I'm the first to attack "useless busywork" employees, but my experience at a large, uh, software firm at this time was there were loads of "promo doc"/pet projects going on.
There were plenty of people working very hard on things that had no path to profitability/utility (beyond the attempt to get higher-ups promoted for "showing impact" or "ownership") or whatever. This was paired with incentives at this time for managers to have more underlings.
I have no idea of the ratio of this to "day in the life" TikToks, but there were lots of people working on things that had no utility or time horizon to be "valuable" in the business sense.
I can't ignore the profound degradation in the American standard of living as a contributing factor, especially in the last ~5 years (the recent housing bubble and "transitory inflation" (remember that one?) being disproportionate contributors.
This is paired with the lack of stability in employment seemingly across sectors and general economic uncertainty.
I hear concerns like the following, across social groups:
"I'm 'paid well' but live in this dusty old apartment building that's, at most, 700 sq ft."
"If I lose this job, what's the likelihood I make the same amount to even afford this? How long will the job search take?"
Few other things: I pay more for car insurance now than I did when I was in my early 20s, despite driving a far slower, more pedestrian car. Food prices are laughable, even rent far out from major employment centers is much much more than it was even in the late 10's, etc.
I think all of these are major factors that almost noone is immune from.
Almost everyone I know will express some sort of exasperation and lack of security related to the above. These are not the conditions that motivate people to have kids.
> I constantly get junior developers handed to me from "strategic partners", they are just disguised as senior developers. I'm telling you brother, the LLMs aren't helping these guys do the job. I've let go 3 of them in July alone.
I find this surprising. I figured the opposite: that the quality of body shop type places would improve and the productivity increases would decrease as you went "up" the skill ladder.
I've worked on/inherited a few projects from the Big Name body shops and, frankly, I'd take some "vibe coded" LLM mess any day of the week. I really figured there was nowhere to go but "up" for those kinds of projects.
The problem is that these guys are so bad they can't even understand the requirements to explain to GitHub Copilot what to do. By the time I've written enough detail into a feature for them to do it, I could have done it myself, and they'll still get it wrong.
I do wonder where in the cycle this all is given that we've now seen yet another LLM/"Agentic" VSCode fork.
I'm genuinely surprised that Code forks and LLM cli things are seemingly the only use case that's approached viability. Even a year ago, I figured there'd be something else that's emerged by now.
But there are a ton of LLM powered products in the market.
I have a friend in finance that uses LLM powered products for financial analysis, he works in a big bank. Just now anthropic released a product to compete in this space.
Another friend in real estate uses LLM powered lead qualifications products, he runs marketing campaigns and the AI handles the initial interaction via email or phone and then ranks the lead in their crm.
I have a few friends that run small businesses and use LLM powered assistants to manage all their email comms and agendas.
I've also talked with startups in legal and marketing doing very well.
Coding is the theme that's talked about the most in HN but there are a ton of startups and big companies creating value with LLMs
Yup. Lots of products in the education space. Even doctors are using LLMs, while talking with patients. All sorts of teams are using the adjacent products for image and (increasingly) video generation. Translation freelancers have been hit somewhat hard because LLMs do "good enough" quite a bit better than old google translate.
Coding is relevant to the HN bubble, and as tech is the biggest driver of the economy it's no surprise that tech-related AI usages will also be the biggest causes of investment, but it really is used in quite a lot of places out there already that aren't coding related at all.
LLMs are amazing at anything requiring text analysis (go figure). Everyone I know doing equity or economic research in finance is using it extensively for that, and from what I hear from doctors the LLMs are as good as that in their space if not better
It feels like there's a lot of shifting goalposts. A year ago, the hype was that knowledge work would cease to exist by 2027.
Now we are trying to hype up enhanced email autocomplete and data analysis as revolutionary?
I agree that those things are useful. But it's not really addressing the criticism. I would have zero criticisms of AI marketing if it was "hey, look at this new technology that can assist your employees and make them 20% more productive".
I think there's also a healthy dose of skepticism after the internet and social media age. Those were also society altering technologies that purported to democratize the political and economic system. I don't think those goals were accomplished, although without a doubt many workers and industries were made more productive. That effect is definitely real and I'm not denying that.
But in other areas, the last 3 decades of technological advancement have been a resounding failure. We haven't made a dent in educational outcomes or intergenerational poverty, for instance.
I rarely see this talked about - that H1B inherently creates a power imbalance in favour of the employer. It enables them to stomp on workers’ rights and pay less. All according to plan I’m sure.
Seems to be an issue in the tech industry more so than elsewhere. H1Bs are common in investment banking, management consulting, science labs, university jobs, really any sector where foreign graduates of US universities are hired.
Not disagreeing with the imbalance, but I know about it (I don’t live in USA) because I’ve seen it discussed on HN and other discussion forums quite a few times.
ChromeOS is more than enough for lots of roles. Even for devs (backend, web and android etc) it should be good enough if you have good enough CPU, RAM and storage.
Sure and water is enough for hydration so their cafeteria has no actual coffee or what.
If you'd force me (a dev used to work on a blazingly fast Linux machine) to use this I'd just be inclined to look for a job elsewhere. Not sure if that was in your interest as a corp.
It's not a great line to blur for either side of the business, IMO. Property issues all the way down with power imbalance for flavor. For brevity I'll gloss over the security/liability concerns for BYOD/them...
Here's my anecdote: had to prove I didn't use what was their hardware to create something I released for free. I lost more in frustration alone than that saved. Nevermind the postage.
Time and place matters, as always.
They can provide what they want to monitor. Now: I'll buy a discount device, I won't offer my own.
Quadruple for phones. Say the business wants to call outside of work. It can afford differential, payment for that device, and the plan to connect it. I'll still choose when it's on, human after all.
> Software, as a profession, collectively talks about quality with all of the rigor of joint passing English majors sharing their favorite sections of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Yet people throw around the term "engineers" with reckless abandon for seemingly anyone that wrote Javascript once in their lives. It all strikes me as very silly.
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