Execs thirsting over AI is killing my passion for software engineering
Posted by abbys11@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 130 comments
Hi all,
I work at a search engine giant as a software engineer in privacy. We worked on our privacy product over the past 4 years, launched it in beta and it was ready for production. Suddenly our head of cyber security comes out and says that "People used to care about privacy in 2019 but now they want AI" so they decide to kill our product and repurposed the org on adding LLM malware to the product instead.
I get that it's a job that pays the bills but I enjoyed every role I had before this one. This one too, I loved the people I worked with and the product. But I can't deal with constant top level buffoonery.
The job market is absolutely brutal, even more so in Canada. I remember being approached 10 times a day on LinkedIn at some point and now everywhere I interview, apparently I'm competing with someone with more experience than me while simultaneously accepting significantly lower pay.
FML
xaervagon@reddit
One thing I've learned over the years is that tech trends aren't marketed to you, the software engineer, they're marketed to your boss, the paycheck signer. Ever since the automation revolution, the messaging has gone from "look at all the cool stuff you can do" to "look at all the workers you can fire," and workers are the most expensive part of a business. Usually trends like these either blow over or find a small niche, but the techbros that own the industry have way too much money invested to let it phase out now.
That said, I'll agree with the rest: you're taking this job personally and it's not doing you any favors.
thekwoka@reddit
Really true in every industry.
vom-IT-coffin@reddit
I too remember the low code revolution.
Key-Boat-7519@reddit
Don’t take it personally; treat the AI pivot like a business constraint you can either shape or use to plan your exit.
Since bosses buy outcomes, talk their language: cost, risk, time. Pitch a 6-week spike with a clear metric (e.g., cut manual review by 30%) and a guardrail plan: PII redaction, consent checks, audit logs, and a kill switch. Tie privacy to AI value: on-device inference for sensitive flows, minimization and data contracts for training sets, and a red-team plan for prompt/response leaks. If they still hand-wave, set a 90-day exit ramp: ship one measurable win, get references, and aim for a niche (privacy + ML governance). Two tight case studies beat a long resume right now.
At my last gig we used AWS API Gateway and Kong for governance, and DreamFactory to quickly expose REST over legacy SQL Server so an LLM PoC could ship without new microservices.
Bottom line: shape the pivot or use it to leave, but don’t tie your identity to the exec whim.
WrongThinkBadSpeak@reddit
This time the retards signing the checks think they'll be able to replace their highly specialized and capable workforce that enabled them to have what they have in the first place and the entire edifice will crumble once they realize what they're doing and it's too late.
nullpotato@reddit
It's a fine line balancing care for the craft and staying invested enough to enjoy what you do versus not taking dumb business decisions personally.
eggplanthead123@reddit
Same here brother (or sister).
It’s very cringe and I hate how it’s being thrown in our faces every single day.
The only people who are embracing AI and drinking the kool aid are the ones who would be safe if AI were to displace engineers.
I genuinely hope it all crashes
budding_gardener_1@reddit
lol the ones who are thirsting over AI are the ones who (ironically) are the MOST replaceable by AI (mostly higher level execs who don't do anything)
pydry@reddit
If theyre replaceable by a drinking bird then GenAI isnt going to see them off, even if it theoretically could.
budding_gardener_1@reddit
It's funny because it's true - the further up the tree you go, the less useful you are, the more replaceable by AI you are, but the less likely you are to ACTUALLY be replaced by AI
michamarremarremarre@reddit
It seems the Dilbert Principle is still valid.
AstopingAlperto@reddit
I have so many people like this in my org and they are continuously making things so fucking bad it’s remarkable we have any customers left.
budding_gardener_1@reddit
I bet they can synergize and take things offline like you wouldn't believe
AstopingAlperto@reddit
They prefer the Arborists guide to management. Keep making cuts until this shit falls over.
IngresABF@reddit
I think/hope there’s a reckoning coming with the MBA-driven efficiency drives of the past however many years. With shift-left cybersecurity stuff we now understand much better that resiliency and risk is impacted when we under-provision. Surely the same risk profile applies to human resourcing
AstopingAlperto@reddit
It’s all cyclical.
