[codyvoda]

why does every engineer keep talking about it like it’s more than marketing hype? why do you actually accept this is a real narrative real people believe? have you talked to the executives implementing these strategies?

redbull does not give you wings. it’s disconcerting to see the lack of nuance in these discussions around these new tools (and yeah sorry this isn’t really aimed at you, but the zeitgeist, apologies)

[skwee357]

Because this “marketing hype” is affecting the way we do our job.

Some of us are being laid off due to the hype; some are assigned to babysit the AI; and some are simply looked down on by higher ups who are eagerly waiting for a day to lay us all off.

You can convince yourself as much as you want that it’s “just a hype”, but regardless of your beliefs are, it has REAL world consequences.

[codyvoda]

because we react like this

engineers are testing promising new technology. a mob (of probably half or more bots) is having a [redacted] perpetuating the anti-narrative they huffed themselves up into believing. and now we’re in a meta-[redacted] as if either A) redditors and armchair engineers here have valid opinions on this tech and B) marketers and founders with massive incentives to overpromise are telling a true narrative

why? we don’t have to do it. we could actually look at these topics with nuance and not react like literal bots to everything

(sorry I’m just losing my faith in humanity and taking it out in this thread)

[rco8786]

> why does every engineer keep talking about it like it’s more than marketing hype?

because it is more than marketing hype. real people are taking real action based on this narrative.

> why do you actually accept this is a real narrative real people believe?

largely because I witness real people believing this narrative with my own eyes on a daily basis.

[Twirrim]

> why do you actually accept this is a real narrative real people believe?

Because we're literally seeing people being laid off with narratives about being replaced with AI (At a whole slew of companies). Because we're seeing company policies around hiring being changed to require hiring managers to provide exhaustive justifications why the work couldn't be handled by an AI (at e.g. Shopify, Salesforce and so on)

> have you talked to the executives implementing these strategies?

I have had a few conversations, yes. Have you? They're weirdly "true believers" that are buying the marketing hype hook line and sinker. They're doing small coding exercises themselves in these tools, seeing that they as an executive can manage to get valid code for the small exercise out the other side of it, and assuming that that means it can replace head count. Either deliberately or naively failing to understand that there is a world of difference between leet code style exercises, or quick small changes to code bases, and actual software development.

The weirdest conversation recently, which thankfully I got to just be on the periphery of, involved an engineering org that decided to try to replace the post-incident process with one entirely written by LLMs. It would take timelines from a ticket, and a small prompt to write up the entire post-incident report, tasks etc.

The whole project showed a gross misunderstanding of the point of post-incident stuff, eradicating "introspection" and "learning from your mistakes", turning it into a check box exercise for teams. Even their narrative around what they were doing was hilarious, because it came down to "Get the post-incident report out of the way so we can concentrate on the real work".

[einsteinx2]

> Either deliberately or naively failing to understand that there is a world of difference between leet code style exercises, or quick small changes to code bases, and actual software development.

Given how often leet code questions are used in the interview process across the entire industry I think it’s a fair assumption that they fail to understand this.