Post AhvMSaja02sVB2Jx0i by davidculley@sigmoid.social
(DIR) More posts by davidculley@sigmoid.social
(DIR) Post #AhvMSZBrjuJeOBXVp2 by fabio@manganiello.social
2024-04-28T06:38:32.571981Z
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IT executives are cynical when it comes to humans, clueless when it comes to technical feasibility, and chronically affected by a FOMO that attracts them to all shiny things because they’re constantly afraid of being left behind by competition.And I know as a fact, after working in large tech companies for many years, that those who get promoted to decision-making positions are usually the least brilliant among the employees, the most arrogant and the most likely to be affected by Dunning-Kruger - the pyramid of skills in knowledge-based jobs is inverted compared to more traditional industries like manufacturing.Most of the high level managers in IT companies don’t even analyze nor plan, and many don’t even think. They barely read the headline of an executive report, irrationally follow “industry trends”, keep repeating the same buzzwords and arcane corporate formulas in executive meetings like the members of a weird cargo cult, and mimic what everybody else does without putting any more thought into it than a single migrating bird puts any thought on where the whole flock is going.For years they’ve pretended to care about people. They’ve given perks, fancy offices and fancy salaries, talked a lot about their company as a big family where people help one another etc.Then someone showed them a demo of an AI model that can generate some basic code snippets after learning to parrot millions of StackOverflow posts and Github repos, and now they’re advertising no-code/low-code frameworks left and right thinking that they can take care of the whole lifecycle of a piece of software in production instead of an engineer.The real ugly face of management has come out: they genuinely don’t give a fuck about you. Most don’t even mention the possibility of using the new technologies to augment/improve existing jobs (augmentation of existing jobs by replacing the most mechanical parts is usually the most efficient way of embracing new technologies).All the corporate bullshit about shared values and being a family are gone out of the window. Replacement of expensive employees in order to thicken shareholder returns is what they were dreaming all along, after all.But that won’t happen until #AI models actually become able to reason instead of merely parroting examples. Reasoning doesn’t “emerge” from mere exposure to examples - or, at least, it’s a very inefficient way of building reasoning skills into software.A kid doesn’t have to be exposed to thousands of pictures of cats before learning the difference between a cat and a dishwasher, because even a kid has an ability that even the most advanced AI model lacks: formal generalization of features given only a limited amount of examples, through logical inference rather than brute forcing synaptic weights.My hypothesis is that soon most of these businesses will desperately come back to the market to hire at an inflated price the engineers that they are currently firing. They’ll soon be badly burned by marketing/business managers trying to deploy, debug and scale production processes built by dragging and connecting blocks in UIs that remind me of those of Lego Mindstorm and Scratch, which I used two decades ago to introduce mid-school teenagers to programming. And today a whole generation of technically illiterate managers seems to believe that the same tools used by a 12-year-old can also be used to run production workflows that process hundreds of data points per second for businesses worth billions of dollars.That’s, of course, unless AI actually learns to think like human engineers do - through inference and logical reasoning.Only when AI research moves from training larger and larger statistical models to building logical inference on top of them through decision trees, symbolic logic and Bayesian inference, then I’ll know that my engineering job is actually at risk.Until then, I’ll reserve my right to treat IT executives caught in the AI+layoff fever as the most imbecile primates who have ever walked this earth.
(DIR) Post #AhvMSaja02sVB2Jx0i by davidculley@sigmoid.social
2024-04-29T08:24:48Z
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@fabio Very true.More worrisome than artificial intelligence is natural stupidity.It depresses me that the human species is so stricken with greed.These greedy execs only pay us engineers b/c they can’t get rid of us (yet).Then why do we engineers endure—and submit to—these Dunning–Kruger types anyway? They clearly don’t care about us, and it’s not that we who do the heavy lifting would have a need for their hampering incompetency to carry the weight.
(DIR) Post #AhvMSctZxq45sd0xsG by fabio@manganiello.social
2024-04-29T10:11:43.460129Z
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@davidculley that’s a conundrum I’ve been going through myself lately.Those of us who actually enjoy to solve problems, build solutions and automate things through software would also like to do it for a living, as engineering jobs have been high-demand and well-paid for a quite long time.However business-school Dunning-Kruger tax-cheater borderline-sociopath types have taken over most of the management positions in our industry in the past decade. So the most common option (build software for a salary) nowadays means having to interact mostly with that kind of people, rather than early Silicon Valley geeks who genuinely enjoy tinkering and advancing the world through technology. And IMHO it doesn’t make much of a difference to work on a permanent job or as a contractor (indeed, a contractor position usually gets all the short-termism issues even more amplified, while losing the relative financial stability).A thought that keeps buzzing through my mind is that of starting my own business - Platypush for instance is big enough and with enough added value to have a small company built around it. But, besides the downsides that that normally entails (like the loss, at least in the short term, of a stable income that can pay your mortgage and bills, and having to focus more on business/bureaucracy problems of kickstarting and running a business and marketing the product rather than the fun part of building stuff), what discourages me the most is that such a company would have to also build a sound business model that can compete with those leveraged by the unethical sharks out there, without compromising too much on our values and ethos.A sensible trade-off may be to work for a large company that is (at least for now) “less evil” than others, and try to carve your own space inside of it in such a way that you can give your little push of a tech giant in a more ethical direction. That’s what e.g. @timnitGebru tried to do at Google, by pushing the company’s AI plans towards a more ethical and sustainable direction. That’s also what I’m currently trying to do at Booking, by building solutions that create consistent data lineages in order to increase the accountability and “explainability” of data+decision flows that often involve dozens of different frameworks. And I’m trying to do that in the open whenever possible, by contributing to the #OpenLineage project. Giving back to the community is the least you can do when you work for a business with a multibillion revenue. Such a decision obviously comes with its risks, at Timnit knows quite well: the company you work for can get rid of you if enough business school jerks are called into a room and decide that your project / line of research affects too much the bottom line of “their” business.An even better bet may be to reach out to employers that built their business on strong values and are unlikely (at least on the short/medium term) to enshittify, lay off thousands of employees after the CEO got galvanized by a demo of a new AI prototype, or switch to a user data hoarder-and-reseller business model ( #Nextcloud and #Fairphone B.V., just to name two such business on top of my mind, or also Blender). But that usually means lower salaries than big-fish competitors, and probably an impact on a more constrained niche. I hope that this will change in the future though. If both enough engineers and enough users get sufficiently disgusted by the most common business models in the industry they work for/consume, then sufficient demand may push the rise of even more companies focused on alternative models and a stronger ethos. And institutions like the #EU can definitely do more - rather than advertising “European tech champions” along the lines of US and China, they should probably foster (and directly fund much more generously than they currently do) an alternative ecosystem based on sustainability, openness and fairness. Yes, it’d be akin to the direct funding of strategic tech businesses that the US and China currently do, but, unlike them, it’d pick the will, not the winners. A combination of a steady demand/supply market for alternative solutions and more direct funding can also increase the salaries that these companies can offer to their engineers, thus contributing to a bigger “drain” of talent away from today’s Big Tech firms.For now, the more I think of all these trade-offs, the more powerless I feel, the more I contemplate leaving the industry altogether, move from the big city to the countryside, and start growing my own watermelons for a living.