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by ryandvm 28 days ago
Tech company leadership gleefully replacing engineers with AI is going to be an incredibly short-lived era. I'll admit I was a little shocked at just how susceptible software engineering was to the brute force of LLMs, but man, wait until they find out just how easy it is for an LLM to do their jobs.

This isn't stopping until it gets all the way up to the asset holders.
2 comments
postexitus 28 days ago
They are not replacing anybody with AI. Meta has been a bloated hell hole for a very long time now (maybe 10+ years). Nothing, literally nothing beyond Ads and AdTech makes a dent in their earnings. The complaints here - it's not only the "recently toxic environment"; I remember a conversation I had with a Meta SWE in 2019; he said "If I stop doing anything right now, my manager would not realize for at least 6 months - the stuff I am working on is that unimportant". It's not hard to see how people will get disillusioned so quickly when the job itself is this meaningless.
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bradlys 28 days ago
This is large ymmv. Most people would get fired for not shipping stuff regularly. Just because some engineers at a big company are able to skirt by without shipping doesn’t mean that’s the norm.

The company has tens of thousands of people. There will be some variation but a lot of orgs are quite ruthless with their metrics.

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postexitus 28 days ago
Agreed - also things have changed a lot since 2019. Having said that, even people who ship and are rewarded for it do work on stuff that has very little impact on the bottom line. Except ads.
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CodingJeebus 28 days ago
A big part of successful LLM-driven dev is caring about the quality of the output, and it's so easy to ship slop and not care in a low-morale environment.

I think execs are vastly underestimating the damage an apathetic engineering org armed with AI can do to their platform. The short-termism can (and I think will) come back around when they foster an angry culture with a huge token budget.

It reminds me of Woodstock '99, when in order to keep an angry, hungry and drunk crowd under control, the organizers planned a candlelight vigil for Columbine and gave the crowd real candles. That went over about as well as one might guess.

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