Lolthelies@reddit
Replaceable doesn’t mean they’ll be replaced. They’ll still fart in each other’s faces and pretend it doesn’t smell so they’ll still be safe while we’re in line for bread chatting about how replaceable they are
RegrettableBiscuit@reddit
Yeah. Most of them are already not doing much of value right now, and yet they are here, so I doubt an LLM will replace them, regardless of how much better it can do their job.
pheonixblade9@reddit
if executives get replaced by AI, who will massage the egos of the board and have three martini lunches with their buddies?
SamsonAtReddit@reddit
It will crash. I use it, Deepseek for getting some functions and boilerplate. So I'm not anti AI.
But it will crash! Because the economics of it currently don't make financial sense. The capex is like 10x or more revenue. For example, Sam Altmann is saying we will need 1 trillion in investment in 10 yrs. So 100 billion a year. For a company that makes 13 billion in revenue? Not profit, revenue. As per what they are saying, spend 8x every single year of your revenue? None of this make any financial sense. At all.
Either the cost significantly get dropped soon. Ie, none of this capex spend and some miracle cost per query go down.
Or that 20 dollar sub to ChatGPT is going to 2000 a month.
Counter argument would be, well Amazon didn't make money for like 10 yrs..yeah, but the dot com bust happened. Every else went bankrupt, and they could survive. But I still lived dot com bust when everything went to shit for like 5 yrs in IT.
treesofthemind@reddit
So who are the ones who would be safe? Delivery managers? Surely they can be automated too
eggplanthead123@reddit
Management who make absurd amounts of money and can quit tomorrow if they wanted to because they have enough saved for retirement.
Oo__II__oO@reddit
We're getting calls to use AI from entry-level non-developers who thinks because they use Gemini to help them pick a restaurant, they can shoehorn their way into the prod codebase to implement AI suggestions and supplant the engineers. Of course when it all blows up in our faces, the legacy code developers will shoulder the blame (despite not being responsible for the muckup), while newbies pad their resumes and jump ship to the next opportunity with the "developer" feather in their cap.
Zebu09@reddit
I love privacy more than AI.
That's such a shame...
circalight@reddit
Thank your lucky stars you never had execs who were passionate about blockchain.
Alwaysafk@reddit
How can we blockchain the cloud? Think about it!
RiPont@reddit
Your balls... as a service.
kenybz@reddit
…I’m listening
PileOGunz@reddit
We need a blockchain based big data lake to store our LLM on the cloud we can then use micro services to provide access to the shopping cart which suggests products
RegrettableBiscuit@reddit
Wait, if an AI just blockchains products into a shopping cart, do we even need customers?
notfulofshit@reddit
With autonomous decentralized agents.
Alwaysafk@reddit
Fascinating, can you give me a swag on how many points that would be? We have some capacity in Q4, hey do you think it would support NFTs?
GoreSeeker@reddit
I'm thankful my execs were like "We've heard about the big interest in blockchain, but we don't think it has any place in our company".
sarhoshamiral@reddit
Can we combine blockchain and AI somehow :)
abbys11@reddit (OP)
Believe me they talked about it at the very least
achandlerwhite@reddit
Interesting that your head of cyber security makes that kind of decision in your company.
Fit-Chance4873@reddit
Not surprising. AWS added API keys to make their “llms” more accessible. The API keys can bypass traditional IAM.
abbys11@reddit (OP)
Yep. It was quite ironic. The crazy thing is that they were quite decent as a director but lost the plot as soon as they became a VP
malln1nja@reddit
The Peter Principle in action.
AchillesDev@reddit
Yes, definitely not a reason to re-evaluate your priors.
milkChoccyThunder@reddit
$$$
RegrettableBiscuit@reddit
"People used to care about privacy in 2019 but now they want AI"
And by "people", he means "investors", right? Because I don't know any real person who is excited about getting "AI" shoved into every damn thing.
