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Comment by throwaw12 | Hacker News Reader

That dude is a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, doesn't need your "resume driven" label, his resume is good enough already.

Why don't you accept it as, dude is experimenting and learning new tool, how cool is that, if this is possible, what else can I build with these tools?

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May be not resume driven. But hearing MS and AI, I can't help but wonder if this is result of one of those mandates by "leadership" where everyone is forced to come up with a AI use case or hack.

isn't this is exactly the point of innovation and mandates?

"leadership" or real leaders, want people to experiment a lot, so some of them will come up with novel ideas and either decide to build it on their own and get rich or build internally and make company rich.

Not always, but in many cases when someone becomes rich with innovation, it is probably because there was a benefit to a society (excluding gambling, porn, social media addictions)

Because there was a benefit for some shareholder somewhere, maybe.

It's insane to expect them go rouge and not benefit the company in some sense

The pressure at those levels is even higher, as it is an unsaid expectation of sorts that LLMs represent the cutting edge of technology, so principals/DEs must use it to show that they're on the top of the game.

fair, but it doesn't mean some of them are genuinely experimenting and figuring out interesting ways to use LLMs, some examples I personally love and admire

* simonw - Simon Willison, he could just continue building datasette or help Django, but he started exploring LLMs

* Armin Ronacher

* Steve Yegge

and many more

No idea if this is true but very sad if it is. This is a great argument for the concept of tenure, so experts can work on what they as experts deem important instead of being subject to the whims of leadership. I, probably naively pictured Distinguished Engineer to be closer to that, but maybe not.

It's in the career framework of most big techs to use AI this year, so everyone is doing it to hold on to their bonuses.

Sadly, yes, it's true. New AI projects are getting funded and existing non-AI projects are getting mothballed. It's very disruptive and yet another sign of the hype being a bubble. Companies are pivoting entirely to it and neglecting their core competencies.

Currently Microsoft is eliminating a lot of the useless fat in redundancy plans. So the crappy "resume driven" thinkg might be actually needed.

That sounds exactly like the type of person that would care about their resume.

Microsoft (the company with no noteworthy accomplishments within the past decades) is a metric for a resume being good now?

All they do is buy out companies and make a already finished product theirs.

Oh he's from Microsoft? That makes malarkey like this track so much more.

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