alt Hacker NewsWhatever happened to "show, don't tell"? Other productivity boosters certainly didn't need such memos; they were naturally adopted because the benefits were unambiguous. There were no "IDE-first company memos" or "software framework-first company memos"; devs organically picked these up because the productivity gains were immediately self-evident.
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Goes to show how infested with disconnected management this industry is.
All the tools that improved productivity for software devs (Docker, K8S/ECS/autoscaling, Telemetry providers) took very long for management to realize they bring value, and in some places with a lot of resistance. Some places where I worked, asking for an IntelliJ license would make your manager look at you like you were asking "hey can I bang your wife?".
Remember when companies all forced us to buy smartphones? Or switch to search engines instead of books? Or when Amazon announced it was "react native first"?
Bezos's API memo is the biggest example I can think of. It was not individually productive for teams but arguably it was very productive for Amazon/AWS as a whole.
There was an Apple memo like this though that said they were word processing first.
https://writingball.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-infamous-apple-...
People will voluntarily adopt modest productivity boosters that don't threaten their job security. They will rebel against extraordinary productivity boosters that may make some of their skills obsolete or threaten their career.
That doesn't work in an environment where there are compliance and regulatory controls.
In most companies, you can't just pick up random new tools (especially ones that send data to third parties). The telling part is giving internal safety to use these tools.
Stock valuation has moved further away from Ben Graham-era emphasis on analysis of cash flow.
>Other productivity boosters certainly didn't need such memos; they were naturally adopted because the benefits were unambiguous.
This is simply not true. As a counter example consider debuggers. They are a big productivity boost, but it requires the user to change their development practice and learn a new tool. This makes adoption very hard. AI has a similar issue of being a new tool with a learning curve.
On the other hand, there were surely memos like "our facility will be using electric power now. Steam is out". Sometimes execs do set a company's direction.
Contract-first. API-first. Domain-driven. Platform driven. Microservice driven.
Tech loves making something a top priority (and forgetting about it several years later); AI is the first one that is applicable to the masses.
.. Well maybe not User-first. But that was even less clear than AI-first.
Productive output is a lagging indicator. Using AI tools is theoretically leading???
20 years ago or so, we had an exec ask us about our unit tests.
Think about the Industrial Age transition from individual craftspeople working on small shops using hand tools to make things into working in factories on large-scale assembly lines. The latter is wildly more productive than the former. If you owned a business that employed a bunch of cobblers, then moving them all out of their little shops into one big factory where they can produce 100x as many shoes means you just got yourself 100x richer.
But for an individual cobbler, you basically got fired at one job and hired at another. This may come as a surprise to those who view work as simply an abstract concept that produces value units, but people actually have preferences about how they spend their time. If you're a cobbler, you might enjoy your little workshop, slicing off the edge of leather around the heel, hammering in the pegs, sitting at your workbench.
The nature of the work and your enjoyment of it is a fundamental part of the compensation package of a job.
You might not want to quit that job and get a different job running a shoe assembly line in a factory. Now, if the boss said "hey, since you're all going to be so much more productive working in the factory, we'll give you all 10x raises" then perhaps you might be more excited about putting down your hammer. But the boss isn't saying that. He's saying "all of the cobblers at the other companies are doing this to, so where are you gonna go?".
Of course AI is a top-down mandate. For people who enjoy reading and writing code themselves and find spending their day corralling AI agents to be a less enjoyable job, then the CEO has basically given them a giant benefits cut with zero compensation in return.