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It feels like we all signed up to be ICs, but now we’re middle managers and our reports are bots.

I forget where I saw this (a Medium post, somewhere) but someone summed this up as "I didn't sign up for this just to be a tech priest for the machine god".

Someone commented yesterday that managers and other higher-ups are "already ok with non-deterministic outputs", because that's what engineers give them.

As a manager/tech-lead, I've kind of been a tech priest for some time.

Which is why it's so funny to hear seasoned engineers lament the probabilistic nature of AI systems, and how you have to be hand setting code to really think about the problem domain.

They seem to all be ICs that forget that there are abstraction layers above them where all of that happens (and more).

> and our reports are bots.

With no gossip, rivalry or backstabbing. Super polite and patient, which is very inspiring.

We also brutally churning them by "laying off" the previously latest model once the new latest is available.

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