[HN Gopher] "AI-first" is the new Return To Office
___________________________________________________________________
"AI-first" is the new Return To Office
Author : LorenDB
Score : 285 points
Date : 2025-04-30 13:38 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.anildash.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.anildash.com)
| srveale wrote:
| I don't necessarily disagree with the main argument, but
|
| > did your boss ever have to send you a memo demanding that you
| use a smartphone
|
| Yes, there were tons of jobs that required you to have a
| smartphone, and still do. I remember my second job, they'd give
| out Blackberries - debatably not smartphones, but still - to the
| managers and require work communication on them. I know this was
| true for many companies.
|
| This isn't the perfect analogy anyway, since one major reason
| companies did this was to increase security, while forcing AI
| onto begrudging workers feels like it could have the opposite
| effect. The commonality is efficiency, or at least the perception
| of it by upper management.
|
| One example I can think of where there was worker pushback but it
| makes total sense is the use of electronic medical records.
| Doctors/nurses originally didn't want to, and there are certainly
| a lot of problems with the tech, but I don't think anyone is
| suggesting now that we should go back to paper.
|
| You can make the argument that an "AI first" mandate will
| backfire, but the notion that workers will collectively gravitate
| towards new tech is not true in general.
| pxx wrote:
| I don't think your example is really a counterexample. Work-
| provided Blackberries allowed you to be more responsive to work
| messages while communicating over an ostensibly secure medium.
|
| on the other hand, making sure that people use AI for
| performance reviews would be akin to measuring the percentage
| of work days that you used your blackberry. that's not
| something that anyone sane ever did.
|
| somewhat in the same vein, nobody ever sent a directive saying
| that all interoffice memoranda must be typed in via blackberry.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea, the point is, if a product or technology is useful,
| people will want to use it. They'll bang down your door to be
| allowed to use it. They'll even surreptitiously use it if you
| don't allow it. If you have to mandate that they use it, what
| does that really say about the tool?
|
| A better example is probably source control. It might not
| have been true in the past, but these days, nobody has to
| mandate that you use source control. We all know the
| benefits, and if we're starting a new software business,
| we're going to use source control by default from day one.
| Uehreka wrote:
| > Yes, there were tons of jobs that required you to have a
| smartphone, and still do. I remember my second job, they'd give
| out Blackberries - debatably not smartphones, but still - to
| the managers and require work communication on them.
|
| Anil is referring specifically to the way that people who were
| told to use a Blackberry would bring an iPhone to work anyway
| and demand that IT support it because it was so much better. In
| the late 2000s Blackberries were a top-down mandate that failed
| because iPhones were a bottom-up revolution that was too
| successful to ban.
|
| So look for situations where employees are using their personal
| AI subscriptions for work and are starting to demand that IT
| budget for it so they don't have to pay out of pocket. I'm
| seeing this right now at my job with GitHub Copilot.
| anildash wrote:
| Yeah, I think that's fair, but those bosses that made us get
| Blackberries were mostly doing that because they wanted to be
| able to call us and make us work, not because we had to be
| convinced that smartphones had value, right? We all ended up
| buying smartphones on our own as well.
| remich wrote:
| Well, we all ended up buying smartphones eventually. But the
| delta between when Blackberries first were adopted in
| corporate environments and when iPhones/Androids were
| can't-miss technologies wasn't small.
| srveale wrote:
| You may underestimate how many people do not need to be
| convinced. Again, I'll refrain from making a value judgment,
| but the hard numbers show that LLMs have been one of the most
| quickly adopted technologies in the history of mankind,
| including the time before anyone was forced to use them.
|
| Not sure if these are the best stats to illustrate the point,
| but ChatGPT was released November 2022, 2.5 years ago, and
| they currently claim ~1 billion users [1]
|
| By comparison, iPhone sales were something like 30 million
| over the same time period, June 2007 through 2009. [2]
|
| In other words, what took ChatGPT several months took
| smartphones several years.
|
| Of course there are problems with the comparison (iPhones are
| expensive, but many people bought each version of the iPhone
| making the raw user count go down, Sam Altman is
| exaggerating, people use LLMs other than ChatGPT, blah blah
| blah), so maybe let's not concentrate on this particular
| analogy. The point is: even a very skeptical view of how many
| people use LLMs day-to-day has to acknowledge they are
| relatively popular, for better or worse.
|
| I think we're better served trying to keep the cat from
| scratching us rather than trying to put it back in the bag.
| Ham-fisted megalomaniac CEOs forcing a dangerous technology
| on workers before we all understand the danger is a big
| problem, that's for sure. To the original point, "AI-first is
| the new RTO", there's definitely some juice there, but it's
| not because the general public is anti-AI.
|
| [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/martineparis/2025/04/12/chat
| gpt...
|
| [2] https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology--
| media-a...
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > In other words, what took ChatGPT several months took
| smartphones several years
|
| You are comparing a cheap subscription service to an
| expensive piece of hardware that would replace hardware
| that most people already owned
|
| Of course smartphones were slower to adopt. Everyone had
| phones already, and they were expensive!
|
| ChatGPT is *free
| srveale wrote:
| Do you have any thoughts on the second half of my
| comment?
| lsy wrote:
| The point is well-made that truly revolutionary technologies
| don't need top-down mandates to drive adoption, and it's
| certainly a bad sign for the AI industry that we are in this
| phase of the hype cycle. But it also seems likely that top-down
| mandates will create perverse incentives for product development
| around these technologies, preventing genuinely valuable use
| cases from emerging as people determine what does and doesn't
| work.
|
| If everyone, to satisfy their CEO's emotional attachment to AI,
| is forced to type into a chat box to get dreck out and then
| massage it into something usable for their work, we'll see that
| ineffective mode persist longer, and probably miss out on better
| modes of interaction and more well-targeted use cases.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I wonder about the opportunity cost of going all-in on AI. What
| great products are _not_ being developed, simply because every
| CEO is currently under this AI spell and is insisting that
| everything everyone does must be about AI? AI is sucking all
| the oxygen out of the room and probably causing actually useful
| projects to be canceled or de-prioritized.
| mulmen wrote:
| It's not every CEO. If you have a better idea do that and
| outcompete the companies that are making what you think is a
| bad bet.
| teddy-smith wrote:
| The article presents some good points but to me it seems like not
| being a jerk and calling Will.I.am "nobodys favorite rapper" is a
| selling point for A.I.
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| A selling point for humans is that some of them are actually
| funny, unlike LLMs which just regurgitate synatically competent
| but humourously incompetent waffle.
| glitchc wrote:
| I dunno. The latter part sounds like a number of humans I've
| interacted with. They're all nice people though.
| anildash wrote:
| I will admit it was not my kindest joke, but on the other hand,
| I genuinely did not expect him to read a treatise on IOT
| infrastructure.
| ctkhn wrote:
| I think you have some leeway joking on a guy who wrote a song
| called "Let's get retarded"
| anildash wrote:
| Was genuinely my feeling at the time, too.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| I thought AI-first was the new blockchain?