HenryJonesJunior@reddit
No advice, just another +1. I'm also employed by a search engine giant, and my amazing competent director has transformed into
while (true) print("Can we use AI here to speed this up?"). After a reorg we left a senior director known for diving into specs and asking hard questions about whether the stack was solid with one who seems to care most about being able to say our team is using AI.It's exhausting and it's demoralizing. Within the last week I've been told that my top priority was to write a doc explaining how we could launch the big thing that my team is doing for the next year, to drop that and move onto a prototype to show we could do thing X to convince the VP to ignore the team that claims that they can use AI to make an X (that doesn't do 90% of what we do or scale to 10% of our size, but I digress), and then when I was landing the prototype was told that the prototype/demo didn't matter if we couldn't say we used AI - never mind that my part of the prototype was essentially transforming 10-80 foos where each one takes me less than 5 minutes by hand, there are a lot of one-off edge cases, and it is literally slower to both write and execute if I try to shove AI into the process.
But here I am, working late hours to try to get a demo using AI ready for Friday morning (which I was intending to take as vacation), stressed out by the constant randomization, trying to keep my head down and not get a reputation as someone who "doesn't believe in AI" and all the while looking at our schedule and saying "we're already behind, why do you keep randomizing us every week".
I often say "at least they pay me enough to put up with this shit" but these days I'm less and less sure, especially if this never-ending meat grinder of randomization, demands for acceleration, and chasing buzzwords pushes me closer to a literal heart attack.
fire_in_the_theater@reddit
i wish i could join a software co-op that just didn't have useless bullshit pushing execs ...
Intelligent_Water_79@reddit
I mean..... its just borrrrrinnnnng
EverBurningPheonix@reddit
What kills me is majority ai engineers today dont even know linear regression lol
j-e-s-u-s-1@reddit
I built a cool decentralized product built around on Swift and Rust - using QUIC and cloudless, all investors and founders trying tell me - what kind of AI agents can you add so it makes me do A,B…Z easily. So its AI all the way right now. Nothing else sells. The fun is gone.
abbys11@reddit (OP)
Oh neat. I am a maintainer on said giant's QUIC/H3 stack
mysteryweapon@reddit
Jokes on them, I always hated software engineering lol
Dragon_ZA@reddit
It's a harsh reality we all have to face at some point. You get paid to do your job. You won't be the first or the last person to be stuck in a job they don't like because of a rough market. The reality is that you either make peace with it, or work hard at landing something you are really passionate about.
fourbyfourequalsone@reddit
This is the exact discussion I had with my friend. The reason why I liked software engineering more has been growing less and less as years went by. With AI, it's at the rock bottom.
At the end of the day, it's still the one job I would want to do to earn money. Just like how I want to earn money, businesses also value the impact I create.
In an employee friendly job market, businesses will care about my passion. I don't think we will ever see such a market anymore.
Thaetos@reddit
These markets still widely exist, but mostly in blue collar jobs.
wiseflow@reddit
This same sentiment is echoing across industries right now... execs chasing the next shiny AI trend while real builders take a back seat. There's definitely some use cases for these tools of course, but the narrative is tiring.. and it's disheartening when meaningful work gets bulldozed by buzzwords. The hype cycle always cools, and when it does, the people who actually understand the craft are the ones still standing.
jeremyckahn@reddit
$$$
abrandis@reddit
This, work is work, unless you have direct ownership stake in a company and have authority to set policies or make strategic choices, your just a passenger in the SS. Worker Bee.
If you have an intellectual itch you want to scratch , open source is still a thing plenty of projects to contribute to
Calkky@reddit
FWIW, the way the execs are behaving here is nothing new.
The way SVPs/CxOs are fawning over AI today is no different than what they were doing, say, 15 years ago around the mythical notion of "technology." I worked at a company that was nearly single-handedly destroyed by a dipshit CIO that seemed to have a mythical belief in tech as some sort of universal force that could be harnessed in equal measure by any and every engineer. I think you can see where this is headed: he gaslit himself and the other execs into believing that devs were merely vessels for the mysterious force of "technology." With this in mind, why not hire an army of H1Bs for the cost of a small team of seasoned (ie expensive) pros? As I said, he nearly burned the company to the ground before the board caught wind of what was on the horizon. Tens of millions of dollars spent, and ZERO product delivered. The snake oil consulting company he hand picked to spearhead the initiative was pushing an architecture that was outdated before we even started implementing it. His failure has reached legendary status in the IT community, and he eventually had to leave the state. Without divulging too much, he went from a highly-touted CIO to being a bog standard Accenture Project Manager. And this was after being out of work for nearly 2 years.
