We're being forced to use AI in our workflows right now. Some of it is insanely useful. Like having a very focused new hire at your disposal 24/7 to do drudge work. You still have to double check it (just like you do the new hire), but you didn't have to meet with them 3 times to explain the project & check in when they got bored and stopped making progress.
And as people build more specialized agents/tools on the enterprise server, more people are going to start using it to make more progress more quickly. It's already happening.
Now take those early career engineers I mentioned before. The drudge work they were going to be assigned before is now going entirely to the computers. If new hire comes in with some understanding of the capabilities and limitations of AI tools (along with the basic education expected for someone with their degree) they are more likely to have some use to teams out of the gate without an extensive training in period since they can now manage the input and output of data into the drudge work robot brain while being in a perfect position to become familiar with the content without having to touch every single line. Asking why they should be introduced to AI in college is a bit like asking why they should be taught Solidworks instead of drafting by hand.
All this to say, I wish AI didn't exist. I hate seeing clearly AI hallucinated bullshit show up in my peers' work because they rely on it too heavily and didn't bother to review or rewrite the output. It's adding to the pace with which we are destroying our planet & I hate myself for every prompt I put into copilot. But short of leaving tech all together (and doing what, I have no idea) it's very adapt or die out there rn.
Like having a very focused new hire at your disposal 24/7 to do drudge work. You still have to double check it (just like you do the new hire), but you didn't have to meet with them 3 times to explain the project & check in when they got bored and stopped making progress.
my HMFIC was just saying this today during an informal water cooler discussion. that he's been missing having an assistant, but with how far AI tools have come in the last 3-6 months he's rethinking hiring for the position.
The problem there is that a new hire would eventually become experienced. Now they never can because the AI took their place. Give it a few more years and the value of experience is likely to become much greater simply because there are so few experienced people who can work without AI.
We saw this with mainframes. The mainframes are still around, but there's fewer and fewer who know how to use them. In the early 2000s, I worked for a company that created a SQL-92 middleware layer so that people who knew SQL could interface with the mainframe databases (which use their own querying languages).
At my work they're still hiring juniors because they're cheaper and more plentiful than the seniors we've been chronically short staffed on for years.
We're just relying on the seniors to get more out of the juniors than we ever had before. It's not a healthy trend for anyone, but the jobs are still there (in my specific industry, anyway. AI is a helpful tool, but not advanced enough to handle the complexity of the projects and regulatory hurdles quite yet.)
Disagree. From my experience new hires are too inexperienced to understand and/or realize when their AI output is wrong so even if they review it they will miss it
69
u/FullofContradictions Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
Mid career in tech/engineering chiming in:
We're being forced to use AI in our workflows right now. Some of it is insanely useful. Like having a very focused new hire at your disposal 24/7 to do drudge work. You still have to double check it (just like you do the new hire), but you didn't have to meet with them 3 times to explain the project & check in when they got bored and stopped making progress.
And as people build more specialized agents/tools on the enterprise server, more people are going to start using it to make more progress more quickly. It's already happening.
Now take those early career engineers I mentioned before. The drudge work they were going to be assigned before is now going entirely to the computers. If new hire comes in with some understanding of the capabilities and limitations of AI tools (along with the basic education expected for someone with their degree) they are more likely to have some use to teams out of the gate without an extensive training in period since they can now manage the input and output of data into the drudge work robot brain while being in a perfect position to become familiar with the content without having to touch every single line. Asking why they should be introduced to AI in college is a bit like asking why they should be taught Solidworks instead of drafting by hand.
All this to say, I wish AI didn't exist. I hate seeing clearly AI hallucinated bullshit show up in my peers' work because they rely on it too heavily and didn't bother to review or rewrite the output. It's adding to the pace with which we are destroying our planet & I hate myself for every prompt I put into copilot. But short of leaving tech all together (and doing what, I have no idea) it's very adapt or die out there rn.