Comment by phaser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phaser | Hacker News Reader

I've seen it worse: A team of employees have an entry level engineering job, and work as a bridge between support and the "core" engineering team. They just talk to customers when an issue is escalated, and maybe it will submit a hotfix PR but when the issue must be escalated further the instructions are to send it to the higher-ranked team who will make it part of the next sprint.

At every all-hands meetings, core team gets to present, gets to showcase the new features, gets celebrated for "going the extra mile" for customers.

But the real extra mile, is the patience, empathy and thoughtful communication (which is a rare talent, really) of the entry level engineers, who are also humble and nice to be around with, being the only ones who contribute positively to the company culture, as opposed to the ego-tripping 10x engineers.

Management thinks they are absolutely replaceable. Even more, when the concept of "AI agent" appeared on their radars, they were the first people who they thought they're gonna replace.

But the real reason to replace them is to please investors who don't wanna be behind the AI-efficiency-hype. They can't be promoted to a core team, because where's the efficiency in that?

Even more, when the concept of "AI agent" appeared on their radars, they were the first people who they thought they're gonna replace.

I worked on a project where they replaced virtually all tier-1 customer service reps with an AI chatbot, which worked ok, because 90% of those calls are things like "what's my balance" and "I need a replacement credit card", which an AI can competently navigate. Phase 2, I was informed, was to replace Tier-2 with a chatbot, so the only time a human has to get involved was the most complicated problems. SO MUCH MONEY SAVED AMIRIGHT?!?

So I asked, in the middle of this giant kickoff meeting, "if you get rid of tier 1 & 2 reps, how are you going to train up the tier 3 reps who know enough about how things work to handle these most-complicated problems?". After an extended silence we got "we have a plan for that but we can't go into it just now". Sure you do.

The plan is to replace the tier 3 reps too

> how are you going to train up the tier 3 reps

iterative feedback loops using memories for context, of course. just like they trained the first two tiers

Where are the feedback loops for customer issues that haven't arisen before, or happen very infrequently. The existence of a tier 3 is for problems that aren't an everyday occurrence. Further, these are often all or partially 'people problems', not 'technology problems'.

Do you need to do tier 1 and 2 work before tier 3?

If they are structurally different, and there’s a way to train people directly into tier 3, then it doesn’t seem unreasonable to automate t1 and t2 as from my experience the vast majority of the tickets are either simple or repeated workflows. Taking the idea to the limit, you’d automate all tiers, and have the ai escalate to the individual teams within the company for any truly meaningful edge cases

I feel sort of the same about SWE, which is much more complex, but juniors can ostensibly grow into seniors with AI

If it wasn't clear, I'm talking about CSRs who deal with people, not computers.

> Management thinks they are absolutely replaceable. Even more, when the concept of "AI agent" appeared on their radars, they were the first people who they thought they're gonna replace.

This is the way of the world. I want to bet on making myself replaceable, and move on to the next job to be done. It's fun. It's obviously valuable.

I'm good at my job. I crave new things to learn. My nature is to tune everything to work in as boring of a way as possible. I want to be the grandma with a single finger on the "creampuff" Cadillac steering wheel.

A grandmother driving down the road in a Cadillac doesn't look like someone who has conquered her world, but unless a manager looks deeper, they won't see it.

I firmly believe that companies who are smart about software, which is mostly "less is more", are about to use their new superpowers to out innovate the big boys. It will be like pg's writings on blowing away the online store competition with lisp-ninja-ism.

Good management values the people who align themselves with the company, and smile and help the customers. Bad managers manage software at surface level.

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