Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

bitwize

AI is the much-hoped-for MBA's Stone, the magical substance which transmutes engineering work (costly) into managerial work (valuable).

monarchwadia

The premise is incorrect. Plenty of ICs are enamored with AI. And plenty of executives are skeptical of it.

exolymph

People who will get paid more if AI eliminates jobs (in theory, anyway — execs aren't necessarily owners) versus people whose jobs will be eliminated.

paxys

You must be living in a different universe if you think ICs aren't enamored by AI. Every developer I know basically can't operate now without Claude Code (or equivalent).

try-working

I'm an IC and I love it. Executives have the wrong concept of AI. For them it's chat + magic, and then it does everything. You can't work with people who have incorrect concepts about how the world works. Best ignore them.

ackshuallytho

Devs think it will save time and execs think it will save money. But because time is money, I think all the benefits go to the dev. The exec still needs the dev regardless

booleandilemma

Why would ICs be enamored with something quite literally designed to replace them?

fcarraldo

AI allows executives to spend R&D to create a flywheel which builds more, faster, without hiring more. It makes every individual employee able to deliver more. ICs dislike this because it raises expectations and puts the spotlight on delivery velocity. In a manufacturing analogy, it’s the same as adding robots that enables workers to pack twice as many pallets per day. You work the same hours, but you’re more tired, and the company pockets the profits. Software Engineers are experiencing, many for the first time in their careers, what happens when they lose individual bargaining power. Their jobs are being redefined, and they have no say in the matter - especially in the US where “Union” is a forbidden word.

comrade1234

What's an IC?

SirensOfTitan

I think executives are excited about AI because it confirms their worldview: that the work is a commodity and the real value lies in orchestration and strategy. It doesn't help that the west has a clear bias wherein moving "up" is moving away from the work. Many executives often don't know what good looks like at the detail level, so they can't evaluate AI output quality.

internet2000

ICs are too.

sigbottle

What? Doesn't this boil down to "people like people who reliably get results", e.g., we live in a complicated nondeterministic world but we try and make it as deterministic as possible, except for some reason you focus on the nondeterministic part for managers, and "deterministic" part for engineers? Not even sure if determinism is a good axis to analyze this problem. Also smells extremely like concept creep - do you mean "moving up the abstraction stack" as "non determinism" too?

pron

As someone who's both an IC and leads other developers I disagree with the explanation. As a technical lead, with people I can much better predict the quality of the outcome than with LLMs, and the "failure modes" are much more manageable. As a programmer, I am actually more impressed with AI agents but in an informed and qualified way. Their debugging ability wows me; their coding ability disappoints and frustrates me. I think that the simple explanation for why executives are so hyped about AI is simply that they're not familiar with its severe current limitations. For example, Garry Tan seems to really believe he's generating 10KLOC of working code per day; if he'd been a working developer he would have known he isn't.

kerblang

I'm not gonna say "incorrect" like the absolutists. It's an interesting hypothesis, at least. But I will insist that executives are more driven by FOMO than a teenager.

fooker

The premise is wrong. Plenty of ICs 'enamored' with AI. If you are not, you either have a boring job or do not have any ideas that are worth prototyping asynchronously. Or haven't tried AI in the last ~3 months.

mystraline

IC is a strange relabeling of a "worker". When you analyze this as "Management loves AI" and "workers hate it" goes completely back to 'who owns the means of production?', and can be clearly seen within Marx's critique.

pjmlp

ICs see the teams being reduced as the individual productivity gets increased the amount of FTE per project goes down, and superfluous folks shown the door. Meanwhile executives see the money related numbers go up.

yieldcrv

> I think there’s pretty clearly a divide in AI perception between executives and individual contributors (ICs). Narrator: there is not

01100011

Eh... In my systems programming job ICs have mostly avoided it because we don't have time to learn a new thing with questionable benefits. A lot of my team are really, really good programmers and like that aspect of the job. They don't want to turn any part of it over to a machine. Now if a machine could save us from ever dealing with Jira... That said, I have begun using AI for some things and it is starting to be useful. It's still 50/50 though, with many hallucinations that waste time but some cases where it caught very simple bugs(syntax or copy/paste errors). I think the experience of, say, systems programmers is very different vs python/web folks though. AI does a great job for my helper scripts in Python. Management needs to take their own medicine though. They continue to refuse to leverage AI to do things it could actually be good at. I give a duplicate status to management 3x/week now. Why? AI could handle tracking and summarizing it just fine. It could also produce my monthly status for me.

indistinction

AI has freed me from a vicious cycle that I had been corralled into as an explicit attrition tactic, and which almost ended with me being used non-consensually for reproductive purposes on at least one occasion. It accomplished this not simply by eliminating my overpaid bullshit job as parasite attractor; but by putting an end to its pathetic semblance of a premise: building software to be used by, uh, someone? for, uh, something? The various entities requesting the work (or, in later years, the layers of barely-sentient intermediaries between me and said entities) were hardly if ever clear on how exactly this was supposed to produce value; but now they're free, too! Free from having to even try to understand how answering that question is relevant, emdash - so in the end it worked out for them as well! I am finally at liberty to do something worthwhile with my life, and while at this point I realize it'll take me some time to even remember what "worthwhile" even was (or whether such a thing still exists in your imaginary world of personalized sensory bubbles), I do sleep a rich REM sleep knowing society is now capable of digging its own grave without my assistance. Seriously, I was looking at my bank account and getting a little worried. I am told that mine is a minority position: if you happen to be the kind of person who believes that more is better, no matter more of what , rest assured you and your eventual progeny will be quite safe - for a while, anyway - in your new role as AI trainer (or is it AI fodder, let's let the market decide!) Well, turns out when we are all busy looking the part, it becomes impossible for anyone to actually play the part; but also nobody notices, so this is fine too! Just one request on my part: if possible, do shut up while figuring out how to better turn yourself and our world into paperclips, alright? Besides the ones that you recognize as people, a whole bunch of other people do live on this here planetation - and I hear they find all the AI blather to be mighty annoying.