As IBM pushes for automation, its AI simply not up to the job of replacing staff
theregister.com
theregister.com
This betrays not only a misunderstanding of what LLMs can do, but a basic lack of knowledge of the software development lifecycle. Krishna gets paid $20 million a year to be this big of an idiot. He should lose his job immediately. He hasn't earned it.
Remember, your company's management would do anything if it meant they could get a dollar. Never bend over backwards for these troglodytes.
Remember, what happens in five years time isn't Krishna's problem. What happens in the next 90 days is Krishna's problem. And if he can drastically reduce payroll while maintaining revenues in the next 90 days, he is judged by the market to be a good CEO.
They are also going for the entirely wrong market.
Everyone is arguing about replacing programming jobs, "AI can't replace my job".
But it is really just fractional.
Lets say you have 5 marketing drones writing boring marketing material. AI allows them to do more, you still need humans to use the tools, and to edit, but now you only need 3.
AI can't do the 'entire job' but it did enough to eliminate two positions. This is what is already happening. Do you think this stopped with the ESPN case? Companies didn't stop because they got caught, they just got better at it.
Maybe it just needs to reach point where the AI "confabulating" is equal or less than human "confabulating".
Plenty of humans BS, make errors. So AI just needs to reach parity to allow replacing the humans.
if you make the human stressed enough, they will in fact tell you an answer whether or not they know the answer.
Big Boss reads Gartner. Gartners says do X. Big Boss mandates X, and gets the cost savings they want by firing or hiring freeze. The quality/quantity of the output was hard to measure compared to the concrete reduction on the spend side.
20 years ago it was offshoring. I recall a job where managers were all essentially given the offer at budget season - you can have 5 hires in Bangalore or 0 hires in US. Not a pot of money and managers deciding X vs Y, it was simply an ultimatum X or 0.
Certainly it worked, however it was first forced in many areas where it didn't work, top-down. AI efficiencies will happen similarly.
If the goal is functional software you're right.
However there are two goals at IBM: planet scale patent portfolio and satisfying the letter of their contracts at the Lowe's possible cost.
If they can find a way to get paid without staff they'll be delighted.
Unfortunately their core competency is hiring 20x as much staff as needed for a job, at the Lowe's quality they can achieve.
- They are saying that maliciously as signalling for cost savings.
- They know this will slowly rot and destroy long term development. Probably screamed from all sides internally.
- They are doing this to meet their own targets.
- If everyone is doing this, it means their competitors are also taking the hit, so it might not be as bad for them long term going this route. It's a similar thing as everyone having bad call centers.
I don't think they care about competition at all, though. In fact, I'd venture to say that most publicly-traded companies are helmed by people who don't care about the competition beyond what it means for share price. And share price is itself a relatively poor metric for long-term sustainability and growth at a company, because most of the people who are supposed to care about it as an indicator of those things are already hedged and ready to divest at a moment's notice. No one with any real voting power at most major companies has put all of their eggs in the company basket; they diversify.
Executives who are compensated in shares also get compensated so well that they reach the point of diminishing returns on what money can buy you in a given society. If you, for a decade, get paid $1.5 million in cash, then get bonuses for meeting short-term performance targets, there's basically nowhere in the Western world you can't exist comfortably. And that's before you exercise stock options. So the risk of failure has no real bite to it.
Some context from an earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558554#41561970
Basically, management rot sets in with MBAs in charge who have no clue how software products get built. They see coders as overhead. Big Mistake. Short-term, it leads to some improved profits. Long term, it leads to cultural rot. and the org is doomed. Happening to amazon and aws as we speak.
Still waking up in western Kansas, though.
It sounds like IBM's management in this case thinks of AI powered code generators like they (and others) did of COBOL back when, "it's basically english so non-programmers can use it".
Their revenue has been falling for a decade now [0]
I don't even know what it is that they sell anymore. I wonder if they do.
Also, I found this paragraph interesting:
> "Senior software engineers stopped being developed in the US around 2012," Blake said. "That’s the real story. No country on Earth is producing new coders faster than old ones retire. India and Brazil were the last countries and both stopped growing new devs circa 2023. China stopped growing new devs in 2020."
The ROI of one good engineer who understands their computer can be absolutely immense. The logical thing to do is to have some good ones and build an organization around them to help them focus 100% on building profitable things.
I get the feeling this Krishna fellow sees engineers as a cost to be reduced and thinks the value is added by the rest of the organization, rather than the other way around.
