[mulmboy]

> After 20 years in tech, I can't think of a single company I've worked for/with that would fit the profile of an "intelligent" company. All of them make poor and irrational decisions regularly. I think you over-estimate the intelligence of leadership whilst simultaneously under-estimating their greed and eventual ability to self-destruct.

Says nothing about companies and everything about you

> you also over-estimate the desire for developers to increase their productivity with AI. I use AI to reduce complexity and give me more breathing room, not to increase my output.

I'm the same. But I expect that once many begin to do this, there will be some who do use it for productivity and they will set the bar. Then people like you and I will either use it for productivity or fall behind.

[darkhorse222]

How old are you? All it takes is one bad experience to show you the emperor has no clothes. Corporations, executives, and middle managers are almost by definition self interested and short sighted.

Just look at the over hiring during covid and the methods used to cull that workforce after they realized their mistake. Back handed and inhumane. Executives are more followers than a junior dev is. They just have a lot more terminology to obscure that fact. But they are basically professional bullshitters, like consultant firms.

This is excluding executives with vision. But the market and corporate structure bias towards eliminating those leaders as they are not consistently profitable over every month.

[mulmboy]

what you're saying is orthogonal to the post I was replying to, and to my reply.

self interested and short sighted says nothing about intelligence, irrationality, or poor decision making. Back handed and inhumane covid hiring and firing is probably not a mistake from their perspective. professional bullshitting is a form of intelligence (I hate it too, I've been done in by it, but I respect it)

[johnnyanmac]

I'm happy you've only worked for altruistic, not-for-profit minded companies that care about employee growth and takes pride in their tach stack above all else. I have not had as fortunate an experience.

>I expect that once many begin to do this, there will be some who do use it for productivity and they will set the bar.

Yeah, probably. I've had companies so pinpointed on "velocoity" instead of quality. I imagine they will definitely try to expect triple the velocity just because one person "gets so much done". Not realizing how much of that illusion is correcting the submissions.

[mulmboy]

> I'm happy you've only worked for altruistic, not-for-profit minded companies that care about employee growth and takes pride in their tach stack above all else. I have not had as fortunate an experience.

No one is making this claim.

My comment was a bit terse and provocative, rude, deserves the downvotes tbh. I'll take them.

To elaborate ~ I've got a lot of empathy for the poster I was originally replying to. I've fallen into that way of thinking before, and it sure is comfortable. Of course, companies and their leadership make poor and irrational decisions. Often, however, it's easy to perceive their decisions as poor and irrational when you simply don't have the context they do. "Why would they x ?? if only y!!" but, you know, there may well be a good reason why that you aren't aware of, they may have different goals to you (which may well be selfish! and that doesn't make them irrational or anything). Feels similar to programmers hating when people say "can't you 'just' x" - well yes, but actually there's a mountain of additional considerations behind the scene that the person spouting "just" hasn't considered.

Is leadership unintelligent, or displaying poor/irrational decision making, if the company self destructs? Perhaps. But quite possibly not. They probably got a whole lot out of it. Different priorities.

Consider that leadership may label a developer unintelligent if that dev doesn't always consider how to drive shareholder value "gee they're so focused on increasing their salary not on business value". Well actually the dev is quite smart, from their own perspective. Same thing.

And if every company you've ever worked for truly has poor leadership then, yeah, it's probably worth reassessing how you interview. Do you need to dig deeper into the business? Do you just not have the market value to negotiate landing a job at a company with intelligent leadership?

So, two broad perspectives: either the poster has a challenge with perception, or they are poor at picking companies. Or perhaps the companies truly do have poor leadership but I think that unlikely. Hence it comes back to the individual.

@y-c-o-m-b sorry for being a bit rude.

Cheers for reading

[johnnyanmac]

That's fair enough. But I don't think companies are irrational outright. I just know their rational, potentially selfish actions are orthogonal to my rational and selfish goals.So you almost have to stay scrutinous if you want to keep your goals aligned.

>And if every company you've ever worked for truly has poor leadership then, yeah, it's probably worth reassessing how you interview.

No need. I work in games. There isn't a major studio in the industry that isn't like this. An industry used to churning workers and releasing them the moment the project ends.

In some ways it's a path I chose, but at the same time it means I need to be more cynical to defend myself from their inevitably orthogonal actions. I have an exit plan, but I need more time and money first.

If the industry wasnt so secretive with its techniques and knowledge, maybe I could have side stepped it altogether. But alas.

[y-c-o-m-b]

You say sorry, but it doesn't really come off very apologetic to be honest. Your initial reaction is very suspicious in itself. Why so emotional over what I said? You also presume a lot about me and my career choices and your assertions also teeter on some strong emotions, very odd. What's your personal stake in this that's got you so amped? A hidden insecurity perhaps? Clearly I hit a nerve here.

I've worked in big tech for a combined total of 6 years. Several of the other companies are Fortune 500 members. I've also worked at mid-size and small companies across mortgage, healthcare, fin-tech, point of sale, HR/payroll, and more. I surmise that you would categorize most of these as "intelligent" companies, which negates your argument about this being a "me" problem. Let's take Intel - where I worked for 3 years - as an example. Some would consider this an "intelligent company". I was there when Brian Krzanich took over for Paul Otellini. I think you will have a very easy time finding huge swaths of people/employees that consider Krzanich's leadership decisions to be very poor. In fact over the last few months, you'll find threads here on HN that directly pin the decline of Intel on his decision making.

We can argue the semantics of "intelligent" all day and make excuses for why leaders make irrational choices, but my point still stands. I don't think this is a "me" problem for one simple reason: If you take me out of the equation, the issue still exists.