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this is just not really how corporate salary workers function. We had a guy we kept around for probably longer than we should have who refused to learn anything but sql. It's notoriously difficult to track actual productivity in software and because of that a lot of coasting, because when I say "yeah I spent all day yesterday working on the inspection schedule import process" There is probably only one guy on the team who could reasonably say if that was a task that should really take a whole day, and he's not my manager.
The whole concept of FOMO exists because there really are situations where you could be missing out. If you just assume that all the hype is right and there is a tremendous amount of uplift available if your team is using these new tools then wouldn't you want to push them into using them asap? There's always an available excuse in software not to learn new tools, deadlines are weekly and you have real work to do outside of messing with some new instruction set.
I disagree. I'm willing to acknowledge that there exist people who are going to resist change, not care about productivity gains, etc. But that isn't all of the workers or even close to all of the workers in my experience. Most engineers I've worked with love tools that make them more productive, and will use them no matter what management does. Some will even use tools that management forbids in an attempt to be more productive. It's not theoretical, I've seen this behavior.
So as a manager, there really is no rational reason to push people to use LLMs. One needs to focus on the outcome, not the process. Most of your engineers are going to be stoked to get a 10x performance boost if that is real, at which point you can talk to the laggards and say "hey you need to keep up with the standard the rest of the team is setting". But at no point do you need to go out of your way to push a particular methodology.
Sure, but neither does that mean that one is missing out just because one has FOMO. You need to temper that instinct with some thought, and I see no sign at all that managers are doing that.
You get a variety of engineers with very variable commitment to the job and less than perfect insight into who actually are the laggards and who are the 10x performers. I work with mostly ~40-50 year olds with families and stuff to do. Some of them are much more likely to pick up new tools and methods than others who do good work but see their obligation to the company as discharged so long as they provide the same service they have for years or decades. I wear the scrum master hat, although that's rarely more than 10% of my duties as I'm full time coding, and it's often my job to mediate between management that has a distant view into the process and the engineers themselves.
Another element that needs to be understood is that with salary work when a labor saving tool comes along and actually saves you a lot of labor what that means in effect is often that you are given more work to do. If you care about advancement then this is an opportunity to impress, but if you're fifty something and not really expecting to be promoted before you retire the main upside to 10xing your work is that you get to write more jira tickets and do more work overhead instead of coding. To the younger people on the team like me we were indeed already using the tooling before the firm brought in an internally approved version, and I've been promoted in part because of this attitude. But then this process of promoting people more excited about leveraging new tools means that you would expect to find management to be constitutionally more excited about new tools and lower level workers constitutionally more conservative.
What would it take for you to believe that the managers have actually done some reasoning here? From their perspective they see a potential phase shift in how their organization operates and they want to make sure that if it's real they capture it and if it's not real then maybe they've wasted a little bit of budget on tokens. That's really not a hard risk reward tradeoff to take.
I want you to know that I'm not ignoring your question. I've been trying to think about it, and ultimately I'm not sure. Perhaps someone whom I respect personally would have to explain the reasoning to me? But short of that it's hard to say, despite my honest attempt to come up with something. I realize it's kind of a lame answer, and I apologize for that, but unfortunately it seems that lame honesty is all I have in response to your (quite reasonable) point.
I guess I find your theory of mind for managers to be kind of confusing. Like they're a different species of pointy haired Dilbert characters. The managers most pushing this in my org were originally coders themselves and have toyed around with the tools in their free time. Now, I do think they're a little out of touch to a degree, it's been a while since they've been in the code mines themselves and dealt with the reality of maintaining large code bases even when you were the one who wrote all the lines. But they're mostly smart people who want to help because our glory is their glory.
