People who disagree at all levels of seniority have been made to leave the organization.
Practically speaking, there's no sexy pitch you can make about doing quality grunt work. I've made that mistake virtually every time I've joined a company: I make performance improvements, I stabilize CI, I improve code readability, remove compiler warnings, you name it: but if you're not shipping features, if you're not driving the income needle, you have a much more difficult time framing your value to a non-engineering audience, who ultimately sign the paychecks.
Obviously this varies wildly by organization, but it's been true everywhere I've worked to varying degrees. Some companies (and bosses) are more self-aware than others, which can help for framing the conversation (and retaining one's sanity), but at the end of the day if I'm making a stand about how bad AI quality is, but my AI-using coworker has shipped six medium sized features, I'm not winning that argument.
It doesn't help that I think non-engineers view code quality as a technical boogeyman and an internal issue to their engineering divisions. Our technical leadership's attitude towards our incidents has been "just write better code," which... Well. I don't need to explain the ridiculousness of that statement in this forum, but it undermines most people's criticism of AI. Sure, it writes crap code and misses business requirements; but in the eyes of my product team? That's just dealing with engineers in general. It's not like they can tell the difference.
1) The new feature does not follow the existing API guidelines found here: see examples an and b.
2) The new feature does not use our existing input validation and security checking code, see example.
Once the following points have been addressed we will be happy to integrate it.
All the best.
The ball is now in their court and the feature should come back better
This is a politics problem. Engineers were sending each other crap long before AI.
In the past I’ve hopped on a call with them and where I’ve asked them to show me it running. When it falls over I say here are the things the system should do, send me a video of the new system doing all of them.
The embarrassment usually shames them into actually checking that the code works.
If it doesn’t then you might have to go to the senior stakeholder and quietly demonstrate that they said it works, but it does not actually work.
You don’t want to get into a situation where “integrate” means write the feature while others get credit.
> People who disagree at all levels of seniority have been made to leave the organization.
So either they're right (100% AI-generated code soon) and you'll be out of a job or they'll be wrong, but by then the smart people will have been gone for a while. Do you see a third future where next year you'll still have a job and the company will still have a future?
These are exactly the kind of tasks that I ask an AI tool to perform.
Claude, Codex, et al are terrible at innovation. What they are good at is regurgitating patterns they've seen before, which often mean refactoring something into a more stable/common format. You can paste compiler warnings and errors into an agentic tool's input box and have it fix them for you, with a good chance for success.
I feel for your position within your org, but these tools are definitely shaking things up. Some tasks will be given over entirely to agentic tools.
Very reasonable nowadays, but those were things I was doing back in 2018 as a junior engineer.
> Some tasks will be given over entirely to agentic tools.
Absolutely, and I've found tremendous value in using agents to clean up old techdebt with oneline prompts. They run off, make the changes, modify tests, then put up a PR. It's brilliant and has fully reshaped my approach... but in a lot of ways expectations on my efficiency are much worse now because leadership thinks I can rewrite our techstack to another language over a weekend. It almost doesn't matter that I can pass all this tidying off onto an LLM because I'm expected to have 3x the output that I did a year ago.
It's best to sniff out values mismatches ASAP and then decide whether you can tolerate some discomfort to achieve your personal goals.
You’re much better off mixing both (quality work and product features).
I buried the lede a bit, but my frustration has been feeling like _nobody_ on my team prioritizes quality and instead optimizes for feature velocity, which then leaves some poor sod (me) to pick up the pieces to keep everything ticking over... but then I'm not shipping features.
At the end of the day if my value system is a mismatch from my employer's that's going to be a problem for me, it just baffles me that I keep ending up in what feels like an unsustainable situation that nobody else blinks at.
Yes? In the same way any victim of shoddy practices is "part of the problem"?
I know a lot of people who tried playing this game frequently during COVID, then found themselves stuck in a bad place when the 0% money ran out and companies weren’t eager in hiring someone whose resume had a dozen jobs in the past 6 years.
I hope you get the privilege soon
You can should speak up when tasks are poorly defined, underestimated, or miscommunicated.
Try to flat out “refuse” assigned work and you’ll be swept away in the next round of layoffs, replaced by someone who knows how to communicate and behave diplomatically.
They clearly were not advocating for flat out refusing.