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Aside: where do the extra slashes in the submitted anildash urls
| come from? frequent reoccurrence. An rss feed somewhere? Some
| scheme for him to track outside shares? heh
|
| https://www.anildash.com//2025/04/19/ai-first-is-the-new-ret...
| ctkhn wrote:
| Was thinking the same thing. When I go through google to his
| blog posts I don't see the double slash and it isn't there when
| I go to his blog homepage and click through to the specific
| post.
| anildash wrote:
| I might have screwed something up in my RSS (well,
| technically Atom) feed. I'll take a look later.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > This is unusual -- did your boss ever have to send you a memo
| demanding that you use a smartphone? Was there a performance
| review requiring you to use Slack? I'm actually old enough that I
| was at different workplaces when they started using spreadsheets
| and email and the web, and I can tell you, they absolutely didn't
| have to drive adoption by making people fill out paperwork about
| how they were definitely using the cool new technology.
|
| I've been around long enough to see resistance to things like the
| Internet, version control, bug tracking systems, ORMs, automated
| tests, etc. Not every advancement is welcomed by everybody. An
| awful lot of people are very set in their ways and will refuse to
| change unless given a firm push.
|
| For instance, if you weren't around before version control became
| the norm, then you probably missed the legions of developers who
| said things like _"Ugh, why do I have to use this stupid thing?
| It just slows me down and gets in my way! Why can't I just focus
| on writing code?"_ Those developers had to be dragged into modern
| software development when they were certain it was a stupid waste
| of time.
|
| AI can be extremely useful and there's a lot of people out there
| who refuse to give it a proper try. Using AI well is a skill you
| need to learn and if you don't see positive results on your first
| couple of attempts that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad, it
| just means you are a beginner. If you tried a new language and
| didn't get very far at first, would you blame the language or
| recognise that you lack experience?
|
| An awful lot of people are stuck in a rut where they tried an
| early model, got poor results to begin with, and refused to use
| it again. These people _do_ need a firm, top-down push, or they
| will be left behind.
|
| This has happened before, many times. Contrary to the article's
| claims, sometimes top-down pushes have been necessary even for
| things we now consider near universally good and productive.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| There have also been many fads that were forced on people which
| fizzled out and didn't amount to much.
| trilobyte wrote:
| I see you speak from experience. I feel like I'm watching the
| same cycle play out over and over again, which is that a new,
| transformative technology lands, people with a vested interest
| spend a lot of time denouncing it (your examples mostly land
| for me), the new technology gets over-hyped and fails to meet
| some bar and the haters all start crowing about how it's just
| B.S. and won't ever be useful, etc. etc.
|
| Meanwhile, people are quietly poking around figuring out the
| boundaries of what the technology really can do and pushing it
| a little further along.
|
| With the A.I. hype I've been keeping my message pretty
| consistent for all of the people who work for me: "There's a
| lot of promise, and there are likely a lot of changes that
| could come if things keep going the way they are with A.I., but
| even if the technology hits a wall right now that stops it from
| advancing things have already changed and it's important to
| embrace where we are and adapt".
| Centigonal wrote:
| Such a sane, nuanced take on new technologies. I wish more
| people were outspoken about holding these types of opinions.
|
| It feels like the AI discourse is often dominated by
| irrationally exuberant AI boosters and people with an
| overwhelming, knee-jerk hatred of the technology, and I often
| feel like reading tech news is like watching two people who
| are both wrong argue with one another.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Unfortunately, thoughtful, nuanced takes don't make
| headlines, don't get into Harvard Business Review, and
| don't end up as memos on the CEO's desk. Breathless
| advocacy and knee-jerk dismissals get the clicks and those
| are the takes that end up bubbling to the top and
| influencing the decision makers.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Moderates typically have a lot less to say than extremists
| and don't feel a need to have their passion heard by the
| world. The discussion ends up being controlled by the
| haters and hypers.
|
| New technologies in companies commonly have the same
| pitfalls that burn out users. The companies have very
| little ability to tell if a technology is good or bad at
| the purchasing level. The c-levels that approve the
| invoices are commonly swayed not by the merits of the
| technology, but the persuasion of the salespeople or the
| fears of others in the same industries. This leads to a lot
| of technology that could/should be good being just absolute
| crap for the end user.
|
| Quite often the 'best' or at least most useful technology
| shows up via shadow IT.
| remich wrote:
| And a subgroup (or cousin?) of the exuberant AI boosters
| are the people absolutely convinced that LLM research leads
| to the singularity in the next 18-24 months.
|
| I really do wish we could get to a place where the general
| consensus was something similar to what Anil wrote - the
| greatest gains and biggest pitfalls are realized by people
| who aren't experienced in whatever domain they're using it
| for.
|
| The more experience you have in a given domain, the more
| narrow your use-cases for AI will be (because you can do a
| lot of things on your own faster than the time spent coming
| up with the right prompts and context mods), but
| paradoxically the better you will be at using the tools
| because of your increased ability to spot errors.
|
| *Note: by "narrow" I don't mean useless, I just mean
| benefits typically accrue as speed gains rather than
| knowledge + speed gains.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > I've been around long enough to see resistance to things like
| the Internet, version control, bug tracking systems, ORMs,
| automated tests, etc. Not every advancement is welcomed by
| everybody. An awful lot of people are very set in their ways
| and will refuse to change unless given a firm push.
|
| There was never any widespread resistance to "the Internet",
| let's be real here.
|
| In any case, adoption of all those things was _bottom-up_
| rather than _top-down_. CEOs were not mandating that tech teams
| use version control or ORMs or automated testing. It was tech
| leadership, with a lot of support from ICs in their department.
|
| Tech people in particular are excited about trying new things.
| I never heard CEOs mandating top-down that teams use Kubernetes
| and adding people's Kubernetes usage into their performance
| reviews, yet Kubernetes spread like wildfire--to the point
| where many software companies which had no business using
| something as complicated as Kubernetes started using it. Same
| with other flavor-of-the-month tools and approaches like event
| sourcing, NoSQL/MongoDB, etc.
|
| If anything, as a leader you need to _slow down_ adoption of
| new technology rather than force it upon people. The idea that
| senior leadership needs to _push_ to get AI used is highly
| unusual, to say the least.
| brummm wrote:
| Isn't Amazon's APIs everywhere another example of just this
| that came right from the top? In some companies CEOs double
| as the tech lead, no?
| mjr00 wrote:
| The API mandate notably specified _what_ rather than _how_.
| _" It doesn't matter what technology [you] use. HTTP,
| Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter."_ In
| some ways it's quite the opposite of CEO mandates to use
| AI, which specify _how_ you must build things (using AI!)
| rather than _what_.
|
| The equivalent of the API mandate for AI would be if CEOs
| were demanding that all products include a "Summarize
| Content" button. Or that all code repositories contain a
| summary of their contents in a README. The use of AI to
| solve these problems would be an implementation detail.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Or if CEOs were demanding that everything be written in
| Python. Programming language should also be an
| implementation detail, not something a CEO would worry
| about. Just like "using AI."
