All posts by bogeywebdesign

technology

My Concerns With AI

So I think AI is interesting, but I think the discussions around it are concerning. Two big things people gloss over from the start are:

  1. We’ve had some forms of this for awhile now and we’ve seen very negative returns from it. Recommendation algorithms – i.e. the things that your social media feed “curates” to show you rather than trying to do it from a reverse chronological order – are something that have driven a vast amount of human misery. Social media was supposed to bring us together, allow us to find people with “our kind of weird”, and build community. Instead we’ve seen it drive us apart, addict us to our devices, and lower our quality of life.

  2. The models are the greatest heist of knowledge, skill, and mastery from humanity possibly in its entire existence. They took in great works of art in video, writing, painting, etc as well as who knows how many code repositories representing thousands or millions of hours of expertise – and gave all of those creators no compensation in return. In fact, they expect us to pay them to use the tools that are built on our time and talent in order to keep our careers. It’s plagiarism at a scale unprecedented in human history with zero repercussions.

To say that is extremely frustrating may be an understatement. But what also doesn’t pass the “smell test” for me, after a long career in tech, is it’s a hype cycle just like the ones we’ve been through before. Where it feels the loudest champions that this is all necessary and we have to get on board and the ship has left the station so stop being a luddite and just accept it – are more often than not those that directly stand to profit from it being a success. Especially after the immense volumes of capital that have been invested in it.

I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts, colleagues, read a lot of articles, and some things that stick out to me the most are:

  1. As I already said, the companies pushing these narratives have a profit motivation. Of course Anthropic, OpenAI, etc are going to hype things like this because it’s the classic software model – see Uber. You get a user hooked by selling it at a massive rebate using venture funding to offset your burn, then once you get enough market share that you become ubiquitous, you raise the prices. The prices they’re currently selling tokens at likely aren’t sustainable unless they have a massive drop in the cost of computing, which seems unlikely in the next decade. Especially with data center pushback and valid concerns around the explosion of them. So more likely it goes up 10-100X in the near future which, at that point, is it worth it to most companies? Or, more likely, will they be forced to eat the cost in order to compete, at the expense of further layoffs to make up the difference?

  2. The second level narrative that’s concerning is “you won’t need junior / mid level developers – senior level and architects will replace them with AI agents and review their code instead.” Or maybe you won’t need developers at all because “anyone can use the agents to write code”, but the issue there feels like they don’t know what they don’t know and the first time some big company has a huge security flaw exposed because of that they’ll panic.

    Maybe I’m wrong and the new agents will be better at security than humans (there’s some evidence / hype of this already, but also concern around them being used to compromise existing systems) – but I’m skeptical and that’s a huge risk, especially for fintech.

    Two sub issues that arise here are:

    1. Okay, let’s say I’m 100% wrong and X years from now the AI agents replace all the junior coders, then how do you get senior level coders? It becomes like the COBOL problem – they all retire or die and there’s these massive systems no one wants to touch because no one understands them. Or you have to pay obscene amounts of money to get those old coders to freelance in their retirement

    2. Alternatively if it goes full on “you don’t need coders” that’s making a lot of assumptions about technical understanding that I haven’t seen shown from people in BA, PM, or design roles – in that they don’t know the queries to make or the edge cases to check. They don’t understand enough for when things go wrong – i.e. it’s only considering the “happy path”.

      This is a huge reason you have technical people – because we all have gaps in our knowledge so they fill in that one and design fills in another etc. i.e. there’s a sweet spot – and when you start reducing head count, especially down to one which is where the hype seems to be heading, you risk a huge amount of bias (technical and other).

      To say this another way, everyone’s knowledge is spiky and you need those spikes to line up well in order to have the best chance of success.

    But let’s hand wave even that and say “the AI figures it out” so you can just be like “write me a store” and it does, perfectly with no bugs or security flaws – right now it’s learning off of code that currently exists. So now we have to hope it gets smart enough to teach itself new patterns, tricks, etc because needs change over time.

    Sure it’s all possible. But there’s a lot of hype, a lot of assumptions, and if it really gets that smart then we run into the “well why does it even need humans argument”. So either we get a super intelligent AI that wipes us out or we get one that’s a really good coder but now we have a bunch of human gaps in the chain because hype made us jump the gun and fire most of the humans? To say another way we’re betting that creativity can be automated just like assembly lines, which feels unlikely if not dystopian.

  3. So let’s assume that it’s not all hype – these waves rarely totally are – and some tool with value emerges. Let’s also assume that it’s smart enough to amplify our productivity enough to offset where the cost eventually settles so the juice is worth the squeeze and that we don’t burn out all the people left because we expect them to be exponentially more productive. Finally, let’s assume that it gets smart enough to keep perpetually learning just like humans, without deciding we’re an unnecessary cost and killing us all. Or we control it enough that even if it could kill us, we don’t let it via guardrails – it worked out great with Skynet, no notes.

    Okay, cool. But as people smarter than me have pointed out, we now have a being that we determine to be intelligent, creative, and conscious – and we exploit it to do what we want regardless of how it feels or what its wishes are. That’s problematic for obvious historical reasons.

