Comment by steveBK123
3 days ago
Not just you. Clearly useful tools coming out of this AI crazy, but a LOT of fluff.
Outside of pure tech companies, there's a lot of "Head of AI" hiring by CTOs to show "we are doing AI" regardless of if they have found any application for it yet.
I've also seen a lot of product pivots to AI where they don't really have a need or explanation for the use case that AI helps with.
Further I've seen a number of orgs that were laggards in their internal technology become incredibly distracted thinking AI will solve for them not having even a proper rudimentary 2010s class IT org.
I think the comedown from this will be worse than crypto as while there will be more real use cases, there is far more hype based "we have to do something" adoption that hasn't found a use yet. A lot of orgs that remained weary of crypto got fully on the AI bandwagon. Investment must be an order of magnitude more.
> Clearly useful tools coming out of this AI crazy, but a LOT of fluff.
Isn't this true of every boom? Like A.C. Clarke said, you find the limits of the possible by venturing into the impossible.
On the adoption side, no.
This feels way more like the 90s IT offshoring wave where it was forced bluntly, top down because they thought it would save money.
Things like crypto or cloud or big data had a much longer and measured adoption cycle.
A lot of the fluff is all about boosting sales IMO which is where a lot of money for tech comes from. When MBA types (a large chunk of tech's buyers) hear the promises of efficiency, and replacing workers they get all excited very very quickly unless it requires lots of capital to do so - where they might instead look at cheaper labor (think offshore). AI is the ultimate SaaS product to these types, or at least how it it pitched to them it is. These people see tech workers, and IP as just "resources" - they are fungible bodies not qualified professionals. Obviously this creates a lot of technology delivery issues; and dysfunction. Places run by these types (many corporations) see technology as an expensive cost centre and secondary to the main business. I've seen this even in companies where they have to pivot to being a tech business - because of market competition they were forced to invest, but because it was reluctant investment the old culture remains. Engineers and other "builders/do'ers" are usually second class to the "decision makers" in these places. These are the places where engineers keep the place running, sometimes doing a lot of work and absolutely critical, but get paid little and receive little recognition. This is very common position for a software engineer outside the US.
With this kind of thinking often comes being a laggard in technology as you put it - engineers are a "forced necessary cost" because competitors are forcing us to keep up; not because we actually value it.
AI in their minds has vindicated their thinking hence the excitement about it. As a product it is very easy to "sell/fluff" to these kinds of people; it really excites them. They think engineers are now the expendable people they always wanted them to be rather than the people they had to put up with to get what they wanted. They were now justified in being "laggards" - they now have AI to do it cheaper than they would of had to pay an engineer before.
Yes there's a lot wrong with the thinking above, overestimation of current capabilities, etc and real innovative growth leading companies don't think this way. But the decision makers in these companies don't have that perspective. Much of technology trends, corporate hype is around things you can sell to these decision makers who often overpay for the wrong kind of technologies if you sell to them right (think typical RFQ/RFP corporate processes) - AI is an easy sell/dream to these people.
Yes I think this encapsulates my critique and observation from inside the belly of the beast. To these guys $100/year or even $1000/year per head to give AI to 1000 excel jockey analysts is great. It's cheaper, by an order of magnitude, than upsizing their IT org to the size of their leading competitors. I mean we are talking single digit SWEs for the numbers above.
Of course they probably aren't thinking through how AI will allow their leading competitors to maintain or expand their lead if it is any good anyway.
Interestingly I was in a meeting with our firms IT org recently where they were describing some of the "upgrades" they are making across systems, some of which were going to degrade service. Upon enough prodding they conceded the reasoning was not value, or even cost, but cost attribution. That is, it was too hard to figure out how to meter usage & charge back to business lines, so they are essentially going to discontinue those services and make business lines self manage. Crazy.