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| to me this was more about guiding towards a desired
| outcome. An opinionated bet, but not overly prescriptive.
| "AI first" is saying do everything with AI _and then_ hope
| you find some efficiencies, almost by accident.
| jimbokun wrote:
| My recollection is that AWS was extremely popular among
| developers very early on.
| skwirl wrote:
| Do you just mean within Amazon? Because outside of
| Amazon, there was major resistance to AWS/cloud computing
| in general from older devs highly invested in the status
| quo. I have spent a significant amount of effort in my
| career fighting for cloud adoption.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > if you weren't around before version control became the norm,
| then you probably missed the legions of developers
|
| I was around before version control and I don't remember that
| reaction from more than an insignificant percentage of devs.
| Most devs reacted to the advent of version control with glee
| because it eased a real pain point.
| n4r9 wrote:
| > Those developers had to be dragged into modern software
| development when they were certain it was a stupid waste of
| time.
|
| But why do they have to fill out some paperwork? If the new
| technology is a genuine productivity boost and any sort of
| meaningful performance review is undertaken, then it will show
| up if they're performing sub-par compared to colleagues.
|
| The real problem is that senior management are lazily passing
| down mandates in lieu of trusting middle management to do
| effective performance reviews. Just as it was with Return To
| Office.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Some people are good enough that they'll do well on
| performance reviews anyway, and if there's a new technology
| that's acting as a force multiplier those are exactly the
| people who the company most wants to adopt it.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| Perhaps then they should focus on getting their 0.1x
| developers using it to get competent rather than trying to
| get their 1x developers to 10x using it.
| n4r9 wrote:
| Fair point about comparing performance reviews. It's also
| practically impossible to judge someone's performance on
| novel tasks, or whether they're caring enough about tech
| debt. Even as I wrote my first post there was a nagging
| voice in my head saying "Almost _no one_ does performance
| reviews well enough for that ".
|
| In my (limited) experience, the tasks you want to assign to
| elite devs are less amenable to AI in the first place.
| Faark wrote:
| Social responsibility?
|
| I have a few colleagues who like the way they work and would
| prefer everything to stay the way it is. Such "skilled
| artisans" might be on the way out, replaced by "Ai factory"
| mass production.
|
| Sure, they could just be kicked out and replaced. But they
| worked with the company, in some case for a decade plus.
| Giving them a fair picture of what seems to be down the road
| is the very least I'd expect of a company treating it's
| workers as more than just replaceable cogwheels.
| closeparen wrote:
| It is incredibly early. Copilot and Cursor are both incapable
| of writing a mapping between two structs with identical fields
| - some of the most menial coding imaginable - because they
| either don't have or won't use basic coding mechanics like
| looking up the signature of a thing before writing code about
| it. This is the technology that should be making me 10x more
| productive? This honestly feels like an emperor has no clothes
| situation. Being charitable, maybe the hype is all from people
| generating code into empty projects with no existing context?
| jayGlow wrote:
| that's weird I'm pretty sure I've done that exact thing
| multiple times with chatgpt. I've noticed copilot doesn't
| always work well but it's still frequently useful for me.
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| >> AI can be extremely useful and there's a lot of people out
| there who refuse to give it a proper try.
|
| My take-away was this is exactly what the OP is targeting.
| Management's job is to convince you to try and help you make it
| demonstrate value; mandating "though shall be AI-first" does
| neither of these _effectively_ - ironically some of your best
| developers will: require the most evidence to be convinced,
| fight the hardest, and have the best options to jump ship if
| you go far enough. It 's just weak management when there's the
| obvious alternative. Dash is a developer relations/evangelist
| so it's not surprising he bristles at this approach.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _If you tried a new language and didn't get very far at
| first, would you blame the language or recognise that you lack
| experience?_
|
| This way of phrasing it rejects the possibility that maybe the
| new thing _really does_ suck, and that this can sometimes be
| identified pretty quickly.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > AI can be extremely useful and there's a lot of people out
| there who refuse to give it a proper try. Using AI well is a
| skill you need to learn and if you don't see positive results
| on your first couple of attempts that doesn't necessarily mean
| it's bad, it just means you are a beginner
|
| I'm not a beginner though. In fact I'm actually very
| experienced at doing my job
|
| Which is why I don't need non-technical management and AI
| consultants to be telling me what tools I should be using
|
| If I thought AI was going to be a useful tool for me then I
| would use it
|
| But so far it hasn't, so I don't
|
| I'm not investing my time and energy into a "skill" that
| doesn't seem like it is going to pay off
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > These people do need a firm, top-down push, or they will be
| left behind.
|
| > even for things we now consider near universally
|
| We aren't at the point where AI tools provide a major
| productivity boost. Sometimes they help, sometimes they don't,
| sometimes working with AI has negative productivity.
|
| Assuming AI improves to the point where employees who use it
| are significantly more productive... They'll excel relative to
| their peers. The people who can't figure it out will
| underperform.
| bootsmann wrote:
| I think it would be a worthwhile exercise for yourself to find
| and replace every mention of AI in your post with blockchain or
| metaverse. Just because something is new doesn't mean its
| useful and if you're having to force knowledge workers to adopt
| something supposedly making them more productive then its
| probably a bad sign.
| andy99 wrote:
| did your boss ever have to send you a memo demanding that you use
| a smartphone? Was there a performance review requiring you to use
| Slack?
|
| I see this is already a favorite quote amongst commentors. It's
| mine too: I had a job ~15 years ago where the company had
| introduced an internal social network, that was obviously trying
| to ride on the coattails of Facebook et al without understanding
| why people liked social networks.
|
| Nobody used it because it was useless, but management evidently
| was invested in it because your profile and use of that internal
| site did in fact factor in to performance reviews.
|
| This didn't last long, maybe only one review cycle before
| everyone realized it was irretrievably lost. The parallel with
| the article is very apt thought. The stick instead of the carrot
| is basically an indication that a dumb management idea is in its
| death throes.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| A social network never did a weeks worth of work for me in 10
| minutes. Keep swinging that hammer, John Henry.
| skybrian wrote:
| If it makes that much of a difference and quality is the
| same, nobody will care whether you used AI or not. It's an
| implementation detail.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I would say we might have worked at the same company, but there
| were so many companies trying that at the time we may very well
| not have.
|
| Where I worked, it was an open secret that the CEO had an alter
| ego he used on the site. I have no idea if he knew that we all
| knew who that really was (I have to assume he did), but every
| played along.
|
| By the time I had worked there it had been around for a few
| years already and once a quarter the head of our group set time
| aside for everyone to "engage" with it for an hour so that no
| one would be dinged on their performance review.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| That "Facebook for business" fad was _so fucking stupid_ and
| managed to last what, about a decade?
|
| It's a great example of how executive group-think can drive
| whole multi-industry initiatives that are very-obviously, to
| anyone outside that bubble, pure waste.
| pimlottc wrote:
| Nobody wants Facebook at work, what they want is a
| comprehensive org chart that's actually up-to-date.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Longer; a lot of the metaverse hype was pretty much a
| reframing of it.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| I once worked at a company that'd acquired a virtual-office
| company. I wasn't around for the acquisition, but it really
| smelled like one rich person bailing out another's failed
| investment (or someone on the board had a bunch of money in
| the acquisition target, or something along those lines).
|
| To justify owning the useless damn thing, they insisted
| everyone use it, basically like Slack if it ate 3-4x the
| resources (really saying something, given Electron already
| eating 5-10x the resources it ought to need for any given
| task), monopolized a screen when in use, and added all the
| awkward elements of physical environments to virtual ones
| for no reason ("is it weird if 'I' 'sit' in this chair
| 'next to' this other 'person' when there are other chairs
| available in the room?", or "oh shit where's that meeting
| room 'physically' located, again? I think I'm lost...")
| while removing none of the awkwardness of virtual
| interactions.
|
| Truly, bizarrely pointless. It was like some shit out of
| the Silicon Valley TV show, so absurd it was hard to
| believe it was real. I swear to god, I'm not making this
| up, they even had _in-world presentations_ , so you could
| add all the fun of having a bad angle on a screen or being
| too far away to comfortably read the text to the joy of a
| Zoom screen-share. Totally nuts. Luckily you could also
| maximize whatever was being presented, but... hooray, your
| best feature is that I can ignore all the things that make
| your dumb crap distinctive? What a win.
|
| This is what I think of every time I see anyone trying to
| promote Zuckerberg's weird, bad idea. I assure you, being
| in VR goggles would not have made the experience either
| more productive or more pleasant. Nobody who's ever tried
| to work like this even for one week could possibly think
| it's a good idea to invest in it.
| romellem wrote:
| Oh wow, totally forgot about [Yammer][1]. What a waste of time.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viva_Engage
| mjheart wrote:
| As someone who works at a larger corporation who takes the quoted
| "normal policy", I can attest that it's extremely refreshing.
|
| Incidentally, some people on my team have used Copilot for task
| management, but nobody has found it useful for coding / debugging
| / testing.
| walleeee wrote:
| What is "task management" in this context and why did your
| coworkers find llms useful for it?
