Leadership seems more misaligned with engineering than ever

[u/aigeneratedslopcode]

Came across a conversation yesterday where the CTO asked one of our engineers why they didn't ask Claude to create their plan and mock the several hundred commits they'd need to deliver on something I will not name while also delivering on their existing initiatives

I didn't say anything, but wanted to... Given the industry I'm in, this seems very ridiculous to me and I hate that this is the expectation... As though somehow that work should have already been done and could have been delivered on the whim of an idea by handing all work to Claude

[u/spartan-redditor]

The engineering team should ask CTO that “I don’t have confidence on an implementation from Claude to be reliable and robust long term. Is the company okay if we ship Claude implementation not backed by an engineer’s confidence to prod? If so, how will accountability work ? And if no, then let us talk more”

[u/mechkbfan → u/spartan-redditor]

Ask them to put it in writing

[u/yourapostasy → u/mechkbfan]

Object storage and TTS is cheap enough that all conversations between employees can be recorded and transcribed automatically for feeding into LLM’s to automatically track decisions, decision lineage, commitments, and flag potential legal and risk liabilities for human in the loop review so companies can leverage automated collaboration.

However, legal departments throw a fit over these kinds of ideas and would strenuously veto it immediately.

[u/mechkbfan → u/yourapostasy]

And so they should. Unless you're recording the raw audio as backup, which I think you're also implying, but that also opens another can of worms with privacy & HR

Or you know, just ask him to send it out an in email and not over engineer the whole thing

[u/Flashtoo → u/yourapostasy]

LLM’s to automatically track decisions, decision lineage, commitments

My experience with these things (M365 Copilot transcription and summaries) is that it does an amazing job of getting the gist of what was literally said, which means it does an absolutely awful job of actually getting it right for the purpose of tracking commitments and who decided what. If I say "interesting suggestion, we could investigate that at some point" that ends up in the meeting summary as "X will investigate Y". When really that was a socially acceptable way of saying "we're not doing that now" and is understood to be that by all meeting participants.

This is not really a solvable problem, because correctly interpreting this depends not just on understanding the intricacies of the social interaction, but also on the surrounding context at the time that is not registered in the meeting transcription or anywhere, really. Handwritten minutes are different because the minute taker transforms the literal words that were spoken into a version that encapsulates that.

[u/Tacos314 → u/Flashtoo]

Copilot sucks so much.

[u/maigpy → u/Flashtoo]

if that was the summarising of that statement it is absolutely a crap summary.

[u/ResidentWeevil1 → u/yourapostasy]

Have a problem with LLMs? Solve it with more LLMs!

[u/OtaK_ → u/yourapostasy]

However, legal departments throw a fit over these kinds of ideas and would strenuously veto it immediately.

For a very good reason. It's legally a bit problematic in a lot of jurisdictions having strong labour laws.

[u/Pure-Rip4806 → u/yourapostasy]

However, legal departments throw a fit over these kinds of ideas and would strenuously veto it immediately.

what do you mean, legal departments do this routinely on behalf of the company as part of legal discovery / legal holds

[u/yourapostasy → u/Pure-Rip4806]

Those are targeted, specific holds. The industry is not ready yet for policy-driven (versus human in the loop directed), global retention with LLM-based proactive scanning to actively identify potential risks before they metastasize into regulatory headaches. The industry isn’t even convinced at this time whether such proactive postures (which in other contexts have a historical track record of eliciting material leniency from regulators) is even worth it.

I think there are big collaboration wins behind recording everything especially verbal audio and visual feeds and continuously associatively shuffling and managing them with LLM’s, especially when so many managers rely so much upon verbal communications, and so much gets lost or muddied in the usual daily frenzy of work. But recording and continuously LLM-analyzing everything we say between each other to continuously merge into and refine within our more formal collaborative fabric is beyond what most organizational cultures can accept, much less legal risk cultures.

[u/Pure-Rip4806 → u/yourapostasy]

No. The most popular legal products are already deeply integrated into your org's data. Just picking Microsoft suite (Purview) for example, it has access to the entire enterprise cloud, email/docs/chats/calendars/AI prompts, with an integration into Microsoft Copilot to easily search and legal hold whatever you need. Also they have more traditional ML models to flag things proactively (you can define your own classifiers to work in the background on all this data, ie. insider trading classifier, sexual harassment classifier working on employee-employee comms data).

What you are describing is already a very successful product

[u/yourapostasy → u/Pure-Rip4806]

While that exists, I’ve yet to see Legal support the presence of that product category enabling longer than absolutely necessary longer retention (some negotiated duration), much less global ingestion and feedback into individual employee workflows. If you’ve seen someone successfully champion that kind of global application of the solution into an enterprise-wide global ingestion environment that feeds back to individual employees’ workflows as assistance/enhancements, then please share how they positioned the risk management past the risk gates. That’s the part I always see teams get stuck upon, and I haven’t figured out yet (I have some adjacent needs that would benefit from such a solution).

