AI is a multiplier for engineering culture. With it, the work compounds; without it, the rot does, and the dashboard reports green right up to the breach.
It is well known that as soon as something becomes a metric people game it and fail to pay attention to the underlying reality that the metric was supposed to be a proxy for. Meta (and other companies) putting AI usage as an employment metric will automatically result in inappropriate use of AI because the incentive is not bug free code, it is AI usage. Just as previously we have companies setting LOCs or commits/PRs as metric which failed to help developers produce better code faster.
The problem is the code quality is hard to measure but critical to corporate success. AI can generate great code fast when used properly but it can also create complete garbage when abused
Right on the metric part. The thing I can't get past is that they didn't need to do any of this. AI gave them a genuine productivity gain across the engineers they already had. They could have just used it. Instead they dismantled the team to make a usage number move. Baffling call.
Yep. Ed Zitron calls a lot of these people Business Idiots, which I've always felt was harsh. But it also appears to be accurate in more cases than I would expect
Have you rewritten anything on engineering culture, the best parts and the parts to watch out for? I know you have done how to hire someone which gives some of the answers to the question but didn't know if you had one dedicated to just that topic.
Good question. I haven't done one just on that. It's spread across hiring and retention and this Meta piece, never pulled together. Worth doing though. Let me chew on it a bit.
It is well known that as soon as something becomes a metric people game it and fail to pay attention to the underlying reality that the metric was supposed to be a proxy for. Meta (and other companies) putting AI usage as an employment metric will automatically result in inappropriate use of AI because the incentive is not bug free code, it is AI usage. Just as previously we have companies setting LOCs or commits/PRs as metric which failed to help developers produce better code faster.
The problem is the code quality is hard to measure but critical to corporate success. AI can generate great code fast when used properly but it can also create complete garbage when abused
Right on the metric part. The thing I can't get past is that they didn't need to do any of this. AI gave them a genuine productivity gain across the engineers they already had. They could have just used it. Instead they dismantled the team to make a usage number move. Baffling call.
Yep. Ed Zitron calls a lot of these people Business Idiots, which I've always felt was harsh. But it also appears to be accurate in more cases than I would expect
I would recommend you to read Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It. Nothing new happens right now :)
Makes me so happy the entire industry will probably down in flames when they can't get regular companies to stump up more than $20/user/month
Also, and relatedly, thinking how to get cheap power in a data center to run a cluster of B300s when the price drops.
Have you rewritten anything on engineering culture, the best parts and the parts to watch out for? I know you have done how to hire someone which gives some of the answers to the question but didn't know if you had one dedicated to just that topic.
Good question. I haven't done one just on that. It's spread across hiring and retention and this Meta piece, never pulled together. Worth doing though. Let me chew on it a bit.