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Heh, I can definitely imagine hooking up an LLM to our task
| board's API and having it suggest actions (say, marking
| something as ready for QA) based on my Git log, then execute
| those if approved. Probably save me a shitload of time. Hell,
| if I just let it run loose and do whatever it decided to do,
| daily, with no intervention, it'd likely do a better job than
| the median developer (and better than I do). Maybe suggest
| next-tasks for me. I'd worry about it damaging something, but
| I worry about that a ton every time I have to open up any of
| those confusing-UI shared-workspace sorts of things anyway.
|
| That this would be a significant time savings mostly has to
| do with most task tracking systems being so very miserable
| and slow to work in for the majority of the people expected
| to use them, though. If we used something lighter and closer
| to where the work is happening (the code) it wouldn't really
| be that helpful.
| ctkhn wrote:
| Is marking a jira ticket ready for testing that
| complicated? That doesn't seem like something that I both
| spend a ton of time on while being non productive to want
| to outsource to AI
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Various administrative junk probably takes up about 20%
| of my actual wall-time as far as the work itself, but
| contributes enormously more than that to my mental
| fatigue, task-switching time loss, and general stress
| level. It subjectively _feels_ like 50% of my job.
| Interacting with Jira or Azure Devops or Asana or what
| have you is far from everything, but is a decent chunk of
| that.
|
| This does tend to be a much bigger problem at bigcos than
| smaller shops, though.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| _" did your boss ever have to send you a memo demanding that you
| use a smartphone? Was there a performance review requiring you to
| use Slack?"_
|
| In fact I remember very distinctly the Google TGIF All-Hands
| where Larry and Sergey stood up and told SWEs they should be
| trying to do development on tablets, because, y'know, mobile was
| ascendant, they were afraid of being left behind in mobile, and
| wanted to develop for "mobile first" (which ended up being on the
| whole "mobile only" but I'll put that aside for now).
|
| It frankly had the same aura of ... not getting it... lack of
| vision pretending to be visionionary.
|
| In the end, the job of upper management is not to dictate the
| tools to engineers to drive them to efficiency. We frankly
| already have that motivation ourselves. If engineers are
| skeptical of "AI", it's mostly because we've already been engaged
| with it and understand many of its limitations, not because we're
| being "luddites"
|
| One sign of a healthy internal engineering culture is when
| engineers who are actually doing the work work together to pick
| their tools to do the work, rather than have them hoisted on
| them.
|
| When management sends memos out demanding people use AI, what
| they're actually reflecting is their _own_ fear of being left
| behind in the buzzword cycle. Few of us doing the work have that
| fear. I 've seen more projects damaged by excessive novelty and
| forced "innovation" than the other way around.
| hbsbsbsndk wrote:
| Having worked at Shopify, Tobi is 100% a try-hard Elon wannabe.
| Anil is correct that this is about performing "being a CEO" for
| the sake of his image among his peers.
|
| My favorite stupid Shopify cult thing is the hiring page having a
| "skip the line" for "exceptional abilities" which explicitly
| lists being good at video games as a reason to skip the normal
| hiring process. The "other" category includes examples like
| "Olympic athlete".
| BoGoToTo wrote:
| I remember one town hall where he was asked "If you had to
| start over again, what sort of company would you start?" and
| his answer was "I wouldn't, all the good ideas are already
| taken."
| JohnFen wrote:
| That's genuinely astonishing in its degree of ignorance.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| Why? It's the same thing DHH says. He's never going to have
| a better idea than rails and basecamp. Tobi is the same
| with Shopify
| remich wrote:
| There's a difference between having the humility to admit
| that you might not be able to hit another home run, and
| between claiming that "all the good ideas are taken." At
| best, the latter is an admission of a lack of a desire to
| even try anymore, at worst it shows a stunning lack of
| curiosity and creativity.
| sulam wrote:
| That sounds too dumb to be true. As in, is there some missing
| context that this quote was forklifted from?
| ysavir wrote:
| > My favorite stupid Shopify cult thing is the hiring page
| having a "skip the line" for "exceptional abilities" which
| explicitly lists being good at video games as a reason to skip
| the normal hiring process.
|
| Hah! Now you have my curiosity. What do they replace the normal
| hiring process with? A game of LoL?
| mjburgess wrote:
| Some weak evidence of why "exceptional abilities" is not a
| bad idea, even if gimmiky, is that performance "at the
| extreme" is highly correlated. So that the people who tend,
| eg., to be concert pianists, tend also to be very
| accomplished artists, and the like.
|
| So if you're hitting (a verifiable) top 0-0.5% in some field,
| there's a reasonable bias towards assuming a high general
| competence.
|
| I did once hit 0.5 percentile in a multinational PHP exam in
| my teenage years however I did have a second window open with
| an interpreter running for the most fringe questions. -- who
| knows what that means.
| glitchc wrote:
| Wait, you expect a concert pianist to be a good software
| developer... on average? Most of the time? Not at all?
| DrillShopper wrote:
| They can't possibly be worse than half of my coworkers
| mjburgess wrote:
| I expect a concert pianist who's applying for a software
| developer position to be worthy of an initial
| consideration.
|
| I know a software developer who could well be a concert
| pianist, for example. Ie., that pool of people who
| overlap, in that overlap, are probably extraordinarily
| talented.
| Spivak wrote:
| Yes! Well specifically someone who is a concert pianist
| and then who also set out to be a software developer. The
| ability to get _very_ good at a difficult thing is highly
| correlated to being able to get very good at another
| really difficult thing.
|
| Case in point I have a friend who is a top 32 magic
| player in NA. She recently, not even a year ago recently,
| made it her goal to become a chess grandmaster and she's
| already 2000 ELO. You could argue that _maybe_ some
| skills transfer but it 's pretty shaky reasoning.
| michaelbarton wrote:
| Exactly. Olympic athletes in one sport have a much higher
| chance of being an Olympian in another. It's not that
| they inherently "sporty" that makes the difference but
| they're willing to put in the 100s of hours of training
| and get up at 5am regularly. You could say it's
| discipline that would make them a good SWE?
|
| See: https://www.nine.com.au/sport/olympics/olympians-
| who-changed...
| evantbyrne wrote:
| It only make sense if you assume that people can
| generally brute force their way into the top fraction of
| a percent. Not a view that I agree with.
| butlike wrote:
| Yeah, I'm kind of with you. Just because they have the
| capacity to excel doesn't mean they're going to for YOUR
| company.
|
| Also it smells like a false metric. People who are in the
| 0.05% of excellence are probably still heavily invested
| in the thing they're excelling at.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Because a lot of the skills and personality trait of
| becoming elite at something are transferable to becoming
| elite at other things.