What I'm seeing these days from chucklehead execs is similar, but a tad more focused. They really think LLMs (which they seem to believe encompasses all "AI") are much greater than what they are. Hilariously (and frighteningly) enough, most of them truly have no idea how any of it works. A lot of them (most of them?) believe that the entire system can live in their phone. They don't have any inkling of how much compute it takes to answer even a simple question. Whether the LLMs-as-AI-gods fad will die off is anybody's guess, but I think the understanding is spreading that AI (as it's being sold to us) is hilariously janky and broken.
NegativeSemicolon@reddit
It’s their secret internal desire for slave labor
sol_in_vic_tus@reddit
Not really a secret IMO
kokanee-fish@reddit
There are literally companies building human-shaped AI slaves that will do rich people's household chores https://www.figure.ai
Cute_Activity7527@reddit
Elysium here we go. So for rich ppl we are 20-30 years away from „why cant you just die poor ppl, I have robots to replace you”..
This is going to end very very badly.
Sheldor5@reddit
but nobody talks about it ...
egodeathtrip@reddit
everyone talks about it
HK-65@reddit
They do actually, it's just that media sanewashes it.
OneCosmicOwl@reddit
Not even labor, they want us out of their companies. We've become a nuisance to them at this point. It's really incredible how much things have shifted in IT the last years. I think it's partly elites resentment towards one of the few career opportunities that gave people some bit of social mobility.
NegativeSemicolon@reddit
Well yeah, I mean AI is the new slave labor. Cheap, exploitable, doesn’t complain, always agrees with their masters.
chipper33@reddit
When regular people started showing up at: luxury restaurants, ski resorts, golf courses.. “the plebs are in my spaces, we need to shift the market and make it all unaffordable again”
I bet that’s what really set things in motion.
budding_gardener_1@reddit
"gotta keep them dirty poors out of my private club while I rob the country blind"
Objective-Knee7587@reddit
I feel you. Patiently waiting for the bubble to burst
RedditNotFreeSpeech@reddit
Late stage capitalism. Even the hint of something that would allow cutting workforce is a wet dream for all these psychos.
Caramel-Bright@reddit
We have management unironically talking about vibe coding and even vibe working like that's something to be respected by professionals.
Absolutely mind blowing a meme is being taken as a productive path forward by mid and upper management.
To top it off all the ladder climbers are focused on politics and not learning about LLMs so they make the mistakes and observations of someone who's used one for an hour.
Sorry no good news where I work either 😆 I just collect my paycheck and work with the people around me who I like.
Good luck, hope you find some peace :)
Sheldor5@reddit
my solution was always to leave and find another (hopefully better) company
it's your choice, weak people tend to just shut up and die inside for the safety of the job
Euphoric-Neon-2054@reddit
Hey just out of interest (genuine question) what do you gain out of calling strangers 'weak' online? Not a rhetorical question, does it make you feel good to shim out generalisations that insult people who don't need it? Doesn't really matter to me so much as I also just leave jobs that suck but just curious about how this type of personality works.
Sheldor5@reddit
because those people only care about themselves and don't want anything to change so everything stays the same and very likely it gets worse
imagine a bad place where alot of people/the whole team/department quits if the company does something immoral or unethical ... but no, better stay quiet for the sake of having a job/salary (you can pay your bills but f*** all the people your employer harms)
oiimn@reddit
Hey just out of interest (genuine question) what do you gain out of policing someone’s speech on an anonymous site? Not rhetorical question, does it make you feel good to sit on your high horse.
If people can’t be honest in an anonymous website where would they be able to. FYI: I agree with you calling these people weak is wrong, I think a more appropriate adjective would be lazy, like the one for you would be condescending.
Euphoric-Neon-2054@reddit
More interesting behaviour; jumping to the defence of someone being called out directly for being openly passive aggressive. Unclear incentive for doing so, strange to believe responding to an insult is ‘policing’.
Internal reflection required.
oiimn@reddit
The original person was not being passive aggressive, he was just being aggressive. The "policing" comment has to do with how you were passive aggressive, when you could have just called him out without the overly verbose pseudo-inquiries (genuine question).
