Comment by JR1427
1 day ago
This is what I find interesting - the response from most companies is "we will need fewer engineers because of AI", not "we can build more things because of AI".
What is driving companies to want to get rid of people, rather than do more? Is it just short-term investor-driven thinking?
I think it's an excuse to do needed lay offs without saying as much. So yes, preserving signals, essentially. I've never met a tech company that didn't love expanding work to fill capacity, even if the work is of little value.
How much more productive are we supposed to be in engineering? Are we 10x'ing our testing capability at the same time? QA is already a massive bottleneck at my $DAYJOB. I'm not sure what benefits the company at-large derives from having the typing machine type faster.
Perhaps this is one of the understanding gaps that crop up around AI development? At my current company and most others I've worked at, testing capability is part of the same bucket because engineers do their own QA.
I'm far more interested in understanding how we can 10x our confidence in a change and not just our line counts.
The optimization function of capitalism and it's instrumental convergence. The AI Alignment problem is already here, and it is us.