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by thesamethrowawa 30 days ago
Early, very early, in my career unit testing was becoming a thing. A few middle managers (non technical) read some articles and decided this was going to fix all the quality problems with the product so decided to enforce it from the top down, even to the point of requiring developers to present their planned unit tests to management before starting on new features! It was completely absurd, but I was too junior to really understand and articulate why.

I'm lucky enough to be in a great company right now, so I decide when I think AI will help me and use it accordingly - but reading about forced AI adoption reminds me so, so much of that earlier time. Non-technical people who don't trust their engineers to use the tools in the way they see best - in their ignorance, and ego, they think the answer is obvious if only those strong headed tech weirdos would listen.

And amongst all this, there is a class of manager and executive that I'm convinced utterly despise engineers. They hate the fact they focus on details, analyse, make predictions grounded in reality. On a personal level, they can't comprehend that some people take deep satisfaction and contentment from building software, from simply learning things, and they don't understand it, it scares them. Why don't they just pursue normal people things in life? Like super expensive cars, massive houses, golf memberships. I think it scares them that they don't have control over technically minded people they way they might do with others. AI is, in their mind, a way to get rid of these people forever, to just "get stuff done" without objections, and they are pushing extremely hard for that to be true, simply because they want it to be true - not because there is any evidence for it.

Rant over.