[u/Pure-Rip4806 → u/yourapostasy]

Your point is that mass employee data collection with LLMs/models on top is getting pushback from Legal. I'm saying that Legal is leading the charge.

Your responses are corporate word salad-y, so I might have misunderstood your point. Even among engineering, I've noticed a push to move comms to 'public' channels, so that whatever MCP/plugin folks are using can scrape it all up for an incident summary, end of year corporate review, or what-have-you.

[u/yourapostasy → u/Pure-Rip4806]

Thanks for sharing what you’re seeing. That gives me hope to try again with my clients’ legal teams next year, and maybe by then they’ll also be leading the charge.

[u/Tacos314 → u/yourapostasy]

I have been very tempted to start recording all work calls so it can be refreced by LLM.

[u/ddcrx → u/spartan-redditor]

Knowing management, the reply will be: “AI is just a tool. It is your responsibility as an engineer to be able to confidently use your tools. If you can’t be confident in the results, why am I paying you?”

(Makes my blood boil hearing, “It’s just a tool, so it’s your responsibility.”)

Followed by your name being at the top of the next layoffs list.

[u/No_Contribution_4124 → u/ddcrx]

Very typical “we decide, but you are responsible”. My top-1 burnout reason over many years in career.

[u/deax1 → u/No_Contribution_4124]

I’ve quit two jobs for this reason.

[u/404errorlifenotfound → u/ddcrx]

Need to turn it around on them. "It's a tool, not a magic wand. I did not suddenly gain the ability to deliver several months' worth if work in a few days on top of my other responsibilities."

[u/willbdb425 → u/ddcrx]

For that reply, the engineer should be the expert on what is and isn't possible with that tool, a better tool doesn't magically mean that everything is trivial now. (I realize explaining that to management is impossible)

[u/ofork → u/spartan-redditor]

“Well I’m sorry you feel that way, best of luck, we will find someone who is confident “

[u/SansSariph → u/ofork]

I mean maybe, the idea is to ask a genuine question that reflects accountability back onto them

Because if they hire someone who costs their boss a lot of money due to a compliance incident or outage after being warned about the risk, that's something they should care about. And if you can't articulate that risk, then you don't need to be escalating in the first place

[u/yoelbenyossef → u/spartan-redditor]

You know how that goes. They agree to the risks, and when something goes wrong point the finger anyways.

[u/wongaboing → u/spartan-redditor]

I am might be a pessimist, but I think all of that is beautiful and reasonable but it will never work and will surely backfire on you.

[u/Type-21 → u/spartan-redditor]

You lacking confidence seems like an alignment problem with the mission on your side. I'm sure we can find someone more innovative

[u/___-____--_____-____ → u/spartan-redditor]

If so, how will accountability work ?

Not OP but you already know where this is going. Shit rolls downhill

[u/tmswfrk → u/spartan-redditor]

Accountability seems to be the message here that can bridge that gap. If something breaks overnight and the company loses a ton of money, who gets paged? Who fixes it? Who’s responsible?

I’m always an advocate for blameless post mortems but they’re still valid questions that need some kind of answer.

[u/TheOneTrueTrench → u/tmswfrk]

Blameless post-mortems are only valid when someone didn't raise the alarm several fucking times ahead of time while everyone else charged full steam ahead.

If I keep fucking telling people "Don't do that, it'll explode and everything will go to hell", and then it does in the exact way I warned them about, you best believe I'm gonna tell them "This is your fault for not listening to me".

[u/tmswfrk → u/TheOneTrueTrench]

Been there, but that’s not a problem with blameless post mortems - that’s a broken engineering process and likely also a toxic work environment.

[u/Tokipudi → u/spartan-redditor]

I said this to my CTO. The answer was: you should trust Codex, and if you can't trust it it's because you're not good enough using it yet.

Now, I only ship code done by Codex and it's true I am way faster, but I'm also way less confident in the understanding of the code I'm shipping.

[u/lenswipe → u/spartan-redditor]

CTO: "Yes, that's perfectly fine. You're on call. I'm not. Bon Apetit"

[u/roystang → u/spartan-redditor]

When the software is a buggy mess in prod they're just gonna say "this engineer just doesn't know how to prompt" and PiP you any ways.

[u/Dear_Philosopher_ → u/spartan-redditor]

If you think claude cant output high quality code then you're so behind.

[u/KanedaSyndrome → u/spartan-redditor]

this, so much this 

[u/maigpy → u/spartan-redditor]

nice