[ko_pivot]

I think the main issue here is brand and growth. AWS needs to convince CIOs/CEOs to use them over Azure/GCP, not engineers. And even if AWS cared about convincing engineers, we already prefer AWS so introducing new services for container orchestration wouldn’t move the needle. What does move the needle is being perceived by enterprise leadership teams as just as cutting edge as the competitors. “Generative AI” is the only signal those teams understand these days.

[8organicbits]

It's strange because as a senior engineer I'm telling everyone that genAI is not ready, has glaring quality, safety, and security issues, is underpriced by VCs planning to crank prices later, and even if the magic was real offers less promise than tried and true conventional solutions we haven't tried yet.

AWS should be spending significant time explaining how their giant portfolio of conventional tools are improving. If they have stopped, they've lost focus. But hopefully it's just the marketing team focused on magic beans.

[Aeolun]

> I'm telling everyone that genAI is not ready, has glaring quality, safety, and security issues

The problem being that nobody listens of course. You still have to build heaps of genAI crud because leadership is so excited about it.

Then you end up building a free text box to automatically determine one of 4 different problems the customer can have, and scratch your head wondering why we don’t just provide 4 options instead of letting the customer write a whole story...

[roncesvalles]

>AWS should be spending significant time explaining how their giant portfolio of conventional tools are improving.

See but that won't work because leaders are dumb. The central tension of civilization is that the smart ones are needed down in the boiler/operating room to solve complex low-level problems, and whoever's left must steer the ship.

[Aeolun]

It’d be nice to think of it like that, but I think the leaders just have completely different incentives.

It doesn’t cost them anything to re-route resources from the keep the lights on work, and has a potentially massive career impact if they’re the first ones to do something sensible with genAI.

Even if most of the work fails it’s still worth it. It’s to their benefit to hype AI beyond all reason because it justifies the resources they spend on it.

[roncesvalles]

Then again, you'd think leadership is something more than just responding in an uncritical straight line to hype and incentives.

[CapeTheory]

Never thought of it in those terms, but I'm afraid you've nailed it.

We're really fucked, aren't we?

[layer8]

If this is true, software engineering leadership is highly dysfunctional, and that should be an issue of major concern.

[marcosdumay]

Welcome to some professional circle somewhere on the world at the 21th century.