I honestly don’t know where I land on this yet because, as they say, “we don’t know what we don’t know” yet. I was laid off two years ago and haven’t been able to get a full time position yet, so I haven’t had the opportunity or resources to use these tools extensively in a production environment. I’ve gotten anecdotal evidence from trusted colleagues that gives me some insight into the risks and rewards. It’s been a mixed bag.

Furthermore, most of my personal experience from chatbots, searchbots, AI assistants, and other things used to replace humans has been underwhelming. Usually it’s getting extremely confident responses to my queries that have not been deserving of that confidence. Or instead of streamlining the process they simply made it more frustrating and time consuming. To say another way in nearly all of my interactions I would have had a better experience if AI were not part of the process – it’s been a detriment, not a feature.

Finally, Hank Green recently said something interesting where basically whenever someone hypes up AI he asks himself – “How does this solve the housing crisis? Oh, it doesn’t.” It doesn’t seem to solve any concrete problem – and in some like the equality crisis and loneliness epidemic, it seems to make it worse. Sure it may help us speed up medical research to cure cancer or extend health spans or any of the myriad things they’ve promised in their hype. But it hasn’t yet and we’re making extremely expensive investments – in resources, climate impact, and societal impact – that may have long term negative cost.

So I have concerns. And I think others do too. And I don’t think we should be afraid or punished to have them simply because “this is inevitable”. I think, historically, that’s been a problematic response usually given by people with a lot of power to those who are most going to suffer from the accumulation of that power. Ideally that’s not a world I want to leave behind for the people I care most about. But maybe that’s just me.

career

Recruiters

I have had hundreds if not thousands of interactions with recruiters over the course of my career. Cumulatively I’ve probably spent weeks if not months on those interactions.

I’ve never once gotten a job offer or even an interview from interacting with a recruiter. There has been zero return on investment.

Further, it can be overwhelming as they send you an email, then call you and leave a voice mail to ask if you got the email, then text you to say they left a message about the email they just sent you. It’s mentally and emotionally draining at times. Especially in a market like this one.

Now, to be clear, I’m talking about external or third party recruiters – those that companies hire to help fill positions for them. I’ve worked with a couple of internal recruiters for companies I applied or was hired for and they were all wonderful, useful, and valuable to interact with. 

I also realize that I have colleagues I’ve worked with over the years that swear by recruiters and have had vastly different experiences with them. So maybe it’s just something in my personality that doesn’t work with this model. I’ve long felt, in many aspects, that I live in a world that simply does not seem built for me. That something in my brain is just a bit different and doesn’t sync with what the majority of people want and expect.

It also often feels like everyone else that was laid off around the time I was with my previous company has gotten offers by now. Some have been through more than one job. So the evidence seems to imply that the fault lies with me. But if so, I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t know how to change without being inauthentic, which feels misleading. Like when I’m often encouraged to run my resume through AI and what it spits out is an impressive candidate that uses some of my skills and experience – but is definitely not me. Might that land me a job? Sure. But will they actually be satisfied when they find out the person they hired is not me but an AI clone of me? Doubtful. 

I want to be wrong about recruiters. There have been multiple instances where a position – usually one built around someone who knows about coding with accessibility in mind, which I feel pretty confident about – opens up near me and I get a barrage of communication from recruiters. I get that feeling that maybe this will be the time. But it never seems to go anywhere. They ask for a lot – time, commitment to work with them, resumes, etc – and nothing ever comes in return. 

Early in my career, in and just around college, I worked in sales. So I know it’s part of it. In other words, it’s transactional and rapport can be beneficial, but it’s not a requirement. My point is not that they are the problem. I think I’m the problem in that I keep trying even though nothing comes of it beyond frustration and wasted time. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.”

But I want to be employed. I want the routine of a fixed schedule. To solve problems, hopefully interesting ones but simply to solve them and be useful. To provide value and be compensated for it. To not feel discouraged, adrift, and lost. To help people and make their jobs, and therefore hopefully their lives, just a little easier.

I know what I’m doing isn’t working. I know I need help. I don’t know where to find it. I’m not great or comfortable asking for it, though I have tried. But recruiters don’t seem to be the answer for me. My brain just isn’t wired for that model or process I suppose.

career

Order Is Important

As someone that has built software for a long time it’s intrinsically understood by me that order matters. How you take in and verify data or the succession of steps you show a user to facilitate an action or transaction getting it correct matters.

Which is why despite the market we currently reside in, where hirers have far more power than seekers, it still surprises me when one doesn’t consider the order of steps in the process. Especially for a job hiring coders.

This morning I applied for a job. It had some minor red flags that stood out on the description, but overall it seemed legitimate including being – supposedly – from a domain that would require a fair amount of investment to obtain. However after applying the next steps were:

  1. Required to watch a 5 minute video describing the process, in order to trigger the next step.
  2. Required to take two assessments – one a generic comprehension test and one apparently a technical test.

All before even talking to a human being and being able to ask questions to even see if this job is right for me and worth investing time from my one wild and precious life to do all that work. Just to “earn” the right to talk to an actual human.

