CEOs Say AI Is Making Work More Efficient. Employees Tell a Different Story | Hacker News Reader

CEOs Say AI Is Making Work More Efficient. Employees Tell a Different Story

wsj.com

52 points1vuio0pswjnm721 comments

Most of the time large corporate CEOs appear to be just magic 8 balls, making decisions to ensure that the company doesn't end up with decision paralysis. AI reduces the amount they have to read before saying yes/no, so of course it makes their lives more efficient. Most of the time it doesn't even matter if they choose yes or no. Just that they pick something.

I think the real issue is that its still in its painful growth stage and we have a way to go until we will start to understand better where its good and where its a disaster.

I have a co-worker who is really good at herding agents. I've seen him do work in an afternoon what would take more than two weeks without AI, but some of his other work ends up being so bad the rest of us want to string him up by his thumbs.

Its impossible to tell from just looking before hand what the result will be.

Sounds like it’s a force multiplier, both on the good and bad side. That lines up with what I have seen. It’s hard to tell if it’s a net positive or negative.

If I would get suckered into paying lot of money for AI, I would definitelly try to convince myself that the AI is working.

I would say that AI has not saved me any time as a developer. What is has done is allowed me to increase scope by doing tasks like documentation and prototyping/experimentation that I would not have found time for otherwise.

Saying that the AI saves time is like saying that a printer saves paper.

You say it hasn't saved you any time because you're doing more work now - e.g. documentation. I would say that's being pedantic, but I guess the expectations shift with it, so in practice, you can't just maintain your old output level and reclaim the saved time.

I haven't seen our roadmap accelerate because of AI. I'm sure, given time, having the P2s like documentation and prototyping in place will yield dividends. But I still can't imagine even doubling our rate of progress.

I am in an area that is bottlenecked on many things besides writing the code. Testing requires physical devices and realtime execution. So having the code 10x faster is little difference when the other processes take most of the time.

https://archive.is/PZ2Kv

Overall it's a quality of life improvement but not a true efficiency boost. The problem is the review process to properly understand a change can take nearly as long as if I wrote it myself. Sometimes it's an accelerant some times I'm untangling a gordian knot of awful code.

Obviously, C suite will allways be biased

So will the workers be biased against AI

Shed workers ... increase profit ... stock price go up ... Exec get bonus ... Economy fail ... Exec no care ... Exec have bonus and job still ...

Honestly the caveman speak will get me marked down but fuck it.. It is transparent what they want....

Ai has use but frankly until it can be trusted to actually follow the right path and skip around hard tasks make subtle bugs that can screw things up... It will get worse before it gets better....

when has this ever happened? stop making things up in your mind

It hasn't with AI.

But it's exactly what the executives say, and why they are interested in AI.

There is a post currently right next to this one on the front page about Autodesk showing a desire to use AI to fire workers.

https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/autodesk-lay-...

i think workers getting fired is okay

You are allowed your opinion.

It doesn't stop this

> when has this ever happened?

Being wrong. They are excited for AI because they want to avoid employing people.

The subprime mortgage crisis that led to the Great Recession comes to mind.

The destruction of Boeing for short-term profits.

Private equity's destruction of public companies.

The entire American health insurance system.

do you think by and large this describes the american economy?

yes.

The pain of using AI is only temporary—once you get the hang of it, your efficiency will improve significantly

Not really, it still produces way too many errors to let run on its own. It’s just as useful as stack overflow was at its peak.

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