LLMs are the first technology I've experienced where there's a lot of top-down pressure to adopt it ASAP. Most other technologies in my career, like VCS or static analysis or whatever else were championed by colleagues or peers.
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Something similar was going on with cloud a few years ago. The story was if you get cloud you can get rid of those expensive infrastructure people and it will all be so much more reliable. So the big boss gets a cloud strategy and foists it on those lower down. There's also pressure to be an on-trend boss. If all the other boss' are getting into it, then you need to as well.
The bosses have seen pay and benefits go up and up and up. They've seen people jump between companies, taking institutional knowledge with them. They need the job market to crater so they can re-exert control in the relationship. LLMs are fucking catnip to this belief system. "You mean I do need to deal with those people that I have to hire and train and pay? I hate those guys! Awesome!"
They are an enterprise SaaS company in SV. Where they have machine learning software that they have been selling for more than a decade, it’s all been rebranded as AI. That’s fair enough from a sales perspective, I guess. What’s odd is that their C-suite and SVPs are pressuring everyone to use LLMs everywhere, for pretty much everything, and none of them seem to understand why it’s only that level of employee that’s seeing any benefit or expressing any interest. My spouse has reported that the running joke across the company is that the executives have jobs that can be done by LLMs, but no one else does. The ICs could not be less interested, and even if they were, legal promulgated a policy against actually putting anything confidential into any LLM other than Copilot in Azure, which the whole workforce reportedly only really uses for summarizing the increasing number of meetings that are perceived as a waste of IC time. A lot of those meetings are “let’s use AI”.
It’s absolutely insane.