There is a complete lack of courage in the leadership of tech companies today, and top-down AI mandates are just another manifestation.

True visionaries think outside the box, but most tech executives are forcing their employees into black boxes, out of fear of not doing exactly what their competitors are doing.

We have lemmings for leaders, and that means that—much like the LLMs that are being shoehorned into everything—there isn’t room for original thinking. Everyone’s strategy looks exactly the same.

▲ duxup an hour ago | parent | next [-]

There was an amusing post about judging developers based on token usage where some user on HN here was pushing this idea “ICs don’t like it but this is the best way to evaluate” (something like that).

They have a whole management team and can’t seem to find a way to judge or god forbid encourage developers…

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throwaw12 an hour ago | parent [-]

Problem is in management, management usually comes up non-sense metric when they themselves lack of good metric.

For example, everyone talks about strategy, but when you ask them what's our strategy answer is usually something like:

* let's figure out together

* industry changing is so fast, we should revisit plans every quarter

...

	▲	steveBK123 32 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Because the higher up you go in management, the more "strategy" is a Plato's Cave like interpretation of what better/bigger/whatever competitors are doing.
	▲	doublerabbit 19 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Ha. Exactly at my current contract job. "Welcome to the new contractor who will be the artitect our new infrastructure. What is your dream IT setup?" "Yeah, we can't afford that. Lets revisit once you wrangle those 2003 Dell R620's running Windows 2008 with no patching." And that is why after eight months i'm terminating my contract on Friday and swimming back to shore.

▲ CharlieDigital an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm going to offer a contrarian view here:

First is that despite a lot of waste, some innovation will arise from an enterprising employee finding some interesting use case. A lot of the tokenmaxxing is just waste, but out of that waste may arise a small number of genuinely powerful use cases.

Second is that many workers will be entrenched in their ways. If your executive goal is to achieve the above (find innovative ways of using AI), then you need to move everyone to use it. Most will just waste tokens, but someone may find a novel and useful way of using it that benefits the organization. It is difficult to achieve these without forcing people to act since their default is to follow the well-worn grooves.

So mandates like these are a top-down forcing function like a slime mold feeling out different paths to find resources.

Some devs in my org have fully embraced AI; some would not even use AI if not for leadership mandates and linking usage to performance reviews (I know, I think this is stupid, too). I can see why mandates could be useful since some folks definitely won't be inclined to use AI.

▲ KaiserPro 40 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> but out of that waste may arise a small number of genuinely powerful use cases.

Imagine you employ me as a hotel manager, and I come to you and say: "sure I spent all our food budget internationally in three months, and sure I have nothing really to show for it, but for those three months, we had a lot of food fights"

Your manager then goes on to explain they not only need more money to cover the food budget, but also they need to quituple the cleaning budget too.

Oh and the service level has dropped, because not all clients liked being in the middle of a food fight.

However "we might have some innovation in the food delivery system of our hotel chain"

	▲	CharlieDigital 37 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		`> we might have some innovation in the food delivery system of our hotel chain` This is really relative to the size of that innovation, isn't it? `> Imagine you employ me as a hotel manager, and I come to you and say: "sure I spent all our food budget internationally in three months, and sure I have nothing really to show for it, but for those three months, we had a lot of food fights"` This is exactly how startups and VC funding works, isn't it? You have an idea, give you cash to burn to prove the idea and business model. Many teams and ideas fail. But some small number of unicorns produce outsized returns to keep the whole thing going.
	▲	HDThoreaun 12 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Imagine you employ me as a hotel manager, and I come to you and say: "sure I spent all our food budget internationally in three months, but we invented this new dish and now our restaurant is the hottest in town. Sure 95% of the food was wasted but now we can stop the waste and keep the popular dish."

▲ discreteevent 2 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[delayed]

▲ throwaw12 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> some innovation will arise

Absolutely, but most management are not leaders, the moment someone pushes the idea to stack rank based on token usage, it gets approved and some genuine people will be impacted.

Post-ZIRP era proved there are very few strong leaders, before that everyone was behaving like they're most amazing leader because they read some books and raised $10M

▲ vasco 34 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> A lot of the tokenmaxxing is just waste, but out of that waste may arise a small number of genuinely powerful use cases

A lot of monkeys will also eventually type up Shakespeare?

▲ justinparus an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is keeping your company private the easiest way to get around this?

▲ overfeed 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Everyone’s strategy looks exactly the same.

If one is a CxO who's looking out for one's job security, herd-like behavior is the safest option, due to the (near universal) structure of "performance"-based executive remuneration.

▲ AdrianB1 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Lacking not just courage, but also character. Wasting company money on buzzwords and dubious outcomes is lack of character.