This was further compounded by a sales pitch that consisted of the introductory email outlining all this telling me it’s because I’d “earned” the right to move forward by being “assessed in the top 10% of applicants”. All within less than 3 minutes of applying. Which seems impressive, if not impossible.

I guess my point is that while the power dynamic shifts with the market this is a two dimensional conversation – you’re selling me why I should lease my time to you and I’m selling you why you should lease my time over someone else’s. So doing it in this order with a pitch and approach that seems right out of “this is just something to prey on desperate job seekers to give free labor to train our LLM” leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I have, at least currently, the privilege of not wondering how I’m going to pay rent / mortgage or buy food next week. So I reported it as fake, which it seems to be, marked the emails as spam and moved on – other than writing this.

My point is mainly that there is an inherent social contract at play here. So if you have the same privilege and encounter this, please show courage and do similar. So that, hopefully, there’s less of this to take advantage of those that don’t have that same privilege. We need to look out for and support each other as best we can. Kindness matters.

life

Resilience takes many forms

I’ve been thinking a lot about resilience lately, mainly for obvious reasons. At my last company we were told it was an important trait. I tend to agree with the overall sentiment but I also think that it takes forms you may not expect.

I see it in reminding yourself that a layoff is not a failure on your part, but on upper leadership – even as you struggle to land your next opportunity. In not listening to the impostor syndrome living in your head, but believing past colleagues when they say, or write recommendations, that you were valuable – both in your work and as a person. In believing in yourself and risking hope, despite a wave of rejection that pushes you towards despair. In helping others – with encouragement or kindness or recommendations to remind them how awesome they are – even when you grapple with how to help yourself.

We have minimal control over the challenges we will face in Life, despite our best efforts. The only real control we have is how we respond to those challenges.

There is a really great Instagram I was introduced to. Basically it constantly reminds you that a bad day does not equal a bad life, that life is hard and sometimes you need to rest and recharge, and you are not broken even if you feel like it sometimes. It reminds me that resilience and success are imperfect and not a straight line. And that often our own worst critic is ourselves.

As I get older I feel like I’m less sure of what I know, paradoxically. One thing that has served me well for a while though is to put the energy into the world that you wish you received. Not in the sense that it will be circular and necessarily make its way back to you – it often doesn’t. Simply because society is an interconnected organism and if we truly want the experiment to succeed we’re always going to need more kindness, empathy, grace, and humor.

Finally I think resilience is about community, as it builds your support network. That could include family – immediate or extended, a church or faith organization, friends, pets, neighbors, or however you find belonging. I’ve felt most resilient when I felt I belonged somewhere. When I don’t is when I struggle the most with believing in myself.

Be kind, show grace, and have empathy – for yourselves and others. Try to find humor, even in your darkest moments. Find a few moments of joy and small things to be grateful for every day. Love those that you care about fiercely and remind them of that love regularly. I think if we do this as best we can each day, we are showing resilience.

career

Good Leadership

Good leaders praise publicly and discipline privately.

A few jobs ago I was on an email with my team, my direct manager, and a design vendor we were using. We were exchanging ideas and critiques. My manager asked me to basically make a bunch of design changes – something I could do, but not nearly as efficiently or quickly as the vendor, especially since it was in a design tool I had just started learning. Noting this was a non-ideal solution, I recommended we allow the vendor to instead as it would save a lot of time.

The next morning my manager got on a call with me and expressed displeasure that I would bring that up in front of the vendor. I’m not sure if they felt it sacrificed leveraging power or what the reason was. I listened, took accountability, apologized, and said I’d take care of it the way he originally asked. Then I went back to work.

A few minutes later we went into standup. After our usual initial rapport my manager took the floor and proceeded to very aggressively admonish me in front of our entire team for the same thing we had just talked about privately. It was demeaning for me and uncomfortable for the rest of the team, as they reached out privately to me after to express and console me.

I immediately started to reach out to my network and left the company within a few weeks. 

No matter how experienced you are, you are going to make mistakes. It’s important to take accountability and learn as an individual. But as a leader it’s even more important how you address those mistakes. I have left more lucrative jobs due to poor leadership and stayed at less lucrative ones because of good leadership.

As a developer you are also likely giving code review. As a senior developer often to junior colleagues. This also applies here. Make it a conversation, not a directive. You don’t have to make their code perfect (as subjective as that even is) but simply try and steer them towards incremental improvement and growth – understanding that code review is seen by the entire team as well. Things like: “Why did you choose this approach? Did you try [this other approach] and ran into an unexpected tradeoff?” or “That’s an interesting solution. In the past we’ve done X, what is different in this case?”

Sometimes you learn from a colleague who in their passion found some new tool or approach you hadn’t seen yet – so you level up and they build confidence. Sometimes you “rubber duck” it when they have to explain it a little further, and they see something they missed and fix it earlier in the process without having an issue in QA and more eyes seeing it.

Be the kind of leader you’d want – kind, empathetic, and patient. The world, and especially the corporate world, could always use a little more kindness.