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0 pointsafpx2mo ago0 comments

It's really insane what is happening. My wife manages 70 software developers. Her boss mandated that managers replace 50% of the staff with AI within a year. And, she's scrambling trying to figure out if any of the tools actually work and annoying her team because she keeps pushing AI on them. Unsurprisingly it's only slowed things down and put her in a terrible position.

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throwaway291302mo ago

Brutal. But probably all too common. One of my clients has very suddenly gone all-in on agentic AI and they're in this crazy hurry. (Probably the most annoying part is they want to automate stuff that I built a POC for using GPT-4o, two years ago - at the time they saw no use for it, but now they're all-in on the hype.)

This started literally two weeks ago and a couple of days ago I talked to one of the admin people who wanted an update on the progress I'd made with sanding off some of the rough edges of the very rough implementation that the managing partner had put in place (he bought a Mac Mini, put OpenClaw on it, then gave it admin access to a whole pile of stuff!) I said I needed a couple more days. "Okay," she said, "but I need this quickly, because we're firing people next week."

They have literally gone from no agentic AI, to discovering OpenClaw, to firing people, in a two-week time span.

When economists say that the predicted job losses as a result of AI have not yet shown up in the data, I'm genuinely befuddled. Either we don't have long to wait to start seeing them, or there's something wrong with the data, because you can't tell me what I just described above is an isolated phenomenon.

I also have to say: I've always enjoyed working with this client, but this experience has been a huge turnoff on a number of different levels.

genthree2mo ago

For a non-tech case of this, my wife worked at a place that fired like 80% of their writers in anticipation of huge speed-ups they expected from LLMs, a couple years ago.

They had to hire a bunch of them back less than two months later. The speed-ups were approximately nil and making the editors edit AI slop all day long had them all close to quitting.

They didn't even wait to see if there were any actual benefits, they just blindly fired a bunch of people based on marketing lies. I can only assume they're the same sorts who fall for Nigerian Prince scams.

justin662mo ago

> Probably the most annoying part is they want to automate stuff that I built a POC for using GPT-4o, two years ago - at the time they saw no use for it, but now they're all-in on the hype.

I’d have guessed the most annoying part would be that you’re assisting them in a hare brained scheme to terminate some people’s employment.

graemep2mo ago

Maybe what they really want her to do is get rid of 50% of her staff and the AI is just an excuse? In that case she should focus on "who can we do without?" rather than "how can we replace people with AI?"

johnnyanmac2mo ago

I'm sure part of this mandatw implied "if you can't show us the numbers we want, you're part of the 50%". And the incentives are set.

komali22mo ago

> Her boss mandated that managers replace 50% of the staff with AI within a year

I bet we could replace nearly all the CEOs in the country with chatgpt controlling a ceo@thatcompany.com email and nobody would notice.

bikelang2mo ago

We’d probably get better outcomes too.

plagiarist2mo ago

For society, yeah, since the AI training corpus is more normal people than sociopaths. Shareholders would be mad, I bet.

theandrewbailey2mo ago

> Shareholders would be mad, I bet.

But think of how much profits will improve by not paying $tens of millions to employ a CEO!

leftytak2mo ago

The assumption that those managers have is that it’s easy to replace tech guys because AI is advancing, and a crap like that nonsense.

Funny enough, I got laid off last month, yes I’m a tech guy, now they apparently regret it because they are now scrambling to find a replacement to do the tech tasks!

TBH, I’m happy I got laid off because I’m finally building something I wanted to use.

PedroBatista2mo ago

They perks and dread of middle management...

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