In other words shareholders and senior management are being shown the appearance of expectations about AI being met, whether or not it's working. Entry-level jobs are an obvious place to look things that can be cut to create an AI budget.
Now he gets asked: if a junior can do the work why aren't you using AI? So instead of opening the req he says to the team "we need to figure out how to make AI do more."
All of these executives are operating under the pretense that they won’t be held accountable when in 10-15yr their middle bench is a disaster, and they’re probably right.
Can’t wait to see what horseshit is next.
If everyone's middle bench is a disaster, there's no one that did it right to contrast their poor decision-making. They're hiding the evidence that will help them skip accountability.
As another commenter mentioned, they’ll all get their performance bonuses, and by the time the bills come due either they’ll be gone, or no one will know why in the hell they’re in the situation they’re in.
Middle bench decay is like some sort of complex immune deficiency. No one can quite put their finger on what’s wrong, but the org can’t pull its collective head out of its ass.
For many companies this happens naturally as it progresses from the dynamic operating environment of high competition to one of maintenance. Staff levels bloat and after a while no one has a grasp on the big picture and the institution forgets why it’s doing what it’s doing.
What’s amazing to me is that these companies that are lighting their hiring process on fire are willingly accelerating this process.
Kitchen potwasher, day labourer, apprentice welder etc none of these entry level jobs are affected by an LLM. But nobody on HN works in those industries.... connection maybe?