Comment by WorldMaker
15 hours ago
Though it is not like management roles have ever appreciated the creative aspects of the job, including problem solving. Management has always wished to just describe the desired outcome and get magic back. They don't like acknowledging that problems and complications exist in the first place. Management likes to think that they are the true creatives for company vision and don't like software developers finding solutions bottom up. Management likes to have a single "architect" and maybe a single "designer" for the creative side that they like and are a "rising" political force (in either the Peter Principle or Gervais Principle senses) rather than deal with a committee of creative people. It's easier for them to pretend software developers are blue collar cogs in the system rather than white collar problem solvers with complex creative specialties. LLMs are only accelerating those mechanics and beliefs.
Agreed. I hate to say it, but if anyone thought this train of thought in management was bad now, it's going to get much worse, and unfortunately burnout is going to sweep the industry as tech workers feel evermore underappreciated and invisible to their leaders.
And worse: with few opportunities to grow their skills from rigorous thinking as this blog post describes. Tech workers will be relegated to cleaning up after sloppy AI codebases.
I greatly agree with that deep cynicism and I too am a cynic. I've spent a lot of my career in the legacy code mines. I've spent a lot of my career trying to climb my way out of them or at least find nicer, more lucrative mines. LLMs are the "gift" of legacy-code-as-a-service. They only magnify and amplify the worst parts of my career. The way the "activist shareholder" class like to over-hype and believe in Generative AI magic today only implies things have more room to keep getting worse before they get better (if they ever get better again).
I'm trying my best to adapt to being a "centaur" in this world. (In Chess it has become statistically evident that Human and Bot players of Chess are generally "worse" than the hybrid "Centaur" players.) But even "centaurs" are going to be increasingly taken for granted by companies, and at least for me the sense is growing that as WOPR declared about tic-tac-toe (and thermo-nuclear warfare) "a curious game, the only way to win is not to play". I don't know how I'd bootstrap an entirely new career at this point in my life, but I keep feeling like I need to try to figure that out. I don't want to just be a janitor of other people's messes for the rest of my life.