| dismalaf wrote:
| No, you'd expect them to have a capacity to learn at a
| high level. Which is a good trait for those who are also
| developers.
| WJW wrote:
| Starcraft 2 is I think the preferred one.
| morkalork wrote:
| I wonder how it worked out for that kid.
| Lammy wrote:
| Make it Brood War and I'm in
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| I've played with BoxeR and trained with team IM from
| Korea. Hmm I should apply.
| 0x1ceb00da wrote:
| You gotta beat the boss to get a job.
| ed wrote:
| Counterpoint: externally, at least, Shopify seems to be a well
| run organization and that has to come from somewhere. (Parter
| for about 8 years.)
| pera wrote:
| Not from my point of view: Last year I paid for a product
| from a shop that was using Shopify, you would think that
| given that this was a one time transaction, once the payment
| has been processed they wouldn't keep storing your PII
| forever but guess what? A couple of months ago I was going to
| buy a product from a totally unrelated shop also using
| Shopify and as soon as I typed my email address they sent me
| an OTP to my phone to autocomplete all my personal details.
| So paying for a product equals to creating an account with
| Shopify.
|
| This is incredibly shady and I wonder if it's even legal here
| in Europe.
| blahaj wrote:
| You could do a GDPR request for the data they have on you.
| I would be curious what they save. Keep us updated if you
| want to.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I think it's shady to use cross-shop information unless the
| customer explicitly opts into it.
|
| But shopify isn't just a payment processing service. It's a
| full blown ecommerce suite. Do you think there's an online
| store out there that gets rid of all PII once an order is
| paid for, or even after its fulfilled?
|
| We've had people try to return/replace things (or even
| credit card disputes) years after they bought it. How
| exactly would that work if we got rid of all information
| about their order shortly after they made it?
| OJFord wrote:
| You may have thought you were saving your details with that
| shop (or not realised at all of course) but yes this is a
| recentish feature I think, at least I haven't noticed it
| for long, branded 'Shop pay' iirc.
|
| As for legality in the EU/UK, it's just like everything
| else, on some level they technically asked for consent and
| you gave it, but yes, dark patterns abound.
| pera wrote:
| It may have been stated somewhere in their T&C, but just
| to be clear: I did not explicitly consent for this.
| OJFord wrote:
| Right, but the enforcement on this stuff is terrible, you
| probably also started receiving mailing list spam that
| you didn't knowingly opt in to, and nothing's going to
| change or come of it even if you do report it to the ICO.
| jen729w wrote:
| Shopify store owner here. Credit to them, they make
| deleting customer data trivial. One obvious button.
|
| This is interesting though: is that data deleted
| everywhere? It makes no sense just to delete from 'my
| store'. But I can delete any customer data at any time.
|
| Perhaps this is a nice example of complexity. From the
| outside it's easy for us to _why don't they just..._ , but
| as soon as you scratch the surface...
| spacemadness wrote:
| That is one of the stupidest things I've read all day, and
| that's saying something. Why are so many tech CEOs this
| childish?
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| Dinner party economics.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Every group has these people. Whether it's churchgoers, world
| leaders, tech CEOs, high schoolers, beer league softball, or
| even chimpanzees. Social bullshitters who do most things for
| the image among a small group of peers. It's a good skill to
| recognize this kind of pattern and how so many kinds of
| patterns are the same things repeating themselves in a
| different environment.
| rchaud wrote:
| They've been slathered with money, PR and attention for years
| before even making a single penny in profit. At some point
| that creates a sense of cognitive dissonance that's hard to
| shake.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Another counterpoint, he's been a pretty pro-nuance voice for a
| long time, very un-Elon like. Eg I still frequently quote some
| of this thread to people:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1210242184341000192.html
|
| My favorite part:
|
| > I've never worked through a night. The only times I worked
| more than 40 hours in a week was when I had the burning desire
| to do so. I need 8ish hours of sleep a night. Same with
| everybody else, whether we admit it or not.
|
| > For creative work, you can't cheat. My believe is that there
| are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at
| Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company.
|
| Obviously, as I'm replying to someone with first-hand Shopify
| experience, which I don't have, take all this as you wish. I
| only know the Twitter Tobi. (and I think his "AI first" memo is
| ridiculous, to the point that I struggle to imagine that the
| same person wrote this twitter thread)
| hbsbsbsndk wrote:
| 2019 public-facing Tobi is probably the least insane version.
| He has gotten worse and more egocentric (and more explicitly
| right-wing) since then.
|
| Early (pre IPO) Shopify had a pretty toxic internal culture
| with a lot of drinking and sexual harassment. I was lucky to
| be there around the post-IPO, pre-pandemic era when there was
| a bit of structure and the techbros were getting reigned in a
| bit. Once the pandemic hit I think he just lost his mind.
| remich wrote:
| Feels like the "loses mind during COVID" is a common thread
| in the VC class. Wonder why.
| daveguy wrote:
| Because so many of them are spoiled brats that can't deal
| with even the thought of putting others before
| themselves? Just guessing. Effective Altruism is a hell
| of a drug.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Actually the investment banking industry seems to be doing this
| for ages.
|
| And if people think about it, it's actually not too different
| from Leetcoding.
| kunzhi wrote:
| I know some folks who work and have worked at Shopify and their
| experiences track with this statement.
|
| I was told that within Shopify there's something called a "Tobi
| Tornado" - basically when Tobi swoops in on a program / feature
| and demands significant change in short order. Carefully
| planned initiatives can be blown up and then it's maximum
| effort expected to turn it around.
|
| What everyone had in common was saying that Tobi is quite a
| smart person and often not wrong, but he's still human, and so
| there's simply no way he can make 100% good calls because he
| can't always have full context.
| rchaud wrote:
| The PC term for this is "founder mode".
| ryandrake wrote:
| I've heard it called "Seagull Management." A manager swoops
| in unannounced, shits all over and disrupts everything, and
| then swoops out while the rank and file have to deal with
| the mess.
| ohgr wrote:
| Got one of them. I ignore him most of the time. This has
| generated more ROI than his initiatives would have.
| Evidenced by the teams who do them generating a loss
| every fucking time.
|
| His nickname, which he wasn't worked out, is the first
| half of a sexual lubricant brand because he's such a
| wanker.
| mathgladiator wrote:
| And that is the rank and file's job. Chaos is important
| for breaking organizational bones.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| And there's the bootlicking take of the day.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Fwiw this is exactly what I'd expect a product founder to do.
| If I wanted to work at a bank I'd go work at a bank. It's so
| easy for groups to over-cover-their-asses, go for maximum
| safety everywhere, design-by-committee all the things, etc. I
| think this is almost unavoidable in a large org. It's the
| task of a decent product minded founder to add some balance
| to this.
|
| I've no idea whether Tobi gets it right, just.. this isn't
| necessarily a bad thing!
| ketzo wrote:
| I mostly agree that the benefit of a product-focused
| founder & CEO is the ability to make judgement calls, even
| corrections, and get things moving faster
|
| However, I think the more work you blow up when you do
| this, the more it's reflective of a poor management style;
| _even if_ it's the right call under the circumstances, that
| call should almost certainly have been made earlier.
|
| Of course we don't live in a perfect world, and if
| something's 75% done but really bad, you press the red
| button and stop it, even if people will be upset.
|
| But if you're consistently being described as a "tornado",
| that says to me you're not applying your founder judgement
| early enough in your company's development process.
