Yet management always seems to miss the institutional knowledge, and experience, that also walks out the door laying off those 1,100 people 'late in their career'...
It's not possible to cram 25 years of experience into two.
If they actually miss it they can call it back to work for triple the going rate.
They usually don't though. Those left behind have to figure it out again with whatever new tools they have at their disposal, thus continuing the great circle of corporate life.
Or corporate death if they don't figure it out in time and it is actually important. But even then, the management won't miss anything.
https://techtrenches.dev/p/the-west-forgot-how-to-make-thing...
(Has some AI tells though, probably AI-assisted?)
That’s great in theory, it rarely works in reality. Those people almost universally find new work quickly because they’re good, or retire because they can.
In both instances the idea of going back to bail out a company that just screwed you, operating with a giant target on your back when the inevitable next layoff occurs, isn’t worth it for 10x the salary. Ignoring the fact a business of any significant size isn’t approving paying someone to come back for 3x, they’ll just caN the manager for the fallout.
LLMs are a great tool, but more often than not it does show if the person using them knows what they're doing or not pretty clearly. Especially if it's anything larger than a trivial small change.
The problem is that "I copied the issue on claude code and then committed the code it produced" is not actually taking ownership.
> noone appreciates the years spent "googling and looking at stackoverflow" anymore, and frankly, they shouldn't be.
Well, I do, and I hard disagree with you there. If the human does not understand what the machine is producing, then I need a different human.
Having said that, and feeling more with you than the other guy, there is nothing for you to "disagree" with.
Mediocre was always buggy and broken in some ways, but for all intents and purposes it was good enough. Today somebody with a year of study can reasonably deploy something - for which the appearance of taking ownership and shipping a full stack of features has reached the bar of good enough.
Consider 10 years ago: Did you believe it was more likely that in the quality-distribution-of-software that we would, over time, create proportionally more quality? I dont think so and AI didn't meaningfully change the trend.
It changed the work dynamics, and still is changing, and with our inability to communicate is going to be an annoying mess.
Dont let the annoyances blind you to what LLMs can do for your point in space, or to where most of the points lie for the rest of the world.
This is contextual on a number of factors. It seems difficult to establish in the general case.
I'm not sure if it matters or not in management. I believe it does in engineering.
Hired as a code monkey, fired as a code monkey.
Give the new people 6 months to benefit from all that institutional knowledge.
Or the exact opposite. Not every institutional experience is good and useful. Some are quite the opposite. I mean, term limits are one of the most common democratic institutions for precisely this reason. We WANT some knowledge and experience to walk out the door.
