Comment by parliament32
9 hours ago
In a real "engineering" role, this person would be stripped of their license for stamping "production grade" on a bunch of AI slop.
That doesn't exist in our trade, so yeah, public shaming is the next best thing. I sincerely hope links to this incident will haunt him every time someone googles his name forevermore.
There was a piece a little while back, most probably from Cory Doctorow, about how some humans have already become Reverse Centaurs:
Controlled by a machine and only there to put their names and reputations on the line when the machine messes up.
Maybe this applies more to a writer having to generate 20 articles per hour in some journalism sweatshop, pressured to push out anything that will catch the winds of SEO augmented news, but I would not discount the level of pressure that the author of the blog post was put under to produce something, anything...
Based on the published profile, I strongly suspect that this person is not paid that well at all. you are not looking at a FAANG kind of deal here most certainly.
So maybe spare one second of thought for that future where many many folks are just there to be burnt up in some cancellation machine whilst profit gets accumulated elsewhere...
As you say, it's pretty hard to say that the average quality of software engineering makes it deserve the word "engineering" at all. Most software is bad accross the board, and developers on average get pretty good salaries for... whatever they bring to the world.
Still I don't think that some random employee deserves to be harassed and publicly shamed for a bad blog post.
In other industries this would be a gross ethical issue and potentially a legal one.
In this industry, public criticism for public fraudulence is "harassment", I guess? C'mon, man.
> In other industries this would be a gross ethical issue and potentially a legal one
Yes, but this is not another industry. Also in other industries, some say that "full self-driving is coming tomorrow" or "we can send millions of people to live on mars".
> public criticism for public fraudulence is "harassment", I guess? C'mon, man.
I never said "don't criticise". I have seen comments that I found very disrespectful early when this post started growing, and I tried to call for some empathy for the human being who made that mistake.