I work at a giant tech company. I'm in the upper levels (the CTO is my bosses boss).
I think our C-suite has truly lost its mind around AI. Last year I thought their delusions were just optics for the market. I thought they were hedging bets, playing the short game for their RSUs, and I forgave any low IQ moments and off key messages as being due to fear, caution, or divided attention from allowing AI grifters to infect their circle and feed them bad lines
But Iately I've been seeing stuff that's so catastrophically stupid, and all in, that I think they really have lost their minds.
I know how this works in big co systems of people. Their stupidity is amplified one thousandfold to lower levels like a game of crack the whip. I'm used to them firing leagues of people for no reason other than deciding contractors are good this month, no wait, now they are bad. And lately they've been so incredibly and almost unbelievably stupid. It will take a year for this to trickle down from the top to everyone, but this whole company has already started recentering and orbiting a new sun. This new sun has nothing to do with making money, making things people want to buy, or reality. Our whole center of gravity is moving to internal optics and politics around AI. I can already see pathological low skill people from long ago enshittified companies starting to win this new game.
AI is not going to kill this company. This company will kill itself because it has lost it's mind thinking it needs to be "AI-native."
Is this everywhere, or can I go somewhere that's still smart? Is this a temporary cycle, are people just freaking out because of WWIII?
Any sort of tech company was always a headless chicken. It's just that when software developers were the hot thing on the horizon we were oblivious to the stupidity that thrives in corporate.
If you think about a business that maximizes profit, and sample opinions from the business side about the business domain.. you would be forgiven to assume the replies are nothing short of genius. However, the facade of brilliance falls apart the moment you attempt to sample anything adjacent to business or unrelated to it. You will realize that having experience in and making a lot of money does not translate well to other endeavors where making money is not the main concern.
Now that we have been milked dry like Apids in an Ant farm and have been virtually kicked out of the money making complex, we start to realize we were just cattle all along and that praise for our stature in the industry as the eponymous "genius" of the entire operation was just flattery to assuage any inconvenience we perceived through corporate bullshit. They succeeded in avoiding drawing our ire towards the incredibly narrow-sighted and hollow endeavor that is making the line go up exponentially.
Now that facade has fallen face first at the dawn of the LLM era. The arrogance that hid from software engineers and developers but was all too apparent to blue collar and "lesser" corporate functions has shown it's face to us, the enlightened morons.
Thanks for coming to (hehe) my TED talk
I’ve been in the software industry for 30 years. There has always been an active disdain for programmers, since we have been relatively scarce and moody and mysterious to the suits. Every so often, another product comes along which purports to finally free the organization of these pesky programmers and let the normies do the work faster and better. Management falls hard for the grift, and things end up worse off as a result. We’re in another one of those right now.
All that “genius” bullshit has always been a thin veneer, said through gritted teeth. They’ll come crawling back soon enough. But it does suck in the meantime.