Hacker News Reader

Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

No surprise. People like being more productive when they reap some of the benefits of that increased productivity. If you're expected to be 10x more productive but don't get a raise, all you're doing is stuffing money in some executive's pocket while your job security goes down.

View on HN

I'm being heavily consulted to advise management on culture change towards AI. And my number one message is this: make the number one, first and potentially only beneficiary of AI use the individual staff members themselves. If they have more time now, DO NOT start filling that with more work for them to do. If they do more all by themselves accept it as a bonus (experience says this is overwhelming what will happen anyway). Whichever way it goes, let them experience directly the benefit, and let the culture change happen organically downstream from that.

I think all these companies front-loading staff reductions are actively sabotaging themselves in the worst possible way in this regard.

I would love to hear more about your advice and the coaching you are giving to management. We also have a strong push to prove evidence of climbing productivity with clearly state future staffing goals. I would like to advocate for this, at even partially, enhancement and quality of life improvement for IC folks.

It starts with the generic pitch around culture change - "culture eats strategy for breakfast" style. Then a bit of shock and awe around how extensively AI is going to redesign business processes in the long run, leading into an argument about it being a marathon, not a sprint and at the moment everyone is treating it like a sprint, the real winners will be those gearing up for endurance. Then structuring the pathway: personal productivity as a cornerstone ebbing into pilots of implementation in areas highly aligned with AI capabilities minimised risk - all as preparation for the main game which will ultimately redesign core business processes in an AI first way.

I will say I am a bit of an outlier. I see others mostly pitching for things like small teams of "AI Champions" etc. I don't favor this because I think it will lead to dysfunctional outcomes (people trying to make the initiatives fail because they weren't "chosen" etc). So I pitch for the broad based, whole organization journey etc. But it does require a strong argument for acceptance of a slower pace of externally visible adoption.

This.

I’m in a dreadful situation right now. Everyone in team got a claude account, but I’m a contractor so not for me (the only dev in team of 25 consultants). Someone in the team assigned me a task to review claude skill that opens up tickets for me. I’m not even using claude and official policy is no AI use for development…

Otherwise it’s been mixed bag. Pace definitely picked up and things that I actually enjoyed doing (UI) it does very well. Things that are actually hard (backend logic) it sucks and painted me in corner too many times.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com