excuse machine though. Turns out that's what everyone actually wanted.

I saw something really similar happen at my last few jobs. 2 jobs ago vibe coding wasn't even viable but some of the people went so hard on making everything so much more bloated with LLMs it was so hard to get yes or no answers for anything. 1 line slack, 20second question would get a response that was 2 pages of wishy washy blog posts with no answer. Follow ups generated more hours wasted. My last job we watched a PM slowly become a vibe manager of vibe coders. He started inserting himself into technical discussions and using ai to dictate our direction at every step. We would reply but it got so laborious fighting against a human translating ai about topics they didn't understand people left. We weren't allowed to push back anymore either or our jobs would get threatened due to AI. Then they started mandating everyone vibe coded and the amount of vibe coding as being monitored. The pm got so disorganized being a pm and an engineer and an architect(their choice no one wanted this)that they would make multiple tickets for the same task with wildly different requirements. One team member would then vibe code it one way and another would another way. It was so hard to watch a profitable team of 20 people bringing in almost 100million of profit a year go into nonutility and the most pointless work. I then left. I am trying my best to not be jaded by all of these changes to the software industry but it's a real struggle.

I've personally witnessed this: 1. My own manager now gives "expert advice and suggestions" using Claude based on his/her incomplete understanding of the domain. 2. Multiple non-technical people within the company are developing internal software tools to be deployed org wide. Hoping such demos will get them their recognition and incentives that they deserve. Management as expected are impressed and approving such POCs. 3. Hyperactive colleagues showcasing expert looking demos that leadership buys. All the while has zero understanding of what's happening underneath. I didn't know how to articulate this problem well, but this article does a great job!

> When called out, he would result to personal attacks. Oh, that's bad. Sounds like a terribly toxic environment.

Pretty much this. It's like a cult mentality. Those who critique the approach or push back get sidelined. There are demos every week of essentially Claude loops and MCP integrations and those of us not reaffirming the ideas stopped getting invited. Heard some wild statements in the past few months. A couple that come to mind: - "we don't need to review the output closely, it's designed to correct itself" - "it comes up with the requirements, writes the tickets, and prioritises what to work on. We only need to give it a two or three line prompt" The promise of this agentic workflow is always only a few weeks away. It's not been used to build anything that has made it to production yet.

Yes I get your frustration, the same thing is happening across orgs these days as claude and co-work has become widespread. Wisdom is a thing, so is competence. Humans have it or they don't but machines do not (yet), but the massive capabilities of the tools are also something that can't be ignored. We can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's going to take some cycles of learning the ropes with this technology for humans to understand it better. I would push back -why couldn't the senior devs communicate these issues to senior management? It sounds like a broken human system not a broken tool or technology. All AI did was shine a light on the human issues on that org.

From past experiences (and I'm sure I'm not alone here), I can almost guarantee that the senior devs did communicate the problems, but they were ignored or brushed aside. Very seldomly does middle/upper management truly listens to engineers, unless there's buy-in from the CTO/VP to champion the ideas and complaints.

Over time, as devs get more experience, they have seen countless fads come and go. Some worked, some screwed things up, etc. - NONE were the silver bullet / savior that they were touted to be by adherents. So they learn a default "no" or "slowly" response to "we need to do this <buzzword> ASAP" from management who only see $$$. I mean AI companies are telling management that devs will resist AI because "it's so good it will let you replace them", so management is getting their views reinforced by devs saying it's a bad idea.

He doesn't care. When c suite gets fired they get like half a million in severance and go rinse and repeat somewhere else

And it was the AI's fault. So convenient.

Finally someone who nailed this problem. In the age of AI you need smart people who are aligned with the organization more than ever. If people aren't aligned with the organization then bad, BAD things happen when the political people get access to AI and there's basically nothing you can do about it. They can use AI to fake things for a very extended time, then always find the most optimal way to cover up the problem before the consequences surface and at that point they've already moved so far up the ladder that the consequences don't matter to them anymore. IMO I think it's actively unsolvable in any org that is already deeply infested with politics. On the other hand, having really smart people has massively increased in value. The only way to surface them is through naturally selecting on actual merit which only an entrepreneurship environment can reliably provide. All of this means that I think startups with star teams are going to absolutely dominate for a few years (as in not just executing faster but with less bandwidth, but literally outright winning in everything) until near-full AI automation starts making the big firms win again simply by virtue of throwing tokens at the problem.

I'm with you on all apart from code review. Our team has tried a couple tools. Most of the issues highlighted are either very surface level or non-issues. When it reviews code from the less competent team members, it misses deeper issues which human review has caught, such as when the wrong change has been made to solve a problem which could be solved a better way. Our manager uses it as evidence to affirm his bias that we don't know what we're doing. It got to the point that he was using a code review tool and pasting the emoji littered output into the PR comments. When we addressed some of the minor issues (extra whitespace for example) he'd post "code review round 2". Very demoralising and some members of the team ended up giving up on reviewing altogether and just approving PRs. I think it's ok to review your own code but I don't think it should be an enforced constraint in a process, because the entire point of code review from the start was to invest time in helping one another improve. When that is outsourced to a machine, it breaks down the social contract within the team.

