"did your boss ever have to send you a memo demanding that you use a smartphone? Was there a performance review requiring you to use Slack?"
In fact I remember very distinctly the Google TGIF All-Hands where Larry and Sergey stood up and told SWEs they should be trying to do development on tablets, because, y'know, mobile was ascendant, they were afraid of being left behind in mobile, and wanted to develop for "mobile first" (which ended up being on the whole "mobile only" but I'll put that aside for now).
It frankly had the same aura of ... not getting it... lack of vision pretending to be visionionary.
In the end, the job of upper management is not to dictate the tools to engineers to drive them to efficiency. We frankly already have that motivation ourselves. If engineers are skeptical of "AI", it's mostly because we've already been engaged with it and understand many of its limitations, not because we're being "luddites"
One sign of a healthy internal engineering culture is when engineers who are actually doing the work work together to pick their tools to do the work, rather than have them hoisted on them.
When management sends memos out demanding people use AI, what they're actually reflecting is their own fear of being left behind in the buzzword cycle. Few of us doing the work have that fear. I've seen more projects damaged by excessive novelty and forced "innovation" than the other way around.
In fact I remember very distinctly the Google TGIF All-Hands where Larry and Sergey stood up and told SWEs they should be trying to do development on tablets, because, y'know, mobile was ascendant, they were afraid of being left behind in mobile, and wanted to develop for "mobile first" (which ended up being on the whole "mobile only" but I'll put that aside for now).
It frankly had the same aura of ... not getting it... lack of vision pretending to be visionionary.
In the end, the job of upper management is not to dictate the tools to engineers to drive them to efficiency. We frankly already have that motivation ourselves. If engineers are skeptical of "AI", it's mostly because we've already been engaged with it and understand many of its limitations, not because we're being "luddites"
One sign of a healthy internal engineering culture is when engineers who are actually doing the work work together to pick their tools to do the work, rather than have them hoisted on them.
When management sends memos out demanding people use AI, what they're actually reflecting is their own fear of being left behind in the buzzword cycle. Few of us doing the work have that fear. I've seen more projects damaged by excessive novelty and forced "innovation" than the other way around.