Euphoric-Neon-2054@reddit
So your problem is not their aggression but my response to their aggression.
Come on, dude. Sounds like you’re policing my response.
Be well.
seg-fault@reddit
I personally think it's valuable to call out toxic attitudes when you see it. Why allow someone to normalize shitty viewpoints unchallenged?
I think it's disingenuous to frame it as "policing" - nobody's being silenced. People are welcome to be honest, and if their honesty is offensive to someone, it's hypocritical to suggest that the slighted individual should remain silent and not let their view be known.
seg-fault@reddit
+1
Are you weak if you're a parent with kids and no free time for take-home assignments or cramming for bullshit leet-code challenges? Or someone with health conditions and not a lot of energy for a job search?
This individualistic attitude we see exhibited above shows very little in the way of worker solidarity. We shouldn't have to find a new job to improve our working conditions - this is one of the more compelling arguments for collective action I can think of.
Natural_TestCase@reddit
Same.
j816y@reddit
OP: I am earning more than everyone else in the market in a company everyone wants to get in but my project got cancelled, FML.
Leave then, take the pay cut and work for whatever you are passionate about, nobody is stopping you.
abbys11@reddit (OP)
I want to, nobody's hiring. Not in my city
j816y@reddit
Take a pay cut, like you mentioned. Go for a startup, whatever that you are passionate about.
If you want the big paycheck, that's fine too, just don't lie to yourself about it is about passion and not about the money.
I don't know about anyone else but I wouldn't care about the work at all if I don't get paid.
abbys11@reddit (OP)
It is definitely a bit of both. I nearly tripled my pay from my startup to this job and work quite a bit less. But it's soul crushing. I'd gladly take a 20-30 percent cut but idk if I could that much more
j816y@reddit
then, keep the job, suck it up. you get what a lot of people wanted already. a job is a job, the whole purpose of a job is that you work in exchange for a paycheck. "liking your job" is overrated.
if i were you i would stop being brainwash by those nonsense. you got the money, which is the most important thing in the modern society. use that money to do whatever you want. your employer doesn't owe you anything else like "providing a task that you like".
if you are really passionate about developing certain product, then develop it yourself.
watergoesdownhill@reddit
I hate to say it, but with this attitude, you're not going to last that long in development. The tides change every five to ten years. 90% of the technology I was an expert is now considered obsolete.
This one's just a big one. At least as big as the internet. If you like writing code, you should just surf along and be fine. If you're just there for the money, just try to make the best of it, maybe move to management.
abbys11@reddit (OP)
You're not wrong. I really enjoyed every job I had before this. Even this one, I loved my colleagues and people I directly reported to.
This job helped me pay off my student loans and I'm grateful for that. But I miss delivering real, impactful work and worse is having it shafted for buzzwords and hype
hw999@reddit
its the same cycle we went through with outsourcing. Give it 3-5 years, they will need real devs to clean up the mess, just like last time.
nullpotato@reddit
Think I prefer cleaning up obviously bad outsourced code versus the insidiously, subtly bad AI stuff.
i_eat_manga@reddit
Drink the cool aid. I realise that this is also an art. How to provide stupids what they want even if it is shit
ryanvalentin@reddit
I got laid off in July but I was ready at that point because leadership was shoving it down our throats. It's gotten worse since then, rewriting the performance expectations with extra emphasis on AI output. On top of that, our industry was one that is dependent on Google to a degree and the "old ways" of using the internet, so leadership was freaking out about future prospects (but completely unsure about what to do other than fire people + talk about AI).
I'm not against the technology - I use it. I think it makes me more productive. What I don't like is all the BS surrounding it right now. We have company leaders thirsting to replace workers, and desperate to add AI products to keep their valuations high, investors convinced it's going to 10x GDP, and developers fearing for their jobs scrambling to stay on top of this whole mess.
I'm hoping for this bubble to burst, so that we can get back to focusing on actual productive use cases for AI and not be corned and told what it can do under veiled threats.
nesh34@reddit
AI can be incredibly useful and help productivity but it does take some skill and noise to make it useful.
