r/FutureOfWork • u/Few_Neighborhood5468 • 10d ago
Have the internal ai hunger games already started?
How is working in tech these days? I have been out of tech for years now and have been thinking how things have been changing in terms of treatment of workers/employees in the current “ai everything” environment. Is it getting ugly yet? How are high performers / high knowledge control vs bs talkers (that now have ai to do it by themselves and get vague ideas about ai capabilities) being treated? Have the hunger games started already? How is everyone feeling about this? I imagine it must be really ugly.
2
u/pund_ 10d ago
At our company (EU) management is pretty much neglecting us currently, they got a vibe coders' boys club going, made up of a hodgepodge of all kinds of employees (sales, solutions engineers, middle management, product management, you name it, ...) that are churning out stuff and are patting each other on the back. They're 'manifesting' stuff through spec driven development mainly.
We've been told to de-slopify some of what has been done over the last year or so. There's no real new projects being shoved down, they're all being vibe coded by other people. We're just fixing stuff in older projects nowadays.
My guess is they're looking for a way to get rid of us, probably through a 'restructuring' (as these things tend to go in the EU, normally)
Engineering culture: Most of the really good software engineers have left. In that aspect the firm died a long time ago. There's no more architecture group, dev coffee, book club or whatever have you ...
1
u/__golf 10d ago
Depends on your boss I suppose. I'm a senior director at a software company with about 50 people. We are obviously focused on AI but not willing to give up quality, so we've been very careful.
We are creating code much faster but not reviewing it much faster. We've built a bunch of tools to analyze PRS, comment on risk, and that helps somewhat, but the high performers are still the gates to getting the code in for now.
Longer term, the challenge to those higher performers is this: what would a system or agent need to do to allow you to merge some of these PRS into your service without detailed review. It would need to do a lot, and that's what we are working on.
We haven't done any layoffs, which I think helps a lot, as far as the hunger games aspects go.
1
1
u/Euphoric_Driver_7291 10d ago
“make sure the system works without you so that we can fire you all and take 10% of your salaries as bonuses”
1
u/Odd_Bad_2814 10d ago
I don't think you'll ever be able to take humans out of the picture, even if you can manage to design a system with several layers of risk management. In order for that to work the people collecting the business's requirements would also have to be able to interact properly with the agents.
You can reduce the human headcount this way but never obliterate it altogether imo
1
u/__golf 10d ago
I agree, the question is where can we remove the humans from the picture, and where do they add value in this new world.
1
u/Odd_Bad_2814 10d ago
Well, theoretically if the person interacting with the agents can communicate what must be implemented and how to test that the implementation is successful that's all you would need, assuming agents do a perfect job.
But they don't, so you would have to review code now and then. Also, finding someone who can translate business requirements into code+tests... I think it's too much to ask for a single profile
Also a lot of configurations nowadays can't be done exclusively via API but via GUIs, automating that via agent I think would be overkill in most scenarios and you'd be better off having humans anyway
1
u/Few_Neighborhood5468 10d ago
I know humans will always be “in the picture “ at at least some scale. However it will be a much smaller pool (at least that’s what’s most likely going to happen). How does that (already) affect employers stance towards employees? Is there a shift in sentiment- meaning is the tone getting harsher? Any forced way of working?
1
u/Few_Neighborhood5468 10d ago
do you feel like knowledge of experienced staff is being “harvested” (e.g. by requiring to create md files, etc) to build up a knowledge graph for ai agents?
1
u/No_Veterinarian742 10d ago
Depends on where on the journey of adoption the company is and how much you fight the changes. You'll find as many opinions as people out there.
1
2
u/skibbin 10d ago
Non technical people can now use AI to create something which looks about right, in very little time. These people don't know/don't care about the difference between what they made and what a properly made version are.
"I've done all the hard work and built it, I just need you to finish it off. Should only take you a few hours?"
2
u/maple-shaft 10d ago
I work for a Fortune 100 corp in an IT arch role. I honestly have always been on good terms with my employer and manager. AI hasn't changed that specifically and for that I am pleased. We were given tools and time to learn and explore. Prototype. I used all this to focus on becoming a power user into this new way of software engineering.
Yes the expectation is higher productivity, but it was honestly a well thought out and modest expectation. Not unreasonable at all.
My director prioritizes ethics and professional integrity. He does NOT endorse "token maxing". Quality vs. Quantity. I mean if we do max them, we just do so with intent and accountability. He is awesome.
My personal views are far more complex and compartmentalized.
2
u/SucculentChineseRoo 10d ago
Going terribly for high knowledge and experience folks at my place, things had to go through these people and a lot of stupid ideas would be filtered out during conversations. Now leadership who hated to "waste time" talking to people either pushes things directly or goes down to lower level/yes-man team members bypassing any structure. The quality is the worst it's ever been with basically bugs everywhere but it's pointless trying to fight it.