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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.
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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