The maligned incentives and hype detract from that, rather than add to it.
N8erTat@reddit
Same on everything you said, but also to me, the satisfaction of doing my job is also down. The constant push to vibe code means I'm babysitting AI instead of actually getting the satisfaction of solving problems myself.
HotTemperature5850@reddit
This is the part I truly hate
erraye@reddit
I think the issue I have is that I’m interested in machine learning, I think there are interesting ai solutions that companies could explore. But I think there’s a significant amount of people who don’t really have the vision or foundation to think about more than vibe coding.
anonymous_ape88@reddit
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPj6HTlkgO7/
ryuzaki49@reddit
Yeah I think that's true. Soon people will want Meta AI to give recaps of their private messages, fuck privacy
Hziak@reddit
Competing with someone with more experience who will take lower pay, but also doesn’t exist because “there are no job seekers anymore” according to that company.*
Yeah, it’s always been this way with top level execs. A friend of mine who was a CEO and retired in his late 30’s explained it to me thusly: if the CEO gets on the %insert latest tech craze% bandwagon and it flops, he says “the whole market was doing it, our team just didn’t pull it off.” But if he doesn’t blindly follow his competition and they pull it off, the board holds him accountable for all the lost opportunities not being a brainless flunky could have earned them.
I think it’s still dumb as hell and entirely unforgivable mismanagement. But it was an attempt to give some insight into the golf and Rolex world of being a professional “leader” instead of a value contributor…
cjthomp@reddit
AI is annoying, but for me it's the thirst for having devs waste time filling out journals and writing toward arbitrary goals and effectively interviewing for their own job every quarter.
That shit is infuriating.
jordynextdoor@reddit
TBH, there's a whole industry now of developers just fixing shitty AI-made apps/tools. Maybe open up your business.
Clyde_Frag@reddit
I doubt they’d have scrapped the old project if it were making money hand over fist for the company. Unfortunately, the era of low interest rates is over which means profit>growth unless the initiative has AI in its name.
I think a lot of devs want the status quo to stay the same from the COVID years but that wasn’t real life or sustainable. Anything not entirely aligned with leadership’s goals is going to get scrapped.
abbys11@reddit (OP)
The project was about PR, not money. Now that AI gets more PR than privacy was getting during the COVID era, that's where they're headed
confused_scientist@reddit
I've been feeling the same way and it's difficult to find job positions that aren't touting AI use in some way.
It's surprising the amount of people that are willingly deluding themselves into thinking they are more productive using AI or making their products better by injecting it everywhere. In my experience, the developers that use AI lack basic understanding of design and cannot communicate the benefits and tradeoffs of their decisions. They are just adding tech debt and degrading system performance with each merge. Every single one of those PRs is a nightmare because I might as well ask AI why it did what it did rather than the PR author because the author is incapable of telling me. I hope that when these devs are on call and have to respond to a page that something clicks in their head when they have to read the slop they and their coworkers are merging into the code base. Realistically, they'll just paste the page body into ChatGPT and merge or do whatever it vomits out though.
It's a plagiarism machine that vomits out slop of others' actual labor while destroying the environment and communities. The people promoting its use lack critical thinking and, assuming that AI will replace software engineers, are ignorantly training their replacement with joy and bells on their toes. They'll become so reliant on it to do their job that when the price of tokens inevitably increases, just like streaming, they'll cough it up because they have to.
Can't wait for this bubble to pop and the shaky foundation it provides for our economy to rest on collapses. /s
menckenjr@reddit
He's really wrong, I think.
WeHaveTheMeeps@reddit
Well the implication is that you’ll work really hard then they’ll kill your career field which was one of the few high paying careers with a lot of job openings.
It’s depressing as fuck.
aidencoder@reddit
I mean, there are plenty of smart people at OpenAI, Stanford, MIT, ... that are actively working to better automate software authoring.
It's a bit more than an implication at this point.