IME it's impossible to fight this people. They have to learn through consequences. There's no other way.

One of the bitter lessons I learned in my SWE career is that looking the part is almost everything. The meme boomer advice of "dress for the job you want, not the one you have" is remarkably true if you broaden the definition of "dress". Race, gender, lookism, age, everything matters in your career. Career progression gets easier just by being the right age, or being the right race (whatever that is at your company), or being the right gender (again, depends on your company). Grooming and personal fitness are easy wins. I've never seen an obese or unkempt executive or middle manager. Even the way you move makes a difference. If you stay past 4:30pm, you're destined to be an IC forever. Leadership-track people leave the office early even if it means taking work home, because it shows that you have your shit together. Leadership-track people eat lunch alone, not at the gossipy "worker's table". And of course, the way you dress matters (men look more leadership-material by dressing simple and consistent, for women it's the opposite). It's all about keeping up appearances.

Interestingly enough, a coworker recently told me that I likely don't have much room for advancement at my employer, given my race. He said look at the race of the people on the ladder above you (it's mostly one race), and then look at yourself. Also, being tall. Easiest way to identify management is height.

I remember learning this lesson. I’d bought some new clothes and worn them to the office. I got more appreciation from my manager than from the entire heroic 6 month death march to ship the last product release.

> men look more leadership-material by dressing simple and consistent, for women it's the opposite This made me think back to the people I've seen rise through the ranks: the women started off dressing very conservative and as they got to senior exec positions, started wearing very bright and powerful outfits. The men on the other hand started with bright t-shirts/polos etc, but then ended up in more conservative suits. Never noticed that before

> If you stay past 4:30pm, you're destined to be an IC forever I have never heard this said before. I wonder how true it is in general

If you stay late it looks like a) you're struggling, b) you're a try-hard, c) you don't have a life after work. One of the most actionable low-hanging career advices I could give is be among the first ones to pack up and leave for the day. You can always continue working at home if you're not done.

When I worked for a crypto startup early in my career, we were once chastised because no one was in the office at 6:30pm. Some engineers (including me) did mostly work from home but most people, engineers and non engineers alike, mostly worked from the office. And a couple years ago I did a short consulting stint for an AI startup (I know how to pick the bubbles huh?) where I shipped something at around 6pm my time, got a call at 9pm their time to talk about it, and then he asked me "what are you working on tonight?" I quit the next day. Anyway, this advice confuses me because many companies see staying late as a badge of commitment. Maybe it doesn't apply to startups.

If that happens globally where AGI and engineer replacement is "shipped" as a social construct, I'm afraid real software engineers (who can write and understand production ready systems) will be the vocal minority who can't do anything.

It goes even further: The existence and availability and feature set of a technology/service is a social construct within a company. At my employer (major public company), when someone says we have X, this then politically turns into X exists, and you have to use it with the assumed feature set. Even when this feature set doesn't exist!

That’s the thing, if you don’t use it someone else will And it’s hard to argue against seemingly instant results

No thanks, I really don't see the benefit of face to face discussions. Just don't hire AI bros, problem solved. If you can't filter them out in the hiring process, maybe refactor the hiring process.

I mean I agree with you, but the reality for many of us is that this is not under our control?

> The article almost reads like a practical manual for increasing perceived productivity inside a company. I think the truth is that at many (most?) places, perceived productivity and convincing is all that matters. You don't actually have to be productive if you can convince the right people above you that you are productive. You don't have to have competence if you can convince them of your competence. You don't have to have a feasible proposal if you can convince them it is feasible. And you don't have to ship a successful product if you can convince them it is successful. It isn't specifically about AI or LLMs. AI makes the convincing easier, but before AI, the usual professional convincers were using other tools to do the convincing. We've all worked with a few of those guys whose primary skill was this kind of convincing, and they often rocket up high on the org chart before perception ever has a chance to be compared with reality.

I agree. but,In practice, the important thing is that, whatever one thinks of management, you still have to speak in terms they recognize and want to hear. The target changes, but the mechanism is similar. This is often criticized, but it is also necessary even in ordinary conversation. The core skill is the ability to guide the agenda toward the place where your own argument can matter. I do not believe that good technology necessarily succeeds. Personally, I see this through the lens of agenda-setting. Agenda-setting matters. I am usually a third party looking at organizations from the outside, but when I observe them, there are almost always factions. And inside those factions, there are people with real influence. Their long-term power often comes from setting the agenda. From that perspective, AI slop looks like a failure of agenda-setting around why the market should need it. They encourage people to exploit human desire and creative motivation. But the problem is this: the market still wants value and scarcity. From that angle, this mismatch with public expectations may be a serious problem for the AI-selling industry.

> 'In many of the rooms I now find myself in, expertise has been asked to look the other way: to deliver faster, produce more, integrate the tools more deeply, get out of the way of the colleagues who are “getting things done”.' The entire article resonates, but that particular passage get at the core of a lot of my current frustrations around the use of these systems. Great article!