A lot of what they deal with day to day is getting their people the tools they need to do their jobs, whether it's AWS access, infrastructure licenses or now AI model and tooling access. For us to be allowed to use the tools at all is a result of them negotiating, moving budgets around and getting teams to build out infrastructure to allow it. They're pushing the use at the same time as they're coordinating to get the tools into our hands. By the time we're at the point of "why not just let the developers use the tools and determine for themselves if they're useful" there's already been hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars invested in making the tools available whether through contracts with the labs or man hours that come out of their budgets either way.
And the time us devs have to actually try them out and see how it goes is itself limited. In a way pushing for us to try it is their way of giving permission to spend work hours experimenting with them. I have several days on this two week cycle earmarked for experimenting with MCP servers to see if we can get agents the ability to query our database, without management signaling clearly that this is a priority it would be hard to justify that kind of use of my time.
Part of convincing you that all of this is rational might just be the empirical question of whether there's actual juice worth this squeeze. I've struggled to understand the people here who have such strong doubts about this. If it were a different forum that I cared less about I might just throw up my hands, things are moving pretty fast now and one way or the other the truth will assert itself soon enough. But I've seen the results, I've used the tools, there might be over reach but if the alternative is under reach then the choice seems very rational to me because there is just obviously value here.
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The easiest way to show reasoning is to summarize and share their thoughts. If they have ideas about where and how this tool will lead to improvements then they can just tell people why.
As described, this hypothetical manager seems to have no better reason than FOMO to get this tool. If the tool would improve a specific task he would have no need to justify it as a "potential phase shift" - he could just say it will be useful for the specific thing. He wants it because it's trendy and he's afraid of being left behind.
Pushing a new technology because other people are excited about it is not reasoning; it is succumbing to hype.
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Chads.
That minimalist, mercenary attitude is a welcome breath of fresh air in a world all too plagued with the LinkedInLunatic “we’re a family with a shared mission looking to dedicate 120% of ourselves to be moving fast, breaking things, and constantly upskilling in maximizing the value we deliver to stakeholders.”
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Last place I worked, they insisted we use AI to do something. The tools had all sorts of claimed cool features... half of which didn't work at all, most of what remained were locked down due to various security policies, and the rest of which required interaction with someone to get permission to use. Said someone was naturally a bottleneck. I have no doubt that people using the tools on their own (and if with work stuff, against the explicit directive of management) had a better experience, but I expect it's likely true that more experienced developers are less willing to do that. More to lose and more experience with getting nothing but blame for violating policy to get the job done.
LOL, as a career-long IC, "A goddamned miracle" is what it would take.
Things are moving fast. A year ago I was pulling up chatbots on my private hardware to do queries to streamline writing sql and parse documentation. Today the firm has a wrapper with sota models and even some scaffolding to give it access to resources about internal documentation. I'm on the list of people that will get to pilot claude code on work computers soon. In my ~10 years here I've never seen heaven and earth moved so rapidly. But your complaint seems different to @SubstantialFrivolity 's you seem to think your previous place's management wasn't pushing the tools enough, at least to the people provisioning them.
The irony of you refusing to do reasoning on your belief on whether they are refusing to do reasoning is a little rich.
I think the older of us have seen such promises in work life before, that "this new tool/suite of software is gonna make things so much better!" and it gets pushed by management and it ends up making things worse, because it doesn't integrate with what you've been using before (where all the data that you've been using and files of work going back years are), the new process takes longer because you have to do extra steps, and the promised efficiencies don't precipitate out.
Some of that is resistance to change, sure. But some of that is "this goddamn slop does not work". It's hard to believe, even if it's true, that this time the shiny new thing is really going to be all that. Best case? It really is all that, can do your job, so 'trimming the fat' means half the staff are laid off and those remaining are responsible for doing three times the work with no increase in compensation, because now "The AI will do it all for you and reducing overheads such as labour costs means improved stock price, and you want our stock price to go up, don't you?"
Us dinosaurs are cynical about both 'improvements' and the love and cherishing that upper levels of management hold in the depths of their hearts for their workers.
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It's not that they weren't pushing them, but that they were simultaneously pushing and crippling them.
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