u/almondcroissant96

At this point there is strong evidence that AI does not increase velocity much outside of startups because it moves the bottleneck to review, and does not solve the political, procedural or practical friction in large enterprises that soaks up most time anyway. Various academic studies have also shown low impact to overall productivity at the firm and individual level.

But it seems like this reality is not getting through to engineering leaders AT ALL. My questions is, under what circumstances will tech leaders be forced to drop the narrative? Because the gulf between people who use AI to do our daily work and the higher ups who don't code anymore just keeps getting wider.

For a long time, standard advice to mid career people who were burned out , wanted to downshift or create more time for their family was go to a big, boring non tech enterprise and take a pay cut if necessary.

Now it seems like those jobs barely exist and are just as competitive as anything else. I’ve been desperately trying to get into a lower stress, conventional industry like regional banking, insurance, health. But it just doesn’t seem like a viable path anymore

For a long time, standard advice to mid career people who were burned out , wanted to downshift or create more time for their family was go to a big, boring non tech enterprise and take a pay cut if necessary.

Now it seems like those jobs barely exist and are just as competitive as anything else. I’ve bern desperately trying to get into a lower stress, conventional industry like regional banking, insurance, health. But it just doesn’t seem like a viable path anymore

I'm not in defense contracting (I'm a fed) but with how bad the general swe job market is right now I see a lot of people in the industry talk about wanting to go into defense because clearance gives job security.

But it also seems like basically no one is sponsoring software/cybersecurity anymore. Are uncleared engineers actually getting hired into the industry anymore or is it pretty much just a closed loop at this point?

I’ve noticed the young guys in my org behave very differently from how juniors have historically acted.

First, I suspect these guys could not survive at all without llms. They don’t have the metal models to problem solve and work through tasks to develop domain expertise. They have some kind of token induced learned helplessness. I think they might not even have code editors on the systems; literally all work they do is typing into the prompt box of codex.

Despite this, they have extremely high confidence and no filter. They will throw out bizarre business and architectural ideas that are just totally nonsensical to anyone with domain expertise or even just some general engineering battle scars. The proposals will often be ai filtered to sound plausible and look impressive but they make no sense. They will initiate meetings with vendors and other teams, go above peoples heads and get management and directors involved in random stuff.

They will also frequently do low value extracurricular work. Like if the senior engineers are working on a system, the juniors will vibe code a reimplementation of the system (that doesn’t do what we need it to do), in a language/stack the team doesn’t use, and then dump thousands of lines of code for review. Instead of asking how they can help, asking if they can learn the details of current system or business problems from other devs, they just throw slop over the wall. They have ZERO instinct to learn.

I’m starting to think ai has brain rotted the new grads to the point they just won’t make it. It would honestly be easier and more productive to work with contractors and/or outsourced devs and we would probably get the same or better quality.