“Every single Monday was called ‘AI Monday,’” Vaughan said, with his mandate for staff that they could work only on AI. “You couldn’t have customer calls; you couldn’t work on budgets; you had to only work on AI projects.” He said this happened across the board, not just for tech workers, but also for sales, marketing, and everybody else at IgniteTech. “That culture needed to be built. That was the key.”
A company so small it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. No discernible products.
Any poly market bets on how long this company actually lasts?
Because it had nothing to do with AI
It was an excuse to slash the workforce with relatively little backlash.
and that’s how he achieved 75% profit margin. Let’s see him do that twice.
surprised he didn’t golden parachute out and reload with another company/
Probably overhired just after COVID like everyone else in the tech sector and then realized he had no idea what to do with all the extra people because he never really had a plan.
COVID excuse not required. CEOs overhiring is like birds flying south for the winter, the sun rising in the east, water being wet - it’s just what they do. 80% is a bit extreme, but he had the AI excuse, so…
Eh I’ve only been in the software industry for 6 years and change. The post-covid hiring boom was for me the first time I’d seen it done en masse and then the subsequent layoffs were the first time I’d seen that en masse, but neither affected me personally luckily.
I have no idea what was going on before that because I had no real reason to care, nobody wanted to hire me anyway before I got my first job in the industry lol
It’s not just the software industry. Fully 1/2 of CEOs I have worked under get their hands on some money and an idea that they’re going to grow the business - really fast - poised for growth - ready to capitalize on the opportunities when they arise - and 6-18 months later their idea doesn’t pan out and they’ve got all these people who are costing more than the company is bringing in in sales revenue, so…
I wonder how many employees are working on automating the CEO there first
From the article:
Vaughan was surprised to find it was often the technical staff, not marketing or sales, who dug in their heels. They were the “most resistant,” he said, voicing various concerns about what the AI couldn’t do, rather than focusing on what it could. The marketing and salespeople were enthused by the possibilities of working with these new tools, he added.
Not surprising the people with technical skills that aren’t actually replaceable by LLMs would be against forced AI adoption. Good luck maintaining a code base created with vibe coding. Meanwhile the CEO probably looks at ChatGPT and realizes it could basically do everything he already does (write emails and make high level decisions without actually having to worry about their implementation) and then incorrectly thinks it’s the case for everyone else.
Prediction markets have outperformed CEOs for decades and still haven’t replaced them, for the same reason WfH hasn’t replaced offices. Everything is a monopoly or oligopoly now, with no need to efficiently maximize profits. It’s entirely a matter of control.
A recent MIT report indicates that 95% of generative AI pilots fail to deliver measurable returns on investment, highlighting significant challenges in successfully implementing AI in businesses
CEOs:
OpenAI marketing > MIT analysis, apparently
“When I do it, it will be different.
My question: what percentage of those failures to deliver were led by people who had no idea what they were doing and expected AI to “do it for them”?
He REALLY hates paying employees and wants their pennies in his treasure horde, we get it.
He will be shocked when he discovers the shareholders don’t want to pay him, either. He’ll be like “what?!?! AI doing MY job? This is a travesty!” and then they will have robot security drag him out of the building screaming.
so they had to sell to ai customers? what an idiot
Vaughan was surprised to find it was often the technical staff, not marketing or sales, who dug in their heels. They were the “most resistant,” he said, voicing various concerns about what the AI couldn’t do, rather than focusing on what it could. The marketing and salespeople were enthused by the possibilities of working with these new tools, he added.
So the people that had an actual idea of what the implications of using it might be weren’t on board? Huh. Weird.
Marketing people are known for beliving their own lies.
Sales and marketing is often mostly bullshitting anyway. It also has a lot less risk and constraints associated to generated text having issues. Not surprised they were more on board. The tool is more fitting for those use cases anyway.
They’re also the people who build their career on never stirring the pot so they can make their clients feel special. They’re built to be sycophants and their jobs are, and this isn’t even necessarily a bad thing, a little more nebulous which means they’d feel the effects much less strongly.
“Pointlessly waffling for a living just got so much easier!”
“All the engineers said my “screen door on a submarine” was “stupid” and would “sink the ship”, so I fired them and hired new engineers!”
- CEO of now defunct “Screen Door Subs Inc.”
speaking of submarines, this is the exact line of thinking that turned an idiot CEO into a paste at the bottom of the ocean
thank you mighty wizard for casting dopamine.
I can not read the word “cast” in any form without remembering this:
There’s a small difference, the imploded CEO was “boldly going where no man had gone before, on such an accelerated timetable and tight budget” - the screen door guy was a couple of orders of magnitude more foolish.
I told AI to build me a submarine out of
titaniumcarbon fiber.- Stockton Rush (if he were alive today)
Titanic sub was made from carbon fiber. Titanium is what he should have used.