| notfromhere wrote:
| Blowing things up like that is mostly for people who want
| to feel important. It's a bad leadership model and fairly
| disrespectful to your employees IMO
| jen729w wrote:
| Shopify store owner here. It's my entire income.
|
| This is terrifying.
|
| Shopify is _well_ past its _move fast..._ phase. It powers
| a vast percentage of ecommerce. If not in dollar
| percentage, certainly in human.
|
| Please, I beg you, pretend like you work at a bank.
| zachthewf wrote:
| There are certainly slow-moving ecommerce platforms that
| I'm sure would be happy to take your business. Yet
| Shopify has the best product. Why do you think that is?
| dismalaf wrote:
| Amazon and Ebay operate more like banks. Which is how
| Shopify carved out their market share. This is a fairly
| mature market. It's just that the incumbents aren't great
| because of how slow-moving they are...
|
| Shopify is good because of how they operate.
| jasondigitized wrote:
| This is also called "Swoop and Poop" or "Show up and Throw
| Up"
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Seagull management too.
|
| Fly in, make a ton of noise, shit on everything, fly away.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| What if he's right more than 50% of the time?
| senko wrote:
| He can be right 100% of the time, this is no way to run a
| company.
|
| You hire passionate people who pour their soul and
| overtime into a thing then you parachute in, override
| half their decisions, micromanage other half, then leave
| leaving them to live with the mess.
|
| After a few of these stunts, you end up with
| disillusioned, cynical, burnt out people who just don't
| care any more, and either quiet quit or leave for greener
| pastures, or the kind of folks who crack the game and
| fail upwards while caring nothing about the company and
| the products.
|
| And as soon as the word spreads out that this is your
| modus operandi, smart folks who have neen around the
| block a few times will avoid you like the plague.
|
| It _can_ work if you 're willing to churn people ( _khm_
| Elon), for some definition of "work".
| phillryu wrote:
| You could be right, but in the hypothetical world where
| he's 100% right, and the current path the project or
| feature is taking is heading towards a dead end or is
| broken in some way. I feel there is a real cost that can
| be more easily ignored, e.g. working on a dead end or
| slowly failing thing that isn't set on the right
| trajectory is ultimately demoralizing and ends up in
| hindsight having been an opportunity cost and waste of
| your time vs. working on something else. And conversely
| if he's right about something like this, there should be
| positive feedback when it is turned around and starts
| performing better for the team involved?
| senko wrote:
| Yeah I don't mean to say founders, CEOs, etc, should
| ignore problems when they see one (let's assume they
| correctly identify the problem, ie 100% right): quite the
| opposite!
|
| But there's a (slower, harder?) way to right the ship and
| make the team better, and (quicker, easier?) way to swoop
| in like a Marvel Avenger and break everything (and
| everyone) in the process.
|
| I feel Founder Mode should in theory be the former, but
| is in fact excuse for many to do the latter (I've no
| evidence for this, just what it looks like to me).
| phillryu wrote:
| Ah ok yeah I see where you're coming from there. It's
| kind of like the question of did Steve Jobs need to be an
| asshole to be as successful as he was. And it can be
| tempting to think that they are intrinsically linked, but
| I also like to believe there is a world where he grew
| more on the empathy side but was still able to lead Apple
| perhaps even better.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > (khm Elon), for some definition of "work".
|
| In that case the definition of "work" being "become the
| wealthiest person in the world".
| senko wrote:
| Bah, that's overrated, I'd be quite happy with just a few
| $B :D
| geodel wrote:
| Not good enough until I get to fire tens of thousands,
| turn their life upside down and gaslight them on their
| way out. And I am sad because these laid off people can
| 't even praise my genius while cleaning out their desk.
| So I am just leaving.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| Shrug? I disagree strongly. If he was 100% right I would
| just double the estimate of every project and build in
| the assumption of a pivot
| hbsbsbsndk wrote:
| There's a kind of survivorship bias to people saying "he's
| very smart". I was in a neglected part of the engineering org
| far away from his micromanaging. If he had been showing up
| and complaining about my projects I wouldn't have stayed for
| years.
| TZubiri wrote:
| This sounds like any normal privately owned company or
| hierarchical organization to be honest.
| tschellenbach wrote:
| When I watch Messi play I think his technique is sloppy to be
| honest.
| guywithahat wrote:
| Well having a fast reaction time is directly correlated with
| your IQ, and so you could make the argument that to be good
| (like professionally good) at video games means you're
| exceptionally intelligent. I certainly wouldn't list it in the
| list as you've described though.
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| That statement, " having a fast reaction time is directly
| correlated with your IQ", is fascinating.
|
| Care to share the evidence you'd use to back it up?
| guywithahat wrote:
| Yeah, the first (and most famous) studies were done by Ian
| Deary in the 80's and 90's, where he would have subjects
| perform simple tasks (such as checking how quickly you can
| cover a light with your finger), and he found a correlation
| with reaction time, which grew stronger as the task became
| more complex. There are more recent, higher quality
| studies, but Deary did a lot of the early work and is who
| I'm most familiar with since his work was mentioned in the
| bell curve. Should be enough info for you to google it
| grotted wrote:
| The Bell Curve has been widely debunked. A quick glance
| at the Wikipedia article gets you countless citations and
| counter arguments.
|
| For the lazy, here's a fun video summarizing them:
| https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo?feature=shared
| dismalaf wrote:
| Dunno, Shopify is the second largest Canadian corporation, in a
| country ruled by a bunch of monopolies enforced by the
| government. Only RBC, a 161 year old bank, is worth more.
|
| Tobi's doing something right.
| 85392_school wrote:
| The "skip the line" page:
| https://www.shopify.com/careers/extraordinary_0dac47b1-3275-...
| TZubiri wrote:
| The skip the line concept sounds interesting. I'm interviewing
| and some companies telling me they schedule an interview in 2
| weeks feels like a light rejection / recognition that the skill
| has abundant offer.
|
| It reminds me of the time I wanted to go out with a girl and
| she scheduled a date with me in 2 weeks, not a good outlook. I
| was happy to have a date so I just counted the days. When this
| happened with another girl I was less invested in, I told her
| to forget it, and she literally removed the guy she was seeing
| that week to go out with me.
|
| I think that when the queue is too long, the solution is to cut
| the line or find another one (or participate in a meat market
| as a commodity amongst 100 for a low probablity of advancing
| for a low salary)
| TZubiri wrote:
| It does say Top 100, and implies competitive gaming.
|
| You made it sounds stupid. But being Top 100 in something with
| a huge global competitive base is not of useless or easy.
|
| If you are offered a kid who spends 16 hrs per day competing
| and studying to be the best at something, and they can channel
| that energy at your company (with probably a shitty salary)
| wouldn't you take it?
| Kalabasa wrote:
| Shopify has an esports team called Shopify Rebellion
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I know this post is about tech, and obviously HN is a tech
| centered site, and most people here work in tech, but let me say:
|
| Outside of tech, AI has been phenomenally helpful. I know many
| tech folk are falling over themselves for non-tech industry
| problems that can be software-solved then leased out monthly, and
| there are tons of these problems out there, but very hard to
| locate and model if you are outside the industry.
|
| But with the current crop of LLMs, people who don't know how to
| program, but recognize that a program could do this task, finally
| can now summon that program to do the task. The path still has a
| tech-ability moat, but I can only imagine the AI titans racing to
| get programming ability into Supply Chain Technician Kim's hands.
| Think Steve Jobs designing an IDE for your mother to use.
|
| I believe it will be the CEO's of these non-tech companies that
| will be pushing "AI first" and having people come in to show non-
| techy non-tech workers how to leverage LLMs to automate tasks.
| You guys have to keep in mind that if you walk into most offices
| in most places of the world, most workers will say "What the hell
| is a macro? I just go down the list line by line..."
