FOMO, US tech monoculture, complicit tech media hyping AI, actual religious AI believers, C-suites looking for short time gains, fear of investors‘ backlash, etc

They never use data to make decisions. I used to ask my managers for ROI analysis on new features they wanted to work on and they would stare blankly at me like I was speaking a foreign language. These people do things by "instincts" and for optics not because they've done any kind of analysis. Its easy for departments to be inefficient if your company is making billions of dollars per year. The million dollar losses go unnoticed.

I'm not convinced that they needed to be conned. That assumes that they're normally able to correctly make this type of decision without a dedicated effort to trick them. (Not saying there wasn't any dedicated effort, just that they're capable of making decisions with similarly poor judgment on their own)

Things have moved from "no one got fired for buying IBM" to "no one got fired for buying AI".

Fully red pilled, I literally cannot believe the rhetoric I’ve been hearing inside major companies.

The goal is to deskill the labor of these workers. If there is a threat of a replacement which can bypass the cost of creating a new skilled worker, then the workers lose their bargaining power. It doesn't matter if the threat is a bluff so long as it is believed enough to give leverage.

At least in my company the CFO came back after talking with other CFOs and then used Lovable to build an app. He then mentioned to his immediate team who then picked it and started running with it. It is now one of the yearly goals. The fun part is when it came time to put money where their mouth is they say the company has no funding. So more FOMO.

there is no measurement of ROI

my company spends millions a year on tokens and when asked about ROI the CTO just says "LoC is up! LoC isn't a good measure of productivity but it's a measure, right? right?"

It could also be that business conditions provided a convenient opportunity to run some experiments.

They were conned because there’s been a massive top down propaganda campaign at the highest levels of corporate America that GAI is right around the corner.

For years many in management believed our value to the company was "just" in our ability to produce code. You could see it from how they would "resource" projects and write job descriptions and manage. The output of the job, to them, was code written / bugs fixed / features implemented. In organizations like this, software was a cost centre, and it was treated that way.

LLMs can write code. They're actually pretty good at it. So problem solved, right? Cost centre cost reduction. Bam!

In reality the more competent in the job were really good at understanding business problems and holding domain specific knowledge, working with the other people on the team to translate that into a problem a computer could solve, and with understanding and diagnosing what was happening in the broader system, not just in a "program."

Someone needs to write the prompts given to the LLMs and decide if what they came back with even makes any sense. Someone needs to respond to pages in the middle of the night. Someone needs to be able to look at the system and have a bigger picture understanding of how it fits with the business' needs, etc. etc. That's a software engineer.

I honestly think not enough in middle and upper management really understand what software development actually is.

"everyone! emergency! we need AI yesterday! we're going to do a company wide hackathon!"

"everyone! ship ship ship! make production ready versions of what was triaged from the hackathon! nnnowwwwww"

"everyone! wow 80% correct, prompt engineer it to be stricter.... and with a bigger model! wow 98% correct! this whole division is made redundant!"

"everyone! its not 98% accurate and even if it was, thats a huge set of errors given our volume!"

"everyone! our AI bills have skyrocketed! they're charging us differently because we're an enterprise! kill the AI, kill the AI"

It's almost as if success in business has nothing to do with creating actual value in our society, but instead engaging in a death cult ideology of share value maximization, and that means that reasonable people are out competed in this social system by brain dead ideologues or something.

These execs suffer from over confidence in their own abilities.

Thats partly why they get so far.

Most executives are complete imbeciles when it comes to the actual work their organizations do.