Damnit, I knew that too. I stopped skimming too early in the Wiki paragraph.
The entire pressure vessel for the crew used five major components: two hemispherical titanium end caps, two matching titanium interface rings, and the 142 cm (56 in) internal diameter, 2.4-meter-long (7.9 ft) carbon fiber-wound cylindrical hull.[15] The forward hemispherical end cap could be detached from its interface ring, becoming a hatch that allowed crew members to enter the crew compartment before a mission, and exit at its conclusion.[3]
build me a submarine out of cheese! I always get hungry when i’m submarining and not! anymore!
Wallace & Gromit Visit the Titanic.
No worries, friend. Good on you for making sure.
rather than focusing on what it could
When you’re driving a car down the ski jumping ramp.
Like the guy with the carbon fiber submarine. Every engineer told him it couldn’t be done, so he kept firing them until he had a staff of young, inexperienced engineers who would do what they were told, and just collect their paychecks.
Now their boss is dead, and there are no more paychecks.
Well at least that problem fixed itself.
I wished more of society’s problems were solved that way, with the guy responsible for such a stupid concept paying the ultimate price for his arrogance.
Seeing these kinds of people harness AI is so embarrassing. They feel empowered while doing some of the whackest stuff. In the end, it is still technical style work snd they are still awful at it.
What the fuck is IgniteTech?
An “enterprise-software powerhouse”, allegedly. Basically they bought an AI startup and decided that this was their entire personality now.
Yeah looking it over it looks like they’re a tech accusation company. Basically they buy flailing or nearly failed companies suck anything out of them they can and then sell them. They probably purchased an AI company like you’re saying decided to go all in on it while purchasing and selling other companies as well. Having anything AI related right now bring big bucks when it comes to funding.
Exactly
It is never the technology at fault. When it comes down to it, evil people want to exercise the power of their crown, damned be the consequences and injustice.
AI is just the latest excuse to be a remorseless dickhead.
This reads like a very weird AI circlejerk. They repeatedly mention that AI is the solution every company should adopt, but fail to provide a single example of succesful application. And I mean a how not a reult. They say ‘company X KPI are this % better thanks to AI’, but not how they applied it. Just talk of AI mindset, and ‘culture’ but I would have liked to understand what exactly it was used for (like agents, chatbots, automation of something in particular). It just reads like a lot of patting in the back and hot air so far, which is a pity because I would be interested in reading about real life cases of successful AI implementaiom
I used to joke that the CEO of my former employer must subscribe to some magazine called “CEO Weekly” in which they must periodically mention, in a similar “no examples of usage, just KPIs” manner, webchat. She would always forget about it promptly and then random number of weeks later bug my boss again.
I told him if they want me to come up with how they can use webchat and be their solutions designer they need to double my salary. $60k USD was not enough for being a tier 3 systems admin, a fax and telephony specialist, and figuring out their use cases for them just to check a box that says “we have it!”
They say ‘company X KPI are this % better thanks to AI’
They asked an LLM for the KPIs and it helpfully made up the figures they wanted to see.
Which became a self fulfilling prophecy once they showed those awesome “results” to the investors.
Of course it’ll all come crashing down once the investors ask for a return on their investment and there are no more new investors to support the pyramid, but by that point someone (probably not the brainrotten CEOs, who are drinking their own coolaid) will be far away with the money in a Cayman Islands bank account…
“I am bad at managing my finances, and eventually need to get bailed out by the government, or end up next to the homeless guy I used to make fun of”.
- This guy.
This is a paid promotion. Its one of the ones you pay an extra $1000 and they hide the sponsored tag.
Native advertising for the uninitiated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_advertising
John Oliver has a good bit on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc
The question I put to management is “What do you want me to use AI for?”
I can’t get a consistent answer. Lots of stuff unrelated to my job duties. “Well, it’s so easy to make Facebook ads!” - “You know that’s not a thing I do, right?”
Yeah, my boss told he’s under pressure from upper management and customers to add AI in our app. His answer is always “to do what?”. So far, nobody has provided an answer, but whenever we get one we’ll be happy to implement it.
They don’t have an answer because they don’t know either. They’ve bought into the idea, and invested trillions, and now they’re all hoping to just churn the cream until it turns into something else, but they have no idea what it will be, or how to use it.
They’re just hoping some minion finally figures out a profitable model, so they can claim it as their own, give him a nominal raise and a nice office, and they can go make trillions off his idea.
If this dickhead is so smart, why does he even need a staff? I’m sure he can go start a company all by himself with just AI to work for him.
I assume that’s the goal he’s aiming for. Wonder who will buy his stuff when it’s just CEOs and their AI still employed.
That will never happen unless CEOs can actually explain what they want.
