Comment by hintymad
16 hours ago
Senior ICs spend all their time either in meetings or on their way to meetings because there are so many teams to "align". It might be okay in the normal days: organizations grow, and we need people specialized in navigating company dynamics. But as we are facing the tsunami of AI, it is increasingly risky to stay a professional meeting goer and box drawer as an IC. The only way to derisk the situation is to go to a company that moves fast, and learn how to build next generation of software with AI, or building the AI infra.
Disagree. The only part an AI can't do is the people aligning and box drawing. The implementation part is trivial. That's who will get replaced.
Meta: This is a topic I'm very interested in reading about. Does anyone know where people can talk about how AI is changing how people in large orgs work.
I don't mean in a forum where everyone bashes AI, but actually discusses how to navigate this?
It's not here at HN.
I'd also be interested!
The AI bashing is a response to the "AI is superintelligence and can write a kernel that's better than Linux" mentality, that is tiring, reeks of gross incompetence, and is almost maliciously wrong.
SOTA LLMs can't reliably implement a single, small feature without producing overly complex code. They don't do engineering.
My approach is two-fold: 1. frontload every conversation with a lot of guidance on how to approach things "like an engineer" (those terms are never uttered, but the guidance basically encodes my workflow as an engineer), to focus on only the problem at hand today, not overbuild things, etc, and 2. not trust a single line of code it produces.
I assume that the demand will change. Say, a new generation of companies to replace the old. Besides, those who do have practical experience on building AI-native applications or building AI infra may be in higher demand as well. That is, maybe our experience will become not as valuable as before, therefore we'd need to refresh our experience with a different pace.
arguably the meeting overhead is actually just people trading domain knowledge. an ai agent can go read their whole code base instead of having that meeting. its not clear how all this shakes out
I would say in addition to domain knowledge, it's also about intent. Code does not capture intent, it usually doesn't include the "why" just the "how".
I argue you still need communication for the "why" to get to the "how", otherwise you will just get the wrong thing.