Same thing happened during the outsourcing craze of early 2000s. Everything and I mean everything moved to India or Philippines. There’s even a movie about it because it was so common. I and everyone else lost our jobs. about a year later the contracts expired and we all got jobs back and outsourcing is used in balance. Eventually ai use will be balanced I hope. It cannot replace us. Not yet anyways.
Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes
Submitted 8 months ago by tonytins@pawb.social to technology@lemmy.world
https://futurism.com/companies-fixing-ai-replacement-mistakes
Comments
Jhuskindle@lemmy.world 8 months ago
skozzii@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
AI needs to be used as a tool for workers, not a replacement for workers. They will figure it out.
reluctant_squidd@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
The even brighter side of it is that it should be easier to spot these companies when job hunting.
IMO: Demand higher wages and iron clad contracts from them because they already demonstrated how they feel about paying people.
They’ll surely cut anyone they can again as soon as they can.
funkyfarmington@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Yet their reputations will somehow never return…
TuffNutzes@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Very expected. It’s fine. I’ll come back at 10 times my previous rate. And you’ll thank me for it.
KbSez@piefed.social 8 months ago
no surprise
AnotherPenguin@programming.dev 8 months ago
Deserved and expected
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 8 months ago
thats because the main peddlers are the ceo/csuites of these tech companies, and the customers arnt people like you or me, its other corporate heads. in case of palintir it would be the government.
Phoenix3875