Nikhil Suresh of Hermit-Tech posted a critique of AI and how it affects decision-making today, and he brings up some points I want to highlight. Other people are tackling the technical and supply-chain sides of AI adoption in the tech industry; but this opinion is from someone acting as an Engagement Manager for a consulting firm, which puts them at the curious intersection of being both a Senior Product Manager and also a Sales Manager. What's more, Suresh is seeing this from the point of view of a team that can say no to AI strategy if they want (by not taking a contract). This means they see this issue as mostly a people and decision-making problem, which is a vantage point we haven't seen much from yet.
Those of us who have made it to Staff+ roles know that good software and systems are more the product of people than it is the technical foundations. Those technical foundations help improve velocity and maintainability, but bad people will make horrible systems out of excellent software. At the Staff+ level, a lot of our job is mediating differences between teams with different technical points of view, or informing managers of various types about the feasibility of different technical approaches. Sometimes we're listened to, sometimes we're not. As Suresh describes, we're in an industry-wide moment of sometimes we're not.
Suresh describes at length the biasing effects of C-level, whole company strategy to adopt a specific technical system in the absence of established best-practices. We've all heard the stories of TokenMaxing, teams yeeting AI-based workflows into deployment pipelines because it has to be done, and companies firing lots of people on the promise of AI only to hire a bunch back months later because the promise was not met. Some companies are doing the work; like Honeycomb, who has taken on the task of coming up with technically defensible ways of using AI tooling in the absence of a top down hype mandate. Most are not doing the work, they're providing massive incentives for adoption without an existing and proven framework.
This shows up in performance review and hiring cycles. News of annual performance reviews requiring evidence of AI use for "meets" or better were already being happening in 2023 when the tooling was much worse. By 2024 many companies required evidence you know how to use AI in coding workflows as part of their interview pipeline, something that has intensified in the last two years. Company strategy is hiring strategy, and company strategy was "we are now an AI company."
In a footnote, Suresh says:
If I was somehow CEO at a hospital or civil engineering firm, I would not for a second think it's my place to start mandating specific procedures or building techniques without explicit agreement from the professionals on staff - how fucking clueless are the non-technicians who have attended a few talks and are now making mandates about how their extremely expensive professionals are doing their jobs?
This is shedding light on a fundamental disconnect between tech CEOs and their workforce. Yes, we are highly trained; but that training was mostly paid by ourselves or other companies, and there are more of us being made every day. There isn't a Software Engineer shortage, and hasn't been one for over a decade. Labor costs are the number one cost center for making internet services, you bet your ass tech CEOs are going to invest in a tool that promises to radically reduce your main cost center. The big companies have been investing in off-shoring jobs outside of the US for over a decade specifically to reduce their production costs, AI came right for that desire and won.
Which is leaving us with an industry wide case of bad people turning excellent services into horrible services. Once the hype wanes (one company I know moved their big AI bet out of Manhattan Project mode and into a more sustainable Product Management cadence, there are others) we're going to be left with an industry wide hangover to clean up after. Neither will happen over night, but those of us who have been in the industry over 20 years (you don't have to be Staff+ for this) know what this looks like.