But for an individual cobbler, you basically got fired at one job and hired at another. This may come as a surprise to those who view work as simply an abstract concept that produces value units, but people actually have preferences about how they spend their time. If you're a cobbler, you might enjoy your little workshop, slicing off the edge of leather around the heel, hammering in the pegs, sitting at your workbench.
The nature of the work and your enjoyment of it is a fundamental part of the compensation package of a job.
You might not want to quit that job and get a different job running a shoe assembly line in a factory. Now, if the boss said "hey, since you're all going to be so much more productive working in the factory, we'll give you all 10x raises" then perhaps you might be more excited about putting down your hammer. But the boss isn't saying that. He's saying "all of the cobblers at the other companies are doing this to, so where are you gonna go?".
Of course AI is a top-down mandate. For people who enjoy reading and writing code themselves and find spending their day corralling AI agents to be a less enjoyable job, then the CEO has basically given them a giant benefits cut with zero compensation in return.
I don’t actually think it’ll be a productivity boost the way I work. Code has never been the difficult part, but I’ll definitely have to show I have included AI in my workflow to be left alone.
Oh well…
In my heart I’m a code “artist,” and like all artists that have been more directly attacked, I also feel personally attacked by all of my stolen “art” that is now monetized by big corporations that do not give a single f*ck about beauty in the code, or whatever.
This may be a strange position, idk. Anyways, that’s the reason why.
That’s more than 3 minutes. I’m not being glib when I say I’ve given it serious thought.
I wouldn't analogize the adoption of AI tools to a transition from individual craftspeople to an assembly line, which is a top-down total reorganization of the company (akin to the transition of a factory from steam power to electricity, as a sibling commenter noted [0]). As it currently exists, AI adoption is a bottom-up decision at the individual level, not a total corporate reorganization. Continuing your analogy, it's more akin to letting craftspeople bring whatever tools they want to work, whether those be hand tools or power tools. If the power tools are any good, most will naturally opt for them because they make the job easier.
>The nature of the work and your enjoyment of it is a fundamental part of the compensation package of a job.
That's certainly a part of it, but I also think workers enjoy and strive to be productive. Why else would they naturally adopt things like compilers, IDEs, and frameworks? Many workers enjoyed the respective intellectual puzzles of hand-optimizing assembly, or memorizing esoteric key combinations in their tricked-out text editors, or implementing everything from scratch, yet nonetheless jumped at the opportunity to adopt modern tooling because it increased how much they could accomplish.
I'm sorry, but did you forget what page this comment thread is attached to? It's literally about corporate communication from CEOs reorganizing their companies around AI and mandating that employees use it.
> That's certainly a part of it, but I also think workers enjoy and strive to be productive.
Agreed! Feeling productive and getting stuff done is also one of the joys of work and part of the compensation package. You're right that to the degree that AI lets you get more done, it can make the job more rewarding.
For some people, that's a clear net win. They feel good about being more productive, and they maybe never particularly enjoyed the programming part anyway and are happy to delegate that to AI.
For other people, it's not a net win. The job is being replaced with a different job that they enjoy less. Maybe they're getting more done, but they've having so little fun doing it that it's a worse job.
That’s exactly my point. The fact that management is trying to top-down force adoption of something that operates at the individual level and whose adoption is thus inherently a bottom-up decision says it all. Individual workers naturally pick up tools that make them more productive and don’t need to be forced to use them from the top-down. We never saw CEOs issue memos “reorganizing” the company around IDEs or software frameworks and mandate that the employees use them, because employees naturally saw their productivity gains and adopted them organically. It seems the same is not true for AI.
We are probably on a similar trajectory.
Completely disingenuous, learn your labor history.
... is now the moment to form worker cooperatives? The companies don't really have privileged access to these tools, and unlike many other things that drive increased productivity, there's not a huge up-front capital investment for the adopter. Why shouldn't ICs capture the value of their increased output?
> Of course AI is a top-down mandate. For people who enjoy reading and writing code themselves and find spending their day corralling AI agents to be a less enjoyable job, then the CEO has basically given them a giant benefits cut with zero compensation in return.
This should be a disclaimer every time someone at work forces you to use AI.
Interesting how when WFH became "the norm" during COVID, there were thousands of apologists arguing that employees suddenly received perks for nothing. Where are all of you now? Why aren't you arguing against employer doing a fucking rug pull?
All the tools that improved productivity for software devs (Docker, K8S/ECS/autoscaling, Telemetry providers) took very long for management to realize they bring value, and in some places with a lot of resistance. Some places where I worked, asking for an IntelliJ license would make your manager look at you like you were asking "hey can I bang your wife?".
AI is a broad category of tools, some of which are highly useful to some people - but mandating wide adoption is going to waste a lot of people's time on inefficient tools.
Companies are just groups of employees - and if the companies are failing to provide a clear rationale to increase productivity those companies will fail.
Sure, that's tautological.
But in reality, these don't exist.
If anything, the problem is that management wants to automate poorly. The employees are asked to "figure it out", and if they give feedback that it's probably not the best option, that feedback is rejected.
https://writingball.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-infamous-apple-...
1. All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
2. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
3. There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
4. It doesn’t matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols — doesn’t matter.
5. All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
6. Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.
[0] https://nordicapis.com/the-bezos-api-mandate-amazons-manifes...
Ah, but that is the question, isn't it. Is it bottom up or top down?
Any company issuing such an edict early on would have bankrupted themselves. And by the time it became practical, no such edict was needed.
In most companies, you can't just pick up random new tools (especially ones that send data to third parties). The telling part is giving internal safety to use these tools.
This is simply not true. As a counter example consider debuggers. They are a big productivity boost, but it requires the user to change their development practice and learn a new tool. This makes adoption very hard. AI has a similar issue of being a new tool with a learning curve.
I would have just thought that people using them would quickly outpace the people that weren't and the people falling behind would adapt or die.
I could believe it. Especially if there are big licensing costs for the debuggers.
>the people falling behind would adapt or die.
It is better to educate people, make them more efficient, and avoid having them die. Having employees die is expensive for the company.
Tech loves making something a top priority (and forgetting about it several years later); AI is the first one that is applicable to the masses.
.. Well maybe not User-first. But that was even less clear than AI-first.