Comment by sashank_1509
10 hours ago
I strongly agree, I work in big tech right now and I feel almost like a charity case. Before Opus 5.5 my work would involve maybe a few hours of coding per week and pointless meetings. Now it’s few minutes of Opus 5.5 prompting and more pointless meetings. And im being paid very well for this, not gonna complain but this can’t last.
This has been talked about for years and years, has little to do with AI.
I've been at places where I went years hardly doing work on a average week. But I'm also good [at some things] so when it mattered I showed up, then didn't do anything for months.
Also, if you build a foundation of being very good, you can coast on that even longer (years) in the right situation. There are 1000s of stories of people doing nothing for years making six figures, easy.
But it was like this pre-AI, as well. I don't think I spent a significant amount of the work week coding since I was an L3 15 years ago. And even then it was clear that impact (and thus promos and raises) was inversely correlated to the amount of the week spent coding.
What I'm seeing on my teams is everyone being more overworked than ever because the coding part happens SO quickly now that there's no friction to slow down all the nonstop "team alignment and box drawing" work that someone else in this thread alluded to.
I dont know which Big Tech you work at but at “my” Big Tech we are working crazy hours. And thats with very heavy use of AI.
The only counter-point here is, I think a lot of larger orgs operated like this before AI. Pointless meetings, a lot of people only really working a few hours a week. It's the classic Office Space portrayal. Or Big Head at Hooli just hanging out on the roof in Silicon Valley. It's real. So I understand the temptation to say "this can't last", but yet...