Pttrnr@reddit
i'm without a job and it's unlikely i'll ever work again, so i just do Software Things that are fun and i learn about all the things i never got to do. Architecture, Projects, new langauges, etc.
aly5321@reddit
I feel the same way. I work in data infra and felt immune to trends for a while, but lately we are explicitly being told to prioritize requests from AI teams over everything else, causing us to constantly reprioritize and shift gears. I was told to keep the rest of my year open in terms of projects because more asks will come. This is so stupid.
internetuser@reddit
OOC how do you know this? It’s not usual for hiring folks to discuss other applicants IME.
abbys11@reddit (OP)
Because the recruiter literally told me that. They told me I had great feedback for interviews but went with someone else
internetuser@reddit
Did they tell you that the other applicant had more experience and accepted a relatively low offer?
nrith@reddit
They could be lying.
internetuser@reddit
Did they tell you that the other applicant had more experience and accepted a relatively low offer?
latchkeylessons@reddit
It's beyond annoying and just destructive at this point. However, I would say to make the best of bad situations it is pretty easy to turn the gaslighting around on "AI" with executives because they have no clue what "AI" is anyway. You can pretty easily just tell someone "AI" is doing something for them in whatever it is you're building and just... do whatever you were going to do anyway. I've seen a few good engineers and product managers do this well over the past couple years to keep things coasting along smoothly while their executives were blissfully ignorant with AI "doing things" while the teams just keep programming away like they always have. It's going to be the exceedingly rare executive that knows how to ask the proper questions to look deeper.
Independent-Fun815@reddit
I'm not sure why u're so high and mighty. Olno offense but u see a cost and and the end of the day u are just a cog in a machine that must make money for its shareholders such as yourself.
Developers these days are so self righteous. I don't see u asking to take a pay cut to work on products u believe in. Or quit ur job to work at a company u believe in. U are selling yourself and services to a company at the company's term.
shelledroot@reddit
I'd 100% offer an discount if the product I'm working is a net positive for the world. I'd say about 20% is on the table depending on the impact the company/product is making.
Sheldor5@reddit
so OP has no free will and isn't allowed to have an opinion?
just leave ... you are clearly a manager or ceo ...
Independent-Fun815@reddit
Ofc he can have an opinion but when his opinion is to paint his company in a bad light, I'm asking who's going to take his post seriously.
It's one thing to do with op does. U protest Google's contract with Israel and get fired. That shows me a real man with conviction and honesty. Not w/e this is.
Sheldor5@reddit
well the world/society is shit because of such am attitude ... nobody cares about the others anymore or risk something and do the right thing ... all you care about is paying your bills ... but at what cost?
adenzerda@reddit
I don't know if you're highly invested in that shit, but the bubble's going to pop, man
t0m4_87@reddit
Like, your comment?
Ok_Slide4905@reddit
Been there, it sucks but remember your job is to build things that other people own. They get to decide what to do with the fruits of your labor.
Go to the bar and have a cold one for the project, then move on.
lakesObacon@reddit
Yeah, I was a layoff because of an AI thirsty CEO a few months ago and it did not feel good. If we don't change and move with the tech we'll get stomped into the ground and left behind, though. I'd suggest leaning into it. I've already put a bunch of "intermediate AI" garbage in the Skills section of my resume to try and improve the SEO of it. Remember, nowadays even recruiters are using AI to filter resume stacks and sort out candidate funnels. So, my plan is to lean into the game that the so-called "thought leaders" are playing. I can understand how to pander to the buffoonery at the top for now as a survival mechanism and maybe on the other side of all this have some viable skills that stick around and skills that I can throw out the window two years from now.
travelinzac@reddit
Adapt or become obsolete
cachemonet0x0cf6619@reddit
It’s a cycle. I do think there is some validity to having some machine learning agents in the logs and a few other places so it’s a better suggestion than usual.
CupFine8373@reddit
They pay you to get the job done not for your Passion.
t0m4_87@reddit
who hurt you
ColumbaPacis@reddit
They pay him to build trashware.
Which will not make the money back they paid him for.
But that is not new, huge amounts of software is trashware. His own previous project was thrown out after all, and he actually endjoyed that one.
In the end, neither this one nor his last is actually meaningfull. No matter which one he enjoyed, both likely made no impact at all on what actually mattered: the business.
Sheldor5@reddit
we are still humans and your argument tells me you have the wrong job
CupFine8373@reddit
well, yours tells me you are touchy touchy dev, back to the keyboard,