AI HYPE - Explained by Computer Scientist || El Podcast EP48

I have worked in Tech all my life and I have never seen someone be so honest about what the industry is actually like as an engineer or developer good work

A recently retired software developer here. I've only seen hard working teams. I've worked in the games industry, bioscience, broadcasting, CAD/CAM, startups. The problem I faced was too many hours depending on the company and culture.

I knew a woman who worked at Xerox for many years. She was assigned to 'monitor' a few lines of code (and adapt them if necessary) for a single line of copiers. She only had to do something when any new bugs were found and it was rare. She ran her own business from her office there.

I worked very hard and intensly in all my tech jobs. Often in Saturdays and Sundays. I'm software engineer. I'm exhausted.

I have been a Software Engineer since 1991 when I graduated college. I have spent the last 20+ years in the defense industry. I can tell you, developing real-time, mission-critical, safety-critical Software and Systems is much more rewarding than the commercial space. Most projects I have worked on have well written requirements, good software process, tools, testing and validation. I have develops many really good projects, and real technology and worked HARD most of the time. Not all projects are successful, but I found DOD work to be much more rewarding, challenging and pushes the limits of technology much more than commercial development.

I work as a contractor. At one gig, they tried to upgrade ssh, and their system failed. So, they were told by the vendor it would be a year long, offshore project to upgrade. But, the client thought they were losing technical people, and they decided to take this project on themselves, and not "offshore". So, they spent a month hiring contractors, etc. 3 hours into the first day, we found the bug. After that their system worked. It was painful. I got paid for 11 days. As a sorta weird reality, management was embarrassed, and was angry at the ones whom pointed out the year old project they authorized, was a one week project. Everyone was actually angry.

There is no single experience in tech. If you work for an enterprise, software, SaaS, consulting, or small business you will see similarities and difference. Even within organizations, there are people who do all the work 60 hours a week, and there are people who take 2 hour lunches, play ping pong for 3 hours, and leave early because they have nothing to do. Don't let this one take define the entire industry.

we absolutely need more engineers and scientists that are willing to be this open and brutally honest

Its so funny that you think this is unique to the tech sector. Most people are loitering, talking to nice colleagues and producing nothing and its the same in all departments that dont produce physical products.

Man, what universe are these guys living in? I had 20 years of hard death marches and 60-hour weeks. Nothing but working my butt off.

I am a software engineer and I agree with the idea that 'agile' does not always ensure efficient software development. At my job we have daily standup meetings where we just give a quick status of what we did the prior day and plan to do today. We also have weekly 'sizing' meetings where the team estimates time for all 'stories'. A simple 1 line code change is usually estimated to take 24 hours or more. Stories that require weeks or months many times are estimated to take 2 or 3 days. I enjoyed the 'waterfall' methodology much better than 'agile'.

WOW, I have been working for the wrong companies. I have been in IT for 30 years and a developer for 20 plus. At all the companies I worked for I put in at least 50 plus avg of hard code developing a week. Many times over 60 hours and many many all nighters on tight deadlines. I guess those companies need a 'real' tech manager or director. I do agree about scrum, it can easily slow the process down unless you have a strong scrum master. I am currently an IT director and ensure my team stays busy in 'meaningful' work. Help get me work at one of these companies and I will set things straight lol.

25 years in IT and I confirm 100% what this fellow has said. The stuff I have seen....1GB spreadsheets that require guys working 24/7 to make sure it doesn't cras. AI is still a very very far fantasy for most businesses. In the 90s UML tools were supposed to replace developers...yeah right.

I doubt the next breakthrough in AI will be discovered by some guy in a garage - the problems that need to be overcome are massive and not even really well understood. A lot of the hype around AI comes from anthropomorphism and sci-fi fantasy.

we have a self driving floor cleaner at work. we have QR codes posted all over where we can drive up to the QR code and scan it in training mode and manually drive the scrubber as it cleans to learn the rout for the next time it scrubs. The downside of driving on it's own is it does not know the difference between a more saturated dirty spot on the floor or a mild spot on the floor. Or the difference between dirt or a rug and can run over the rug and get it caught in the drivers that scrub the floor. I link my phone to the machine so when I run it on auto it gives me a play by play. To put it simply... A machine I have to chase around multiple times to hit the reset button because it went off track or it thought something was in its way and does not know what to do.

What about a "self" driving car that is really just a large front camera where someone in India is "virtually" driving?

Yeah Ai won't be replacing Tech jobs anytime soon. If Tech Jobs are being laid off it's because they are over-staffed not because Ai is replacing them.....simply put the Tech field is too over-hyped and everyone wants a Tech Job.

Not surprised a bit about the assessment by an insider. I've been saying since the start of this hype that AI is nothing more than a program and it needs a human to program it. The concept of "self awareness" will never be a reality, as it will always require guidelines, so directly (through calibration) or indirectly (through the original guidelines) it will always be under our control. You could see AI as a ship on the sea, that when it reaches land, it cannot go any further, as it was only meant to be on water. In order to be able to transform into a land vehicle, the initial programming will need to contain the concept of land as well, otherwise the ship just stops as soon as it reaches land and you have the BSOD. The misconception on machine learning is that the program will find solutions by itself, without original guidelines. That's impossible: if said ship reaches land and it has no concept of land, it will not be able to continue. If the coding tells it to approach any new problem in a random way however, it also means that there is no guideline tied to any rules, which means that anything goes. So just like in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the program can assume a plant or a whale, as there are no rules any longer. And as a consequence, it will fail, since it will not be able to function within a logical ruleset of its environment, as it behaves totally randomly, hence chaotically. Anything that is chaotic ends in disaster without direction. As for the hype, it's clear why there are so many interests pushing this narrative of self awareness and a plethora of "solutions" (for non-existing problems most of the time, like self-driving): the AI will become the convenient scape-goat. Once the masses are led to believe that AI are more intelligent than humans and can take over tasks (initially only driving, then complex tasks like work and finally ethical decisions, like court cases, war, etc.), AI will be installed instead of critical tasks and the owners and programmers will no longer be accountable. After all, the "superior intelligence" can only make the right decision, no matter what that is! And noone will ever find out how the AI have a pre-set of guidelines along hidden agendas. Just look at how ChatGPT is steering thinking along woke guidelines or the utter failure of Google's Gemini. So the brainwash is in full force to convince the masses that AI use is justified. Hence the lies surrounding its ability to learn by itself and obviously the smokescreen is prepared by using popular and superficial means, like art, music, visuals. People are so gullible, they think that a close to perfect visual picture means intelligence..

Once you learn the REAL story of the Luddite movement, you will be proud to be labeled a Luddite. It was about protecting the quality of fabric products made in a literal "cottage industry" verses centralized industrial automation. Luddite attitudes may yet save us from A.lgorithmic I.mpersonation.

I work in tech and I’ve been working nonstop for about 25 years. Inefficiency comes from management leading us in a bad direction, but we never stop working. We have tons of technical debt that we can address during lulls in new projects. We should be spending more time on upgrading skills.