Fuck, yes. This. I work in an "AI-first" startup. Being "The Expert", my work has become 90% reviewing the tons of crap that confident BD people now produce, pretending to understand stuff that has never been their domain, proudly showing off their 20-pages hallucinated docs in the general chat as the achievement of their life. "Heads up folks, I wrote this doc! @OP can you review for accuracy and tone pls?" And don't hit me with the smartass "just say no", it's not an option. I tried that initially. I have a pretty senior position in the org, I complained to the CTO which I report to, and with the BD managers as well, that I do not have bandwidth to review AI-produced crap. After a couple of weeks, CEO and leadership in an org call spelling out loud that "we should collaborate and embrace AI in all our workflows, or we will be left behind". They even issued requirements to write a weekly report about "how AI improved my productivity at work this week". Luckily I am senior enough to afford ignoring these asks, but I feel bad to all my younger colleagues, which are basically forced to train their replacements. I am not even sure at this point whether this is all part of the nefarious corporate MBA "we can get finally rid of employees" wet dream, whether it's just virtue-signalling to investors, or if CEO and friends genuinely believe their own words. I have the feeling leadership (not only in my org) has gone in AI-autopilot mode and just disappeared to the sunny tropical beaches they always wanted to belong to. I would happily find another workplace at this point, but you know how the market is right now, and anyway, I have the feeling that this shit is happening pretty much anywhere money is. Everyone feels smart now, and it's a curse. God, how I hate this. It's making my life miserable.

Well you can hack the people. Send them on wild goose chases, make them simplify their documents, start quizzing them on the contents of their documents, make them do presentations, the list goes on. Getting hazed for doing shitty work sucks and people will catch on.

Heh, I could do it for my subordinates (and I don't need to, I made pretty clear with them that I have zero tolerance for this shit and they seem to comply), but for other teams it's not so easy, the environment is pretty brutal in terms of politics, if I start sabotaging the "SUCCESS" of some dumb BD, the manager will comply with me and the CTO. This quote from the original blog post resonates with me: > The room had been arranged in such a way that saying so was not a contribution; his managers were too invested in the appearance of momentum to want the appearance disturbed. Yes, I know, I should learn to be more subtle. I just don't have the energy for this stuff. I am tired.

Instead of helping, the author fought against them, "from day one anyone could tell that the schemas were wrong", yet nobody helped him, and instead went to the vp and complained about them. sad. what a horrible place to work in

Are you talking about dominating your peers to get a promotion?

External success for any business is defined as dominating the peers in selling. People call it as "wins". This percolates into internal context as well. Business units compete with other, teams compete, and peers within a team compete or performance ratings. If you say you never think of competing with your peers, you are probably not being honest.

But it's a team sport. For example, in Dota 2 you should be trying to dominate your opponents. If you are trying to dominate your teammates instead (by prioritizing better KDA) you are most likely ruining the game.

If you are a manager, you desire that your team should work like it is a team-sport, but at your peer level you would compete with your peers. The same happens at every level.

Who cares? I obviously didn't like the article. > Schemes were all wrong Why'd you let him run wild for two months? What software org would let anyone, even principle do that? Wouldn't the very first thing you'd do is review the guys schema? This reads like all the other snarky posts on HN about how everyone is punching above their pay grade and people who are much more advanced in some space just watch like two trains colliding. I'll tell you what is productive in the workplace. Communication. That is it. Communicate and lift the guy up, give the guy a running start instead of chilling in the break room snarking with all your snarky co-workers.

Exactly what we see. And the worst offenders are those insisting this isn't the case.

I think it's interesting that the data suggests that novices can increase productivity by a third and experts not at all. That sounds very similar to Dunning-Kruger- the novices literally don't know what productivity looks like. I'm finding it difficult to agree on document creation now being zero cost whereas consumption is high cost. I think you can actually spend time giving AI enough context to consume docs for you. I think the other thing worth pointing out with the article is understanding what your company will recognise. Yes, it's totally correct that your company won't thank you for poopoo-ing the idiot with AI. Yes, they'll run into a buzz saw when they hit a stakeholder who can choose to buy in. Don't burn your career protecting theirs. In fact it's not even certain that the idiot is damaging their career (for many reasons). This was a really interesting article.

I find it astounding how otherwise intelligent people fall for such obvious theatre. One really does need a particular mindset to filter this out, and that is almost entirely absent from typical management. As usual, if you don't have an actual reliable signal, or acquiring that signal takes too long - you'll fall back to relying on cheap proxy signals. Confidence over competence, etc. And those that are best at self-promotion and politics win. I've got recent experience in exactly this - someone who is completely out of their depth, mis-representing their actual capabilities. Their reliance on AI is so strong because of this lack of depth - to such a degree that they never learn anything. Lately they've been creating drama and endless discussions about dumb things to a) try to appear like they have strong opinions, and b) to filabust the time so they don't have to talk about important things related to their work output.

Agreed. I mean, to me, it seems that the management tier level of people like what you described, are the people funding and marketing AI to the world. They want to maintain their status and position in the world, while lowering the value of the actual experts in the world and like this article says, feel confident in their impersonations of them.