Yes but is AI really getting you unstuck or are you playing a game of whack-a-mole where it fixes one bug and generates several others that you are unaware off (just one example)?

> Yes but is AI really getting you unstuck

Yes, it really is.

But ... but ... your productivity as an engineer shoots up! You can take on more tasks and ship more! -- Dumbass Engineering Director who has never written a line of code in their life.

Unfortunately, with these types of software simpleton's making decisions we are going to see way more push for AI usage and thus higher productivity expectations. They cannot wrap their heads around the fact (for starters) that AI is not deterministic so that increases the overhead on testing, security, requirements, integrations etc. making all those productivity gains evaporate. Worse (like the author mentioned), it makes your engineer less creative and more burnt-out.

Let's be honest here. Engineers picked this career broadly for 2 reasons, creativity and money. With AI, the creativity aspect is taken away and you are now more of a tester. As for money, those same dumbass decision makers are now going to view this skillset as a commodity and find people who can easily be trained in to "AI Engineers" for way less money to feed inputs.

I am all for technological evolution and welcome it but this isn't anything like that. It is purely based on profits, shareholders and any but building good, proper software systems. Quality be damned. Profession of Software Development be damned. We will regret it in the future.

testing is quite creative too btw

Explain?

True determinism is rare, we often don't get it. That's what purely functional languages are all about and they're a minority.

We are trained on the other thing: unpredictable user interaction, parallelism, circuit-breaking, etc. That's the bread and butter of engineering (of all kinds, really, not just IT).

The non-deterministic intuition is baked into engineering much more than determinism is.

Fair point. But are we moving even further away from determinism with the current ways of working with AI?

I see, you're using "determinism" coloquially, in the sense of "exact outcome".

That's perfectly fine. We are honed for this too.

We don't need to produce exact solutions or answers. We need to make things work despite the presence of chaos. That is our job and we're good at it.

Product managers freak out when someone says "I don't know how much time it will take, there are too many variables!". CFOs freak out when someone says "we don't know how much it will cost". Those folk want exact, predictable outcomes.

Engineers don't, we always dealt with unpredictable chaotic things. We're just fine.

Well said! I wonder if it is like this in the mechanical / electrical engineering space or if the Math n Physics is scary enough to keep the riff-raff out. We've made it too easy for the non-engineering folks and now they're getting involved and disrupting our flow of work. Just like the author (a psych major who's never written a line of production code in life).

The nerve of that product guy!

I’ve always been vocal about this ... engineers are at the core of our business because they build and ship. Everyone else, myself included as an engineering manager exists to support them in doing exactly that. We don’t create value by holding meetings, drafting roadmaps, or removing blockers ... those are simply the means to an end. We create value when a product is built and shipped. It really is that simple.

Surely you mean you create value once your customers use your product to achieve their purposes...

The writing gives the impression of someone speaking about hands-on technical work without a clear understanding of what that actually entails. After reviewing the author’s public LinkedIn profile, it appears their background may be more aligned with product and process management than with hands-on engineering, which could explain the disconnect.

Spot on!

"The fact that the US population elected him a second time means that the US as a whole can't be trusted to behave like rational adults."

This! I mean think about it for a second. That is around 80 million voters.

Trump or no Trump, our country isn't the cool kid on the block anymore.

"We've had bathroom scales for over a century, yet as a society, we are more obese than ever."

Exactly! Couple decades ago they blamed human stupidity on lack of information. Look at us now with all the data available at our fingertips. We are so well informed that we should be better humans but we aren't.

Coming back to the Apple Watch (and alternatives) perhaps what we need along with all these "insights" are a shock collar (yes, like the one for a dog) that serves as a motivation to get off one's ass and get in to better shape. I'll bet that'll sell like hotcakes /s

OK, so it's not that hard but try and follow along.

Did the employees say they have the data to prove it?

No!

Did mgmt. say it?

Yes!

So let's ask mgmt. first to disclose said data.

Got it?

In at least one case it wasn’t released by management because it was absurdly embarrassing. Productivity compared between 2019 and 2023 had statistics similar to the following; average yearly CLs decreased from approximately 70 to under 10, significant revisions pushed in comparable products changed from 26 to 4, meeting time increased by a multiple, email volume decreased similarity. All this with significant increases in seniority and pay among the average employee. Contrapositive scenarios argue that there is a huge opportunity cost to the tech efforts from WFH.

"CL" is a Google-ism for a code change ("change list"). What we'd normally refer to as a pull request I suppose. Googlers like to think the whole world is in on their lingo, but CL is a very unusual acronym outside the Googlosphere.

So they are seriously saying that Google developers on average went from about 70 PRs per year to less than 10 PRs per year when working from home? That seems such an absurdly large decrease that it's hard to believe.