“Listen fellas, I’m not sure we can be pals anymore. Not after yesterday.”
– Gaius Julius Caesar to Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus and Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus, March 16, 44 B.C.E.
- Introduction
- Agile has made us gooey
- The arrogance of believing that knowledge is a destination
- The stupidity of being a 10x “engineer”
- Summary
Introduction
This is a post about AI culture, its boosters and its stupidity. Salty language will probably make an appearance. Just to “set the table”, as the cool guys say, I’m not going to talk about its environmental impact or its impact on the economy and jobs. That stuff is all very real and alarming, and serious people already consider them dealbreakers. But not everyone. Not the “engineers”.
I would like to write about something that I don’t find makes it into a lot of discussions about this technology. It’s talked about tangentially as regards its assault on education and critical thinking, but I want to really nail it down with precise specificity.
For anyone wondering, I’m just another asshole on the Internet with an opinion. If you disagree with me, that’s fine, and I don’t really care, b/c that just means you’re dumb. I think, though, that after reading this and taking the night to sleep on it, that you’ll wake up with a bad back.
Remember when we all gleefully mocked Facebook for “moving fast and breaking things”? Once they started to become extremely unpopular, we all agreed that it probably wasn’t a good idea to fuck with people’s trust. This would, after all, kind of make you look like a dick. And, it would be a real dick move.
What happened to all of the knowing glances, the disappointed shaking of heads? Take a back seat, buzzkills, the misplaced confidence is back, and these noobs are fully aroused. The lines of code they can produce and the businessmen they can suck up to is just too much for the “engineers”.
Pats on the head aside, there are good reasons that people should be concerned with what seems like a complete acquiescence of engineering departments to business people. Time was that there was a healthy friction between them, but that has been eroding for over a decade. Engineering leads used to understand that disagreements were a good thing, not something to be avoided. With the absolute surrender to Agile and, by proxy, business, the will of engineering to stand up for itself shriveled, effecting paving the way for mass adoption of AI.
Agile has made us gooey
Agile has made engineering soft and gooey. And pliable, which was the point. It’s made people of usual sound mind use words like “velocity”, “burndown” and “grooming” without any apparent irony, or, especially in regards to the last one, the chumminess of pedophilia.
At first, I thought others in engineering hated the processes as much as I did, viewing them as a “necessary” evil. But, I would then find myself having discussions with teammates who had become true believers. I would try to tell them that it didn’t used to be like this, and they would just look at me with a bored expression and insinuate that I needed to get with the program.
The arrogance of believing that knowledge is a destination
The common counterargument I see that “senior” “engineers” proffer when challenged about their AI use is that they have reached the point where they know how to drive, or something like that. I don’t know.
What I hear is something completely different from what they intend, I’m sure.
The stupidity of being a 10x “engineer”
Ok, guy, let’s assume you’re correct and you’re massively “productive”. Are you also getting a 10x boost in your paycheck?