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| >> But with the current crop of LLMs, people who don't know how
| to program, but recognize that a program could do this task,
| finally can now summon that program to do the task. The path
| still has a tech-ability moat, but I can only imagine the AI
| titans racing to get programming ability into Supply Chain
| Technician Kim's hands. Think Steve Jobs designing an IDE for
| your mother to use
|
| Brooks has yet to be proven wrong; even if this appears to be
| the silver bullet it could be just as likely that this widens
| the tech moat when non-programmers paint themselves into
| corners where they can't do their jobs without all the brittle,
| impossible to maintain code they've written. Think of the
| skilled trades vacuum we have in much of the Western world. Can
| Supply Chain Technician Kim Jr do her job without AI if she's
| never seen that before?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I think the core disconnect is that the current tech paradigm
| is writing broad scope feature packed programs (and it kind
| of needs to be that way). One stop shops for every need that
| the broadest possible customer base could have, while
| minimizing time that needs to be spent on support.
|
| But I don't see that being the future. Instead I think people
| will just spin up bespoke ultra narrow scope programs (maybe
| scripts is more fitting here, but people like GUIs - scripts
| with GUIs?) that are generally under 3K LOC.
|
| You don't need an AI to one-shot Excel.exe if you just want a
| simple way to track how many plastic pellets came in today,
| and how many went out. A GUI on a simple program on an SQlite
| database will do that no problem. And you can ditch that
| bloated excel doc you have been using for years.
|
| At my own company we forwent a proprietary CAD package
| because Claude could decode the files we had, make a GUI for
| doing the transformation we needed to do, and properly
| reencode the file.
| remich wrote:
| Re your third paragraph - can they though? I'm not trying to be
| combative, it's just that what you wrote has been the promise
| of all no-code/low-code technologies for literal decades.
|
| The exclamation "finally, all of the back-office people can
| write their own software!" is just the other side of the
| "finally, we can get rid of all the software engineers!" coin.
|
| But, so far, every single other time this has been tried it
| runs into the ease-of-use / customizability problem. The easier
| a tool is to use/learn, the harder it is (or impossible) to use
| for specific use-cases. And, vice versa, the more flexible /
| customizable a tool is, the harder it is to use/learn (looking
| at you Jira).
|
| Maybe this time is actually different, but I'll believe it when
| I see it.
| ctkhn wrote:
| Yep - the easier it is to go way down a hole the harder it is
| to dig yourself out.
| hyfgfh wrote:
| > The return to office fad was a big part of this effort, often
| largely motivated by reacting to the show of worker power in the
| racial justice activism efforts of 2020.
|
| Not against this point, but I don't get it, maybe because I don't
| live in the US, but I see as another way to "soft-fire" people,
| as is this AI crazy What I'm missing?
| Illniyar wrote:
| "An average LLM won't even know that Drake's favorite MIME type
| is application/pdf"
|
| Is this seeding for future AI models? If I ask chatGPT a year
| from now what is drake's favorite Mime type would it confidently
| say "application/PDF"
| eat wrote:
| You can see this on perplexity now ;)
| minimaxir wrote:
| I tried that prompt against Google Gemini 2.5 Pro which has a
| cutoff date of January 2025 (enough to have knowledge of the
| Kendrick feud/the pdf jokes) but it couldn't do it, but was
| self-aware enough to know that the question was absurd and had
| an unexpected answer.
|
| > Joke/Wordplay: Is there a pun or play on words involving
| "Drake" and a MIME type?
|
| > Trick question/Testing the AI: The user might be testing if
| the AI will invent an answer, hallucinate, or recognize the
| absurdity.
| 85392_school wrote:
| It's just a joke about AI not getting a joke (that's really
| just self-censoring).
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| AI-first is the new blockchain, trying to fit a solution to a
| non-existent problem, that's it.
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| disagree - it shows some - maybe significant - value, which
| makes it far more dangerous in this AI-everything echo chamber.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| I didn't say AI, or even more specifically GenAI is the same
| as blockchain. I said " AI-first" is.
| resolutefunctor wrote:
| > stating plainly that he doesn't see AI replacing his employees.
| (Though that does immediately raise the "who brought that up?"
| question...)
|
| Almost everyone who isn't highly informed in this field is
| worried about this. This is a completely reasonable thing to
| include in a memo about "forced" adoption of AI. Because
| excluding it induces panic in the workforce.
|
| It is funny that this post calls out groupthink, while failing to
| acknowledge that they're falling into the groupthink of "CEO
| dumb" and "AI bad"
|
| Forced AI adoption is nothing more than a strategy, a gamble, etc
| from company leadership. It may work out great, it may not, and
| anyone stating with conviction one way or another is lying to
| themselves and everyone they're shouting to. It is no different
| than companies going "internet-first" years ago. Doesn't have to
| mean that the people making the decision are "performing" for
| each other or that they are fascists, my god.
|
| Imo its a great way of allowing high performers to create even
| more impact. A great developer typing syntax isn't valuable.
| Their ability to engineer solutions to challenges and problems
| is. Scaling that out to an entire company that believes in their
| people is no different, less time spent on the time-consuming
| functions of a job that are low-value in isolation, and more time
| spent on high-value functions of a job.
|
| The Twitter/Reddit-style "snark-for-clicks" approach is
| disappointing to see so high on a site like this that is largely
| comprised of intelligent and thoughtful people.
| dorian-graph wrote:
| > .. and "AI bad"
|
| He's not saying that though, is he?
|
| He's quite literally said that people have found AI useful, and
| that's great! For example:
|
| > We don't actually have to follow along with the narratives
| that tech tycoons make up for each other. We choose the tools
| that we use, based on the utility that they have for us. It's
| strange to have to say it, but... there are people picking up
| and adopting AI tools on their own, because they find them
| useful.
|
| And:
|
| > The strangest part is, the AI pushers don't have to lie about
| what AI can do! If, as they say, AI tools are going to get
| better quickly, then let them do so and trust that smart people
| will pick them up and use them. If you think your workers and
| colleagues are too stupid to recognize good tools that will
| help them do their jobs better, then ..
|
| Anyway, how many layers of accused irony and snark can we go
| down? Am I the next?
| resolutefunctor wrote:
| I was keying in on the line:
|
| > This is an important illustration: AI is really good for
| helping you if you're bad at something, or at least below
| average. But it's probably not the right tool if you're great
| at something.
|
| Considering the authors complaint is having professionals
| (who would in theory be good at their job because they are
| professionals) use AI puts that in the "not the right tool."
|
| But I probably did stretch a bit there, and appreciate you
| calling it out.
| anildash wrote:
| Yeah, and to be clear, the context that I assumed most
| readers would have (on my site, where I think they'd know a
| bit about me, as opposed to here on HN) is that I'm a
| former CEO. So my disdain for CEO stupidity is higher, and
| my tendency to be critical is much stronger, because of
| that perspective.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Making sure everyone is using LLMs is smart. It's a
| transformative technology and some people are just slow to adopt.
| Org wide process improvements often need mandates or they won't
| happen.
