alt Hacker NewsI just can’t understand why this is not a fireable offense.
Like, I can see getting a strong warning the first time somebody notices you do this, then if you persist you’d have to be let go.
Just like anybody else who is clearly not doing their job.
Why would you tolerate this sort of behavior at your company?
Replies
Because engineers don’t decide on hiring and firing. The managers all have KPIs to transform the org into AI-native. This is the kind of behavior that organizations encourage right now.
I get it’s annoying and I personally hate it but firing someone for it is ridiculous. Are you expecting everyone to rewrite everything from an AI before they share it because that doesn’t sound a good use of company time either.
It seems that this is largely coming from higher ups who are probably (consciously or not) testing the waters for LLMs being able to replace the people they're dumping the walls of text on. I don't mean in any sort of malicious penny pinching scheme either, but simply people wanting to be able to do things quickly and as close to their own demands as possible, while getting rid of the 'middle man.' It just so happens that as LLMs become ever more capable of delivering on e.g. software tasks, software engineers start to become the middle men.
Because it's harder to fire managers. And even harder to fire executives.
Who goes when companies need to downsize? Rarely executives; they'll always find a way to be retained...hell, they're the ones with the power to decide who goes.
How can it be a fireable offense when it's actively encouraged and rewarded?
Let me give you a scenario and see if it is in this same fireable offense line:
An Ops person who deals with company code base but is not a SWE in the code base regularly has to work around issues with this software (They are OPs). However they have read access to the source.
In the past, they see a bug and open a jira with how it was found for the dev team, and it may or may not ever get looked at.
Now ops can point claude to the repo and it can most likely [but not always] find the issue.
So this ops person can do most of the work of reproducing the bug and finding the problem/solution but doesn't understand the code. Should they not produce the findings for someone else to read/validate? Should they go back and just open the ticket the old way?
That would make execs who asked staff to tokenmaxx look even sillier than they already are.
what is often overlooked in corporate culture: if you take a step back, two coworkers refusing to cooperate, regardless of the reason, is a typical "corporate kindergarten" scenario for the manager to take care of.
To avoid rushed or incorrect decisions, conflicts intentionally move through gradual escalation. If someone behaves unprofessionally, for example by submitting a code review they do not understand, the first step is to establish the likely cause.
They may ultimately be at fault, but that does not absolve the surrounding environment. The culture may be toxic, deadlines unrealistic, or communication poor.
The best course of action for someone directly affected by uncooperative coworkers is to avoid assuming ill intent. Get them on a call and let them explain their pull request, however trivial the issue may seem. Even if the gesture is misinterpreted, you still have a far stronger position than righteous indignation.