"If you're smart enough to do your job better with LLMs or smart enough to know why that's not happening, you're smart enough to keep it."
Yeah but managers are dumb enough to just arbitrarily pick the staff they want to keep and which ones to bin, when AI starts shrinking workloads, it's the weirdos that get the bullet first, which in an industry full of indispensable weirdos is a bad thing. Managers and higher ups don't sack people that let them win at golf. Know what I mean?
Doing a good job and making a higher ranking member of staff look good are not usually the same thing.
As techies, we need to be finding ways to use AI and LLMs to replace these bellends before they try and replace us. Project management is a big juicy target at this stage. There is absolutely no reason we can't use AI to automate that. Same thing applies to CTOs. Why not make the "technical" part literally true...it can't be worse than the sheer number of human CTOs out there that have never deployed a single box in their life / written a line of code since 1987.
I swear, if I spent less time "bringing them up to speed", I'd probably get a productivity jump in line with using an AI to assist me.
As a person that has worked as a CTO, project manager and general management shadow on and off for many years (which is essentially the same sort of thing as prompting a beta version of an AI trained on a dataset built in the 80s), I'd dearly love it if I could be the shadow for an AI. I'd be doing the same job, but I'd get much better results.
Quite a few of you out there will be working as a shadow and not know it yet...some pointers to help you figure it out.
1) There is an important executive meeting coming to discuss some sort of technical strategy. You aren't invited, but each of the attendees comes to have a chat with you on the sly individually to ask your opinion on things that have very little to do with any of the projects you're working on.
2) You hear the phrase "off the record" a lot.
3) A weirdly high number of suggestions that you make "off the record" seem to get implemented, but never accredited to you.
4) You're low ranking, but basically running the business.
5) You know exactly what was discussed in a meeting without having been there and you start to control these meetings by providing one person with one set of opinions, mostly ones that you placed there to make the person look smart, but a couple that you agree with, and you arm another person in the meeting with counter arguments to cancel out of the fluff you gave the other person, thus controlling the outcome...without setting foot in the room.
6) If these people are being too cagey with information and you can't quite execute a full plan, and you need more details...you engineer the information that you give these people (basically control the meeting to come to know particular conclusion) to lead to them requesting you join the meeting half way through at which point, you gather a little more information and tip the balance where you see fit.
7) People start sweating when you try and book a 2 week holiday.
I swear, I sometimes feel like the BlackAdder of tech...I've always got a young Baldrick that I'm training up and I'm always deploying cunning plans...it's never been limited to just one company either...I've managed this at several businesses. Mostly because the Baldricks tend to move on and eventually become managers, which opens the doors elsewhere for more cunning plans. They don't always work, but they are usually, so cunning you could brush your teeth with them.
As for AI and how it would help in these situations, I'm not sure it would per se...but past a certain level in most tech firms, you'll find that it's already automated to a degree by someone like me.
Remember kids, puppets are controlled by strings from above, but muppets are controlled with sticks from below. Just ask Jim Henson.