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Comment by nilkn | Hacker News Reader

People will voluntarily adopt modest productivity boosters that don't threaten their job security. They will rebel against extraordinary productivity boosters that may make some of their skills obsolete or threaten their career.

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You have to remember that our trade is automating things. We're all enthusiasts about automating things, and there's very clearly a lot of enthusiasm about using AI for that purpose.

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.

That’s simply not true. Developers hand-writing assembly readily adopted compilers, accountants readily adopted spreadsheets, and farmers readily adopted tractors and powered mills.

That's false. Those things were in fact resisted in some cases. For instance, look up the swing riots of the 1830s.

There might be a temporary resistance from violence but eventually competition will take over. The issue in this case is that we're not looking at voluntary adoption due to a competitive advantage - we're seeing adoption by fiat.

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.

The competitive advantage belongs to companies, not engineers. That's exactly the conflict. What you're predicting -- voluntary adoption due to advantages -- is precisely what is happening, but it's happening at the company level. It's why companies are mandating it and some engineers are resisting it. Just like in the riots I mentioned -- introduction of agricultural machinery was a unilateral decision made by landowners and tenant farmers, often directly against the wishes of the laborers.

A well run company would provide an incentive to their employees for increasing their productivity. Why would employees enthusiastically respond to a mandate that will provide them with no benefit?

Companies are just groups of employees - and if the companies are failing to provide a clear rationale to increase productivity those companies will fail.

I'm sorry to say this, but the company does not need employees to respond enthusiastically. They'll just replace the people who resist for too long. Employees who resist indefinitely have absolutely zero leverage unless they're working on a small subset of services or technologies where AI coding agents will never be useful (which rules out the vast majority of employed software developers).

Oh, they can certainly do that (in part evidenced by companies doing that). It's a large cost to the company, you'll get attrition and lose a lot of employee good-will, and it'll only pay off if you're right. Going with an optional system by making such tools available and incentivizing their use will dodge both of those issues and let you pivot if the technology isn't as beneficial as you thought.

> A well run company would provide an incentive to their employees for increasing their productivity.

Sure, that's tautological.

But in reality, these don't exist.

I don't disagree that they're quite rare now - but they used to exist and we could make them exist again.

Your examples are productivity boosters that don't threaten job security. A human has to provide inputs to the compiler, the spreadsheet, and the tractor.

The tractor, or more generally farm automation, was maybe the biggest single destruction of jobs in human history. In 1800 about 65% of people worked in agriculture, now it's about 1%. Even if AI eliminated every single computer programmers' job it would be a drop in the bucket compared to how many jobs farm automation destroyed.

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