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Comment by franktankbank | Hacker News Reader

Management should not be telling dev the tools to use. Tell me why I'm wrong.

Not that you're wrong, but here's the argument from the other side:

- AI is supposed to be a great productivity booster, but no one has figured out a way of actually measuring developer productivity, so we'll just use the proxy of measuring whether they're using AI.

- Developers won't want to use AI because it's threatening to them, so we'll mandate it.

- Consistency and fungibility of human resources is incredibly valuable. 0.5x developers can use AI to get them up to at least 1x. And 10x developers? We're actually better off if the AI "slows them down" and makes their work output look more like everyone else's. 10x developers are actually a liability, because it can be hard to quantify and measure their contributions, and so when things become worse when they end up leaving, it feels intangible and impossible to fix.

If you have lazy devs, sometimes you need to convince (or coerce, or force) them to get them out of their comfort zone and try something new. But typically this is done because management wants more while giving nothing in return which is why no one tolerates these suggestions.

The other reason, which has been used to prevent devs from fixing bad code, is that making money is more important and sometimes that means moving away from costlier tools, or choosing tools because of specific business arrangements.

Couldn't agree more, but when the company is paying big money for a tool you can bet they're going to make sure people are using it

Is that the RTO mandates because we have so many unused 5 year office leases?

I see, it's part deux.

"We made a poor investment and now we're making it our employees problem" is absolutely a common outcome from business leaders yeah

The only thing that trickles down is bullshit unfortunately

Standardization is valuable.

An extreme example of your position would be a shop where everyone uses a different language. That's obviously untenable.

A more reasonable example might be choice of editor. I'm of the opinion that management should provide everyone a standard editor, then not mandate it's use. This means anyone can hop onto any device and know how to use it, even if the device owner has a super-customized vim setup. Folks who become familiar with the standard editor are also better positioned to help their colleagues troubleshoot their setups.

I don't see how this applies to AI assistants much if at all. It feels like mandating devs run all their ideas by a particular intern. If said intern isn't an architect then there's no value in having a single point of contact.

There is organizational efficiency around everyone using the same tools. Management can pick a set of tools to focus on.

Not all developers know how to use all tools. Management providing education on tools can increase their efficiency.

Developers do not stay up to date with all available tools that exist. Management providing better tools can make people more efficient.

That justifies using common tools and standards, but not why management in particular should be doing the selection.

Everywhere mature that I've worked, management delegated the task of choosing common tools to the senior / staff engineers, as well as decisions around when to make changes or exceptions.

The places that didn't do this were engineer-founded, or were dysfunctional enough that managers could splurge on massive contracts and then force people to use the paid-for tools to justify the contract post-hoc. Every one of these were examples of what not to do.

/can/ is doing some heavy lifting here. Management is just as capable of forcing tools that look good in 15 minute demos but suck for power users on developers.

I mean, ideally, management should not be telling me anything and should let me do my job in splendid, peaceful isolation. In practice, however, management tells me how to do all sorts of things, all the time, and they're responsible for me continuing to get paid, so I have to listen.

You're also responsible if they get paid so if the product sinks it's game over. So they have to listen too.

[flagged]

Unionization is not possible while there are hundreds of millions of eager scab workers in other countries.

Maybe we could tariff offshore code?

Hey now but then we couldn't have all the crypto scams and increasingly complex and insecure software layers at bottom dollar! Forgot to mention all the spyware! How are the executives supposed to get their illegal kickbacks? Won't somebody think of the nepobabies!?

Does this imply US salaries aren't possible either?

NAFTA wasn't inevitable. Globalization has largely been about (some) people making money as we all race to the bottom, and that has meant a steady supply of desperate people willing to sell their labor for less than the current crop of workers.

Arguably one motivation for Trump's tariffs is to onshore jobs. It's an incredibly brutish and stupid way to go about it, though. A much better way would have been to oppose NAFTA and similar global a marketplace policies, as Bernie Sanders has done for decades now (and has largely been in a pretty lonely position).

You're answering a question that wasn't asked so you can bring your view on unionization into the conversation. The implicit question is whether management should, not whether they can.

It's about power to affect change in an organization. The more power you have the better systems you can establish and sustain. Unions should be brought up constantly in these threads about AI mandates and "leadership" directions.

Unions might not be the best solution, or the most practical. I'm all ears for better ways to fight back against bogus leadership. How else can software developers advocate for their interests in an environment where their power is sharply declining (non performance based layoffs, "performance" based layoffs, reduction in junior hiring, reduction in in-office perks, reduction in total comp, etc)?

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