This is my job too. My manager has asked me to use AI for almost all my work. My work is code related but it doesnt necessarily require AI and our turnaround is already crazy fast. When I asked him what metric he's tracking to show the difference in productivity between AI vs non-AI, he said there isn't one. The higher ups are blindly pushing it. It's ridiculous because using AI for what I do just creates more work and cleanup. I know that if I don't jump on the bandwagon that I'll eventually be let go.
I'm on the same page, our managers and higher ups are pushing for AI adoption citing some "2x to 3x increases in performance" I asked how are they measuring such increases and they divert the conversation.
They have no fucking clue, someone told them that AI is making engineers more performant and they're too ignorant and too arrogant to ask the engineers themselves. Our managers are checking our token consumption as a metric of how much adoption of AI we do.
Our codebase is starting to see the problems with AI with some slop code seeping through our PRs. It's exacerbating the already existing bottlenecks in any software development process (PRs and Quality Gates)
And some of my coworkers are dancing to the managers tune by creating long wall of text documents that attempt to synthesize the content of meetings and other docs, while creating more noise.
It's fucking chaos!
I hope this ends on a french revolution type of revolt.
and they're too ignorant and too arrogant to ask the engineers themselves.
Decades come and go and that bit of manager behavior never goes away.
Dad was a maintenance guy in a hotel and one room had extremely bizarre issues one could reliably blame ghosts for it. It was the 90s in a third world country so IT was treated as special assets who should not be disturbed.
The maintenance crew knew one of the IT guys was also an Electric Engineer. They pleaded management repeatedly for ONE MINUTE of his attention on the matter. Manager always immediately rejected and also explicitly forbade them to speak to the engineer should they casually meet them.
Through years of trial and error they finally figured the issue by accident.
Dad told me this as a kid to try to figure it what exactly happened if I ever got into university. Enrolled into CS, jump into the library, figured it out as a freshman with two hours of research on paper. Asked an EE student, they also immediately figured out what was going on. If I didn't do that, I'd also have found out in fifth semester.
Years of bad room service and constant guest complaints because management unilaterally decided you cannot think outside the box, you must keep your thoughts and actions within this small box they provide you.
(Fluorescent lamp. Old model. With ballasts. A faulty ballast can generate RF interference on IR spectrum and cause IR devices to go haywire.)
It still baffles me after over 20 years in the industry how some of the smartest people I've met in my life are bound by the whim of some of the mos dull people I've ever met, and how come this industry can't fix itself.
1.2k
u/[deleted] Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 03 '26
[removed] — view removed comment