IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

Noodleface said:

It's all the AI stuff.

We are no longer writing code but rather doing spec driven development. And people doing code reviews are just copy and pasting the AI slop from their agent into the code review. And people are just feeding that to their agent to fix whatever. Then I open a bug ticket and the first comment is 10 paragraphs from someone's AI agent where it thinks it knows what the problem is.

Add onto that the company BS, which I have tried not to bring up too often here but anyone know knows the internals of the company knows, it's super tiring. But this at least isn't new.

I actually like moving up and being in the position im in. I'm just feeling a bit disillusioned by what's going on here and in the industry. There's no way this is sustainable for development.

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This was the last straw with my subordinate. I've posted about him from time to time, but after many tiring years, he's finally gone. I was encouraging him to use AI more. The stupid questions we've rightfully shamed him for, he can ask the AI instead. Now, he won't spend all afternoon resizing his WSL2. Not choosing which stuff can be delete, just how to.

I tried to take your suggestion to heart, so on an MR with a handful of short issues that I brought up, each one is responded to with paragraphs of first person expertise that I know he doesn't have.

A lot of the initial fearmongering with AI was about it enabling some unstoppable entity. It seems, a tale as old as time, that it enables some bad tendencies in humans. I'm trying to be very conscious about where and when I use AI. If only, but certainly not just only, because it seems to upsetting a fair amount of people to the point of quitting the industry.

Initially, I wanted the bubble to pop because I don't like what it's doing to my vidya games. Still don't like that. But now I'm hoping it does because it seems obscene token costs is the only way to force a real conversation about usage.

Deathwing said:

it seems obscene token costs is the only way to force a real conversation about usage.

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It's actually good that nvidia and those other fucks got too greedy too soon, and now people are having to look at the actual costs while there are still workers out there that can dig them out of the hole they created.

TJT said:

You got the guy fired?

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In a manner of speaking, yes. I put him on a PIP for the second time in the 5+ years that I've managed him. He failed it again despite clearly documented goals and weekly coaching. Only this time, the PIP wasn't toothless because I was promised a replacement(I'm still pessimistic on that). My boss wouldn't let me action the first PIP because management at the time wouldn't replace him. And my boss is a packrat and thinks shitty labor is better than no labor.

Trust me, it's not just poorly interacting with a brand new technology. That alone is understandable. I've made some embarrassing blunders integrating AI into my workflow, and I'm pretty sure I'm not done.

It took 3 rounds of review before we figured out why his local AI review of MR was finding drastically different findings than mine. Well beyond the nondeterminism inherent to AI. He was implementing fixes by hand into one repo and then running the review in another repo. In both repos, the target branch was well out of date but by differing amounts.

He's far better off in a blue collar job where he doesn't have to use his brain. AI is making that type of job vanishingly small in tech. That's another reason I was able to action the second PIP. Previously, he was doing hours worth of work. Shitty work full of repeated mistakes, but there was some undeniable value there. After we were bought out and merged with another company, his workload basically vanished because we are generating far less test results daily. And we were able automate a fair amount of it. Thus, he needed to prove himself adaptable to a more traditional developer role and he failed at that.