Why are they in leadership roles? No clue.
Because they’re useful to the bottom line and are anti-social enough to destroy anyone who threatens it.
People and moreover mentality like this should not exist in our society, yet we incentivize for it.
Also, why can't we replace the leadership with AI? We have more books on management than actual technical knowledge. We can use AI to make similar decisions these leaders make at like what billion times less cost.
Because, IMO, there's a large overlap between being an irrational person and also being likable and smart sounding.
Confidence doesn't actually come from being good, it comes from being delusional. In order to truly market yourself you need a healthy disdain for the truth. You spit on reality and create your own.
Engineers and other rational-minded people have a big problem - they're too honest. They do feasibly analysis, they look at risks, they talk about weaknesses, pros and cons. But this doesn't strike confidence, quite the opposite - it makes the business folk weary. Why go with you, who estimates 10% chance of failure, when they can go with Mark, who says it's guaranteed to work?
Extrapolate that across all decisions and boom, the people at the top are usually the most irrational. It doesn't really matter that it's all a lie because when everyone walks out of that boardroom, they feel comforted.
I used to be upset when people said these things based on pressing a button and watching a computer generate a word salad like a slot machine hitting the jackpot. Until I realized that it’s not a statement about the machine, it’s a statement about themselves. They can’t distinguish between competent people and confident sounding and well-formatted regurgitation. Which is especially concerning from leaders, who really should be able to weed out imposters.
Now, AI may make more leaps quickly that changes the equation. But anyone with an ounce of experience in the tech world knows to not take optimistic extrapolations at face value.
I'm very curious about what PHP is being written over at IBM.
Instead of doing that, you should probably fire and replace the person who suggested that in the first place.
All I do is press a button and collect MRR.
Hint: Those people won't have words like "content" "editor" "writer" or "documentation" in their title. They will, though, likely have words like "director" and "vice president" in there somewhere.
But I would be fascinated to see a company with the higher levels replaced by LLMs. Like a union or guild where the members are actually voting on the real decisions, and the LLMs handle summarizing these decisions and building narratives.
No idea of it would work. Might still need a human CEO. Would be interesting to see, though.
so LLMs are basically senior management? :P
What's in this sense of "network engineering"? (Is it distinct from some role like "technician" or "operations"?)
If you wanted to make IBM's data centers quickly start having downtime, or to be unresponsive to new needs, how many people would you have to hire away?
Operations and Tech sure. But some know linux, some windows some networking. A PC tech wont have a CCNA.
Huh. I hadn't heard this, and it goes against my intuition. They cite a Stackoverflow survey, and some other articles. A bolus of new developers entered the industry around 2000-2010, and are at least senior level now. I assumed the same trend had continued, since development is a pretty safe route to a good salary. What industry are reasonably intelligent people going into these days? The trades are a great option, but I was recently hearing about a scarcity of skilled tradesmen, too. AI was not an existential job threat in 2012, either, so that's not the reason, nor is the present moment's poor job market. What are people doing to make a living now?
Ever since people started talking about the coding abilities of AI I've been thinking this pattern would just accelerate, with beginners and inexperienced developers leaning on it too much instead of improving their own skills.
You can add a bigger engine that makes the tractor better at tractoring (e.g. github copilot), but that doesn't replace the tractor.
> "Senior software engineers stopped being developed in the US around 2012," Blake said. "That’s the real story. No country on Earth is producing new coders faster than old ones retire. India and Brazil were the last countries and both stopped growing new devs circa 2023. China stopped growing new devs in 2020."
This is one article quoting one person at IBM. But if that's true, that's a seismic shift in the landscape from the last, oh, 80 years or so.
That ought to make pay and working conditions better - if true.
Refer to this article https://cbmm.mit.edu/sites/default/files/documents/watson.pd...
> A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE
> THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION
My understanding is they are having trouble getting the individual arbitration clauses thrown out to allow it to proceed
[0]: https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2024/01/23/ibm_supreme_court...
edit: heh, replied concurrently with others pointing the same direction. somebody owes somebody a soft drink.
That said, there have been a number of age discrimination lawsuits, just no major class action it seems: https://www.cohenmilstein.com/case-study/ibm-age-discriminat..., https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/20/ibm_and_kyndryl_again..., https://www.hrdive.com/news/ibm-hr-professionals-suit-age-di..., https://thenationaltriallawyers.org/article/ibm-hit-with-1-5...