|
| No different than using version control etc. There were and are
| engineers who would rather just rsync without having to do the
| bookkeeping paperwork of `git commit` but you mandate it
| nonetheless.
| Devasta wrote:
| With AI, all we will need is staff to write down a few paragraphs
| of their needs and constraints and the computer will be able to
| deliver the desired outcomes.
|
| Also, despite the fact that we were all working remotely for
| years, we need you all to come into the office because water
| cooler chats are far better than writing down a few paragraphs
| outlining what you need and the constraints.
| hosh wrote:
| The company I work for is getting bought out by another company.
| That acquiring company built their whole business and product on
| "people-first". They are making a lot of profit in an industry
| (real estate) that has been contracting. I don't know what their
| AI plans are, only that they have them, and I would not be
| surprised if they are building "people-first" AI into their
| products.
|
| I guess people, not things, creates value.
| zkmon wrote:
| Not surprising. We have seen online-first, mobile-first, cloud-
| first and now AI-first. Oh, and I remember someone talking about
| customer-first as well.
| Lammy wrote:
| > This is unusual -- did your boss ever have to send you a memo
| demanding that you use a smartphone?
|
| They did for Android testing actually. The biggest status symbol
| within the company was based around who got the latest iPhone
| model first, who was important enough to get a prioritized and
| yearly upgrade, and who was stuck with their older models for
| another year. This was back in the iPhone 3GS/4/4S/5 era. I took
| advantage of this by getting them to special-order me expensive
| niche Androids, because it was the only way they could get any
| employee to use one lol
| hintymad wrote:
| I have a more charitable view on the "AI-first" movement. When
| you're a CEO, the last thing you want is for your company to miss
| a major tech shift. We've seen this story play out repeatedly -
| companies that didn't adapt to Windows, to internet, or to
| mobile, ended up struggling or dying.
|
| The tricky part is that you can't just think or talk your way
| into a new paradigm - the entire company has to act. After all,
| good ideas and breakthroughs often come from individuals in the
| trenches instead of from executives. This means exploring new
| possibilities, running experiments, and constantly iterating
| based on what you learn. But the reality is that most people
| naturally resist change. They get comfortable with how things
| work today. In many companies, you're lucky if employees don't
| actively fight against new approaches.
|
| This is why CEOs sometimes need to declare company-wide mandate.
| Microsoft did this in the mid-90s with their famous "Internet
| Tidal Wave" pivot when Bill Gates sent that memo redirecting the
| entire company. Intel forced its "right-hand turn" when CPU
| business was still nascent.
|
| Without these top-down pushes, organizations tend to keep doing
| what they've always done. Or to say the least, such top-down
| mandate at least sends a clear message to the entire company,
| potentially triggering a cultural shift. The "AI-first" thing may
| well be overhyped, but it's probably just leaders trying to make
| sure their companies don't get left behind in what looks like a
| significant shift. Even if the mandate fails, at least the
| company can learn something valuable. Note I'm talking about
| directions. The mandate can fail badly due to poor execution, but
| that's a different topic.
| remich wrote:
| Yeah but there's a significant difference in the leader of a
| company shifting the goals, product, or market of a company in
| a top-down way and a leader attempting to shift the
| implementation details of goals in a top-down way. The former
| is the entire job of a CEO, the latter is micro-managing of the
| first order.
| oddthink wrote:
| Yes, but the message from Shopify leadership is "it's part of
| your job to mess around with this stuff and see what works".
| Not "use AI at all costs".
|
| The general feeling I'm getting is that using this AI stuff
| is important, but it's a learned skill, and we want as many
| people as possible to get familiar enough with it to have
| actual opinions.
|
| I find that pretty unobjectionable.
| remich wrote:
| That's one reading, and if that happens to be the correct
| reading then I agree it's unobjectionable. To me, though,
| making it part of a performance review process makes it
| closer to the "use AI at all costs" requirement than a
| request for devs to mess around with new technologies.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| Anil is a smart guy so if this is his best set of arguments then
| I'm afraid Tobi is right.
|
| Every advancement in tech I've used in my lifetime was at first
| deployed top-down
|
| Smartphone (blackberries), Personal computers, Version control
| (CVS), PowerPoint
|
| The personal adoption FOLLOWED
| guywithahat wrote:
| I feel like they're pretty conjoined. If you're working from
| home, why can't an AI just replace you? AI is great at performing
| narrow jobs, if you're a part of the company you're needed to
| build relationships and help grow the company in creative
| meaningful ways that can't be done remotely. The author seems to
| have a pretty pessimistic view of everything
| remich wrote:
| Pretty wild to claim that remote employees can't build
| relationships or help grow companies in creative or meaningful
| ways.
| quantadev wrote:
| AI use is definitely a two edged sword. It can help us seasoned
| developers be much more productive, because we've seen all the
| anti-patterns, bad ideas, tarpits, and most "classes" of bad
| ideas and bad code that you can imagine; so when we get AI to
| generate code, we older developers can look at it, and in an
| instant know if it's good or bad code, most of the time.
|
| However, for the more Junior Devs (i.e. under 10 to 15 yrs
| experience), their judgement about Generated Code is often simply
| "Does it appear to work or not." and that's a very big problem,
| and a very dangerous problem, that will cause lower quality code
| to creep in and in a way where AI may allow them to crank out
| tons of work, but all of it super buggy code. And most everyone
| would agree we'd rather have simpler, less feature rich products
| that are solid and reliable, rather than products that are loaded
| with both features _and_ bugs.
|
| So to all you seasoned developers out there, who have trouble
| getting hired, since you're over 40, your value as an employee
| has just quadrupled, compared to the less-experienced. The big
| question is, of course, how long will it take the 20ish to 30ish
| hiring managers to realize that, and start valuing experience and
| wisdom over youthfulness and good looks.
| stpedgwdgfhgdd wrote:
| "This is unusual -- did your boss ever have to send you a memo
| demanding that you use a smartphone?"
|
| AI has the promise to optimize worker's efficiency x-fold. This
| promise was not the case with smartphones, slack, etc.
|
| And AI will change everyone's work in years to come, especially
| for developers.
| carterschonwald wrote:
| I like the zingers: This would not get you invited to the fascist
| VC group chat, tho!
| akomtu wrote:
| It's the old trick when the company hires cheap labor offshore
| and makes employees train their replacement. Except that today
| the cheap labor is AI that lives on a remote land called data
| centers, but unlike employees, AI works for food and has no
| ethics.
| jmtulloss wrote:
| > AI is really good for helping you if you're bad at something,
| or at least below average. But it's probably not the right tool
| if you're great at something.
|
| This shows the author's lack of experience in working with AI on
| something they're great at.
|
| AI is great for experts (all the productivity gains, no tolerance
| for the bullshit)
|
| AI is great for newbies (you can do the thing!!)
|
| A more interesting take would be on the struggle to go from
| newbie to expert in a field dominated by AI. We're too early to
| know how to do this.
|
| Of course AI-first is the future. We're just still learning how
| to do it right.
| dullcrisp wrote:
| I think if you're such an expert at something that you need AI
| to do it for you then that's a good opportunity to hand it off
| to someone more junior.
| jmtulloss wrote:
| It's probably not productive for a human to do work that AI
| can do well. Of course the trick is figuring out how to
| identify and verify that work. Experts can do this quickly.
| postalrat wrote:
| AI-first is the evolution of WFH.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-04-30 23:01 UTC)