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So, is AI coming for the programmer jobs? There's a news story in my country about Microsoft seeking redundancies globally which probably means chopping jobs here as well, and one paragraph mentions AI:
Granted, that seems to be trimming jobs across management and admin rather than software engineers, but the little nugget about "up to a third of programming is now done by AI" does seem to be a straw in the wind. Yes? No? Just means they're not hiring new junior staff?
Probably not.
AI is on the part of the hype curve where it will get included in press releases for any and all reasons. If the news is bad, AI will be mentioned as a mitigation strategy. If it’s good, it becomes a growth plan.
My company had a little mini-reorg recently. It also consisted of shuffling some matrix management, and it also gave lip service to new AI tools. I hope no one expects a defense contractor to lead the charge in adopting AI-driven requirements.
Same here. Do you know why the reorgs happen so often? It's exhausting.
I mean, that's a bog-standard way to look like Important Things are being done. In my far too many years at $current_employer, I have seen it countless times and when my previous boss said that we were no longer
playing musical officesreorganizing our workspaces my reaction was ROFLMFAO, GLWT and also to make sure to give him shit every time he brought up the next move we had to do after a several month grace period as well, which I know he appreciated. In fact, I have watched said employer literally move different offices to the other side of the building and then back again less than two years later and that has happened two separate times with different sets of offices even! And it's not just my employer. Behold, Azure has become Entra! Azure Purview and Compliance have merged into the new Purview! Use the new-and-improved Exchange Online Admin (except for all of these things that live in the old Exchange Online Admin that still lives several years later). It never ceases. SMDH.I have a private theory that reorgs are the company-level analogue to how human bodies evolved to raise their temperature as an immune response. When you can cleanly identify and resolve a dysfunction you do that, but when you can't... when all you have is a lingering sense of dread... you can stagnate, and let your corporate DNA die out, or you can generate a lot of "heat" and hope any entrenched dysfunctions eventually die off. No individual corporate T-cell knows what they're doing-- they're just thinking about advancing their careers and how shitty the coffee is. But the behavior gets reinforced by so many selection pressures that they conform to it anyway, as part of a larger system that they can interact with but never fully comprehend.
(This feeds into my whole conspiracy theory about how the stockmarket is already a meaninfully superhuman artificial intelligence but that's another discussion.)
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