I have had a couple conversations where a business guy starts off with a decent idea then he says something like "the cognitive AI module will fill out your expense report after watching you do it for a couple weeks".
What the fuck? If I had the ability to code a cognitive AI module which could do that I would not be building it for you, I would solve self driving and license the software for billions.
Business guys usually comes together and brag about their works. Quite often, they start to talk about things they heard but don’t understand much.
And the other one hear about it, get excited, but also don’t understand much. Then on the meeting, he brought the idea up and convince everyone to do it.
The next you know, you’re pulling your hair out trying to understand what is going on
This happens way too often. They often read a blog that talks about how X was implemented at company Y and mindlessly cite the blog for their own related-but-different-in-important-ways ideas and it’s upto the engineers to fact check the wackiness. It’s not pleasant.
This happened to me recently where a PM shared a blog about someone who had built an “all encompassing multi cloud cost calculator” for their org and had blogged about it. The PM was naturally extremely excited but I asked him to find more details about the tool and if/how that can be used. Turns out even though it was supposedly open sourced it wasn’t really available to just anyone but the author promised he would release it in a month. That was over 6 months ago, no word from the author or PM.
These blog fueled hype trains are extremely destructive. It makes engineering appear trivial. Building useful tool might be easier now but it’s not trivial. And if a tool sounds too good to be true it probably is.
This makes more sense when you remember that being "concerned with reality" for a salesperson mostly means "Getting the commission paid and moving to a different role before everything blows up too badly", rather than "delivering software that meets the sales deal's contractual requirements".
Salespeople are too rarely judged/punished for the disastrus messes they leave behind, and all too quickly judged/rewarded for being able to convince a customer to sign off on a big number without any care for long term implications of that deal...
A few years ago at a small company after a round of golf with some other shmuck, our CEO told us we needed SSO via OAuth, because that's how we can convince people we're secure. How soon could we get it developed? Spare no expense!
We had a single website with an already written to OWASP standards login, no external API or plans for any.
What always drives me crazy about instances like this, is that managers and the c-level seem to be much more willing to listen to some "random" guy or blog over their own people. People they hired, people that have a much better understanding of the issue, the processes and so on.
This effect is by no means limited to tech. And engineers, regardless of type, are by no means immune to that as soon as they reach higher management positions. I have yet to figure this one out. Which drives me crazy sometimes, because my gut tells me that as soon as I did most "problems" I have regarding managment would be solvable instantly.
I think a big worry for any C-levels is "what if my employees are wrong". And there is good reason to hedge against this, because insiders have clear interests in defending past mistakes.
And if you hired your people yourself, you probably know you skipped over some qualified people who were to expensive, and weeded out some overconfident people who turned out not to be all that. In the end, you wonder what those expensive smart people would have said, and you wonder if your confident sounding employees are just overconfident incapables that you failed to weed out.
Hence, getting an outside perspective from someone you trust has a lot of attraction. However, getting that outsider person to be knowledgeable enough, and getting them the right information, is a tough task.
When I was 17 I worked [production] in a sofa factory that made huge profit. They hired every highly specialized consultant available. I asked one of the consultants and some office folk for an explanation (I was paid 3 guilders or so per hours ($1.5)) To my surprise both the consultant and the office folk thought it was a fascinating question and explained elaborately how [to them] it was worth every penny to have written proof for every business process. Investors could point at anything and get a pile of reports explaining exactly why the chosen method was the right one.
(When I left they continued to pay me for months. It struck me just now that cheap employees probably looked great on paper.)
Why they paid me roughly 1.5 USD and the consultants several thousands per hour.
My bad, I originally wrote " They hired every highly specialized consultant available for .... guilders each" but I only hear the price of one and I failed to remember if it was 5000 or 20 000 for a 2 hour chat.
At my last job, about a month or six weeks after starting, the CTO would meet with new devs and ask them if they thought we were doing anything wrong. He was clear “I have to ask you now because in a month it’s gonna seem perfectly normal to you.”
I recall telling him they were doing builds like no one I had ever seen (“Yes we have a plan to change it.”) and and asking why do you use R as the main language for the ETL pipeline (“It makes it easier for data science and we can run it in Spark.”)
In my case, the business guy stubborn and think he know best, many times.
Every times, I told him it wasn’t what he think. For a few times, I let it go, part to let he learn about the reality. I thought he would change the evaluation process. But no, he still stubborn.
I remember at Microsoft, people would need to win an argument with Bill Gate to get their idea approved. Sometimes, it was a really hear arguments. Maybe some people get inspired by this story too much.
I know a guy that works at a company where the CEO will sell something to customers not knowing anything about the technical details, and then come back to the business and "make them do it".
I previously worked for a Dutch fintech company that operated in the same way, but from my understanding they were (probably still are) really quite effective, profits hugely increasing year-on-year.
But this Dutch company also makes use of some kinds of SWAT dev teams that help customers on the spot with issues, making sure the product lives up to the clients’ expectations, even if this means modifying a product delivered by the core dev teams. I.e.: if some feature was promised, but not yet part of the current release, the SWAT team might hack something quickly, often on the spot in the clients offices. Later on, such a hack might be replaced with a proper solution.
Isn’t this the norm? I complained that sales were “demoing new features” to customers before the back-end dev team had even heard of these features. I was basically told to stay in my lane. A property developer making design mockups of new highrises doesn’t run it past the bricklayers first, so why should product/sales talk to us digital bricklayers...
In one sense, great, I don’t want to bother about what a customer’s priorities are. But it turns out that only works if you TRUST the product team.
In my previous job in a consulting company one of the sales people mentioned how this is the first place where he has to sell the project twice: once for the customer, and one for the co-workers who'll work on it.
It was a nice company. Bosses had very limited direct power over the developers and designers, and rightfully so -- it's supposed to be a team of experts, after all.
I had a moment like that once where the product manager said something like "at this stage of the process the software will go off and find the documents specifically relevant to this stage" - and I was like pointing out we could do a search but that might bring back irrelevant stuff or fail to find relevant stuff - he insisted that it would automatically find just the exact documents people would need at that stage in the process.
It was an "AI complete" feature as up to that point it required someone who knew what they were doing to decide what documents were actually relevant - not "close enough".
The product was used for arranging formal approval processes for things like drugs and government contracts - the definition of what documents were relevant was often quite strictly defined in a practical sense but less so in sense that a bit of software could make sense of.
I've been kicked off a project because I couldn't stop talking about training data (they already had) and machine learning algorithms (NLP, text classification) that we could implement right now to start automating a couple of internal processes that are currently pointlessly manual. Think moving incoming e-mail to appropriate downstream support channels.
Not enough magical AI / AGI in there.
The countless PowerPoint presentations built after my departure described processes along the lines of "the AI will detect when you're about to miss your connecting flight and book you into your favourite hotel with your favourite dinner pre-ordered".
Surprisingly, the project survived and now they collect training data and use machine learning for text classification.
Solve self driving? How bout market prediction and just play the market forever. Why would you risk failure when you can just do nothing and make trillions?
If someone offered me AI that drove me to work while I slept or watched movies, or AI that filled out my expense reports, I'd ask if the AI is able to scan the receipts by itself.
Just start a software consulting business. An outsourced programmer goes for $100+ per HOUR. No need to have the initial capital you need for market prediction.
What the fuck? If I had the ability to code a cognitive AI module which could do that I would not be building it for you, I would solve self driving and license the software for billions.