[symfoniq]

There is a complete lack of courage in the leadership of tech companies today, and top-down AI mandates are just another manifestation.

True visionaries think outside the box, but most tech executives are forcing their employees into black boxes, out of fear of not doing exactly what their competitors are doing.

We have lemmings for leaders, and that means that—much like the LLMs that are being shoehorned into everything—there isn’t room for original thinking. Everyone’s strategy looks exactly the same.

[CharlieDigital]

I'm going to offer a contrarian view here:

First is that despite a lot of waste, some innovation will arise from an enterprising employee finding some interesting use case. A lot of the tokenmaxxing is just waste, but out of that waste may arise a small number of genuinely powerful use cases.

Second is that many workers will be entrenched in their ways. If your executive goal is to achieve the above (find innovative ways of using AI), then you need to move everyone to use it. Most will just waste tokens, but someone may find a novel and useful way of using it that benefits the organization. It is difficult to achieve these without forcing people to act since their default is to follow the well-worn grooves.

So mandates like these are a top-down forcing function like a slime mold feeling out different paths to find resources.

Some devs in my org have fully embraced AI; some would not even use AI if not for leadership mandates and linking usage to performance reviews (I know, I think this is stupid, too). I can see why mandates could be useful since some folks definitely won't be inclined to use AI.

[KaiserPro]

> but out of that waste may arise a small number of genuinely powerful use cases.

Imagine you employ me as a hotel manager, and I come to you and say: "sure I spent all our food budget internationally in three months, and sure I have nothing really to show for it, but for those three months, we had a lot of food fights"

Your manager then goes on to explain they not only need more money to cover the food budget, but also they need to quituple the cleaning budget too.

Oh and the service level has dropped, because not all clients liked being in the middle of a food fight.

However "we might have some innovation in the food delivery system of our hotel chain"

[CharlieDigital]

    > we might have some innovation in the food delivery system of our hotel chain

This is really relative to the size of that innovation, isn't it?

    > Imagine you employ me as a hotel manager, and I come to you and say: "sure I spent all our food budget internationally in three months, and sure I have nothing really to show for it, but for those three months, we had a lot of food fights"

This is exactly how startups and VC funding works, isn't it? You have an idea, give you cash to burn to prove the idea and business model. Many teams and ideas fail. But some small number of unicorns produce outsized returns to keep the whole thing going.

[TheOtherHobbes]

It's how it does work, often.

It's not how it should work, because food fights are stupid and have no upside.

Even if everyone else is having them.

It's not a fair analogy because AI isn't completely stupid, and there are situations where it does provide a benefit.

But a rational business would ask if the upside is worth the cost, if the pipeline can be restructured to concentrate and amplify the benefits, if some elements are better being done the old way, if there are strategic threats if tokens become much more expensive, and so on.

Instead we're getting a wave of "Cut workers, cut costs, derp" and that's as far as the "thinking" goes.

The worst thing about AI is that it shows how shallow and stupid current C-suites are.

The US used to have real tech visionaries. Now it has tech cargo cultists, all chasing an IPO cash out and hoping the music doesn't stop before they get their bag.

[HDThoreaun]

Imagine you employ me as a hotel manager, and I come to you and say: "sure I spent all our food budget internationally in three months, but we invented this new dish and now our restaurant is the hottest in town. Sure 95% of the food was wasted but now we can stop the waste and keep the popular dish."

[KaiserPro]

Ok, but was that your intention in the first place? or was it to have food fights.

Thats the problem here. The idea is that we can build more stuff, quickly.

However in uber's case, they just burnt loads of money to push a metric that wasn't really related to productivity.

[HDThoreaun]

The intention was to force everyone to experiment with the new ingredient monsanto recently GMO'd. Of course a lot of our employees suck, so food fights were expected, but luckily some of the employees created something great.

[throwaw12]

> some innovation will arise

Absolutely, but most management are not leaders, the moment someone pushes the idea to stack rank based on token usage, it gets approved and some genuine people will be impacted.

