> Can you come back after it's all resolved? You won't know AI.
In 3-4 years, nothing anyone is doing today will matter. It is rapidly evolving, and I'd rather sit back, do what I know, and let it all fall out one way or other other, then learn what I need to if I haven't retired by then.
For younger people, being on the bleeding edge of new things matters, but it really doesn't for us old folk. We know how to learn. We'll learn it when it matters. So long as we have work until then, I am not going to waste my energy re-skilling every 6 months to use a tech that is nowhere near stable with an entirely unclear future.
Exactly. I really think a place to sit this out for a while would be a good idea for me. Ironically part of my job is getting reluctant developers onboard with GitHub copilot but it’s a dance I’d rather watch from the sidelines for a bit
I am doing it. Not VMS, but a different niche legacy platform. The jobs are few and far between, but so are the people who can do them. In particular, people who can work on both legacy platforms and the modern stacks are quite rare, and AI's presence means there aren't any more of us showing up in the world.
Rarely, because incentives encourage gaming the system. In sales, it is fairly easy to make the game benefit both the sales folks and the business because sales directly drives revenue. Game it however you want, everyone wins. But software does not directly translate into revenue, so once you start setting up incentives, gaming that system can completely derail the actual business goals unless you are exceedingly careful about it.
The only time I've seen sales-like incentives work is in hourly consulting shops, where you can incentivize increasing the billable hours. In that case, the software work does directly translate to revenue.
> In sales, it is fairly easy to make the game benefit both the sales folks and the business because sales directly drives revenue. Game it however you want, everyone wins
Not even that. Hit your top sales target for the year in November, or won’t be able to hit the next higher target? Then, try to delay your customer from signing that new contract until early January, so that those sales contribute to next year’s target.
Need a sale to hit your target? Quote a lower maintenance contract, promise a feature that doesn’t exist, etc.
Reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon where the pointy haired boss tells his team they were going to start paying the developers to fix bugs. Wally tells everyone that he is going to code himself a minivan.
> you have to ask yourself if this is a platform you can entrust your daily workflows to as a business.
No, it isn't. No LLM platform ever will be. No platform or vendor of any kind ever will be, if we are being honest. One cannot set up a business where another company becomes critical to your operations. You can certainly use platforms and vendors in your day-to-day operations, but you always need a backup / business continuity plan because you never know when a vendor will flake out on you, for any variety of reasons.
It seems like many startups learn this lesson painfully, and most people who have been around the block a few times know it well. So I'm not certain why people are disregarding it when it comes to LLMs.
That's why I internally push to use Bedrock. If AWS flakes or bans the company account I've got bigger problems. Putting more eggs in the same basket is a counterintuitive solution to the problem of someone else holding my fate in their hands, but at least it's a platform that's been around > 5 years.
+1. Companies like AWS are not known for this kind of treatment. Even Google does this. The norm seems to be to randomly ban and ignore emails. It's a whitelist to build customer trust, not a blacklist of bad companies
> No, it isn't. No LLM platform ever will be. No platform or vendor of any kind ever will be, if we are being honest. One cannot set up a business where another company becomes critical to your operations.
Most of companies in the world have done that with Windows, though.
In Anthropics defense they make sure that no company can rely on them by being down all the time... And LLMs have become a commodity these days, so you can seamlessly just fail over to another supplier WHEN they go down.
Sure. And we aren’t only using Claude. Nor is it essential to our operations. But it’s a tool we used widely and it’s gone (for the moment), and in a way that is untypical of most “vendor did unexpected thing that hurt our workflow” stories.
Doubtful. Do they use vendors? Sure. Perhaps even in critical functions. But that is not the same thing as a specific vendor being critical. There is almost always a business continuity plan, and frequently you'll find a full risk management plan with documented risks and mitigations. How far they take those planning efforts varies greatly, but I've never seen a medium or larger business that doesn't have at least some basic risk mitigations in place.
This is true, although different companies manage their vendor exposure with varying levels of effectiveness.
Often, it's ideal to use several / all of the vendors for each thing, and play them off against each other. e.g., have some of your database stuff on oracle, some on mssql, or some cloud stuff on aws and some on azure, make your apps portable, and tell them both that you'll switch to the other unless you get a good deal, with that being a plausible threat because you're already using the other one and know how to make your stuff work on both, and occasionally rotate apps between vendors, or change the mix from 50/50 to 60/40 just to show you can.
Of course, the vendors will be trying to work against this and will want to do some supposedly amazing deal if you go exclusively with them for everything... which might be attractive in the short term, but opens the client up to getting screwed in the long term once they fall into all the lock-in traps and lose the very _ability_ to switch vendors.
Nice little project. But how many people do you think exist who know enough about cameras to care about shutter actuations... but do not know how to just right-click their image and see the EXIF data directly?
Your two problems are not tech problems, they are leadership problems. I find it interesting that a CTO looks for a tech solution instead of a leadership solution.
That isn't meant to be a diss on you as a leader - everyone is new at it at some point, and there is a steeper learning curve than most people would ever imagine. And more learning at every step up the ladder you take.
Effective leaders can instill the values that make people do what is needed to make the business work, regardless of rules. You want to empower your teams to build the processes that work for both them and the business, not pigeon-hole 60 engineers across 10 products into an AI-enforced process.
I would not. And I've seen this idea posted multiple times before, so if none of them have shown up on your radar when researching the idea, that tells you something about the market for it.
I use 2 cameras - I have a Nikon Z series DSLR which I use when I am specifically going out for a photo shoot - wildlife and nature are my primary goals, but I do the occasional professional gig such as sports or portraits. But I have an Olympus tough camera that I just keep in my car with me and use for those surprise moments when you see something but didn't pack your main camera. The thing is unbreakable. Waterproof, shockproof, and has survived lots of trauma. You can get filters for it, and it has a surprisingly decent zoom range for a point-and-shoot, including a macro and microscope mode. I have had it for 10 years now, and when I look back at my work, most of my best photos came from the Olympus, not the Nikon.
So while I like the feel of the DSLR best, I cannot deny the Olympus' utility factor. And the older models are just as good (if not better) than the latest models, so it doesn't cost much to pick one up.
In 3-4 years, nothing anyone is doing today will matter. It is rapidly evolving, and I'd rather sit back, do what I know, and let it all fall out one way or other other, then learn what I need to if I haven't retired by then.
For younger people, being on the bleeding edge of new things matters, but it really doesn't for us old folk. We know how to learn. We'll learn it when it matters. So long as we have work until then, I am not going to waste my energy re-skilling every 6 months to use a tech that is nowhere near stable with an entirely unclear future.