Post-ZIRP era proved there are very few strong leaders, before that everyone was behaving like they're most amazing leader because they read some books and raised $10M

[comfysocks]

Sure, indiscriminate tokenmaxxing is a gamble that can pay off sometimes. However, I think that the decision to take any gamble should be made by someone who will bear responsibility for the downside as well as the upside. I would prefer to search for new usages in a more strategic way. I agree that experimentation is a great way to learn if done intelligently and with limits. Full “Monte Carlo” makes sense when ops are cheap enough. It seems some orgs don’t think tokens are cheap enough yet.

[CharlieDigital]

    >  I would prefer to search for new usages in a more strategic way

I think this is very, very hard for orgs to do.

Looking back at the Internet, who would have thought that it would eventually create a Netflix, Amazon, Shopify, Spotify, Google Maps, etc. Just wild the things that ended up coming out of pushing bits over a wire with few simple protocols.

In an ideal world, you make strategic bets, but I can also see the case for the opposite this early in the lifecycle of a technology. You just don't know until you try.

Mid/late 2023, it wasn't at all obvious that it would take over coding that fast.

[queenkjuul]

People talked about streaming years before Netflix. Online maps apps date back to the 1990s. E-commerce as well.

I definitely get the impression that many people thought it would eventually create shopping, streaming, and mapping sites.

I think people were less likely to have predicted things like social media or YouTube, though those weren't ideas sprung from a vacuum either.

[CharlieDigital]

If it were that simple and obvious, Blockbuster would have beat everyone to streaming. Sears would have digitized their catalog and used their vast brick-and-mortar stores as fulfillment centers for same-day shipping.

None of these shifts were obviously the right bet and many organizations lost because they missed the opportunity. Now orgs are on the same horizon and I can see why they don't want to miss this window.

[mgh95]

Blockbuster actually did try to beat everyone to streaming. Notably, Blockbuster and Enron [1] entered into a 20-year partnership for online video delivery.

Sears was a different story, in that they were a real estate company with a store front and retail real estate took a nosedive due to ecommerce. But that's a different discussion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal

[vasco]

> A lot of the tokenmaxxing is just waste, but out of that waste may arise a small number of genuinely powerful use cases

A lot of monkeys will also eventually type up Shakespeare?

[satvikpendem]

Indeed, but that's not a bad thing. If monkeys can produce the next Shakespeare, that will be wildly popular and profitable for the company that did it, justifying the initial waste, just as VC does with companies as a whole.

[discreteevent]

> Some devs in my org have fully embraced AI; some would not even use AI

So if the people who embrace AI areore successful then the others will follow. Just like every other new tech. Why does AI have to be forced? What's the hurry? Especially when there's no clear example of a company jumping ahead because of their use of it.

It's idiots being driven by FUD. That's the reason.

[CharlieDigital]

    > What's the hurry?

There are definitely key windows here for innovation driven by competition.

There's also a need to quickly adopt and understand the technology; take the Internet for example. If we were talking about the Internet, forcing teams to build and publish web pages would be one valid way to get teams comfortable with the tech, the workflow, the shift in how to propagate and convey information to an audience.

Without a mandate, many teams won't adopt the Internet as a medium of information exchange because their processes work just fine and have worked for the last 20 years.

I think it's fair to put AI in a similar light. Unless teams adopt it and use it, it's hard for an org to understand how to get value out of this technology and how it affects existing processes and assumptions.

[smoofles]

> There are definitely key windows here for innovation driven by competition.

Those were always there, and will always be there. The type of time frames people are getting anxious about now rarely work in the real world, though, where potential customers don’t just switch products/service provides unless they’re facing catastrophic outcomes if they don’t.

And AI is not making the difference there that people think. I worked on a product that entered the market as a newcomer, wooed plenty of customers, and even though everyone _wanted_ it, only customers _urgently_ looking for a solution got on board quick (within <6 months).

Ironically enough, the product pivoting to Agentic AI hard killed a ton of momentum and interest from customers, despite exciting investors.

[discreteevent]

I was programming desktop applications when the web came along. I don't remember anyone ever saying they had been mandated to program for it.

The web took off all by itself because it had a clear value proposition for some use cases.

[CharlieDigital]

    > The web took off all by itself because it had a clear value proposition for some use cases.

Many enterprises became legacy because of the web, many enterprises failed because they didn't understand the impact of the tech.

Sears was the OG Amazon. Imagine if Sears had seen it as the new digital catalog.

Blockbuster missed on streaming until it was too late.

Many, many legacy companies did not understand the web and did not understand the impact of the Internet to their business model.

[queenkjuul]

And you think forcing blockbuster's software teams to use the Web would have changed that? You don't think they were using the web for all their corporate communications systems? I very much think they were, and getting blindsided by streaming had probably nothing to do with blockbuster's existing engineering teams not understanding the Internet. Their product teams didn't understand it, but they wouldn't be the ones being "forced to write webpages" either

[watwut]

I genuinely think you don't actually know the history and timeline of companies you talk about. Mostly because it did not happened how you imagine, in the quick timeline you imagine nor even for reasons you imagine.

And even more importantly, the companies who went all in early and spent too much money on it too early without good reason went boom. You had to have actual business reason for it to be success.

[queenkjuul]

Seriously. No mandates at my company. In 2023 and 2024 i had access to Claude, but frankly it wasn't until 2025 that i found the models useful enough, now i use them every day. Nobody forced me. Had they forced me, I'd probably have quit. Once the tools were sufficiently mature and verifiably helpful, people like me all over the company naturally picked up the tools too.

[duxup]

There was an amusing post about judging developers based on token usage where some user on HN here was pushing this idea “ICs don’t like it but this is the best way to evaluate” (something like that).

They have a whole management team and can’t seem to find a way to judge or god forbid encourage developers…

[eudamoniac]

I don't get why it's so hard for management to see the good devs. All the devs know who are the good devs.

[duxup]

And they know things like “Dude isn’t a high performer metrics wise but his work is solid.” Arguably some of the most difficult things to know from a management perspective.

[throwaw12]

Problem is in management, management usually comes up non-sense metric when they themselves lack of good metric.

For example, everyone talks about strategy, but when you ask them what's our strategy answer is usually something like:

* let's figure out together

* industry changing is so fast, we should revisit plans every quarter

...

[steveBK123]

Because the higher up you go in management, the more "strategy" is a Plato's Cave like interpretation of what better/bigger/whatever competitors are doing.

[doublerabbit]

Ha. Exactly at my current contract job.

"Welcome to the new contractor who will be the artitect our new infrastructure. What is your dream IT setup?"

"Yeah, we can't afford that. Lets revisit once you wrangle those 2003 Dell R620's running Windows 2008 with no patching."

And that is why after eight months i'm terminating my contract on Friday and swimming back to shore.

[AdrianB1]

Lacking not just courage, but also character. Wasting company money on buzzwords and dubious outcomes is lack of character.

[overfeed]

> Everyone’s strategy looks exactly the same.

If one is a CxO who's looking out for one's job security, herd-like behavior is the safest option, due to the (near universal) structure of "performance"-based executive remuneration.

[justinparus]

Is keeping your company private the easiest way to get around this?

[brikil]

It should not be overlooked that a lot of this fervor is from investors/board members putting pressure on these companies.

[2dda]

"True visionaries think outside the box,"

I mean that's more of an ex-post statement.

Ex-ante they look at things as objects and visualise/simulate what one ought to do independently, as opposed to being a lemming.

[smoofles]

Yeah courage will get you fired. Whether it be about idiot product decisions, or about how your bosses treat your coworkers. That’s the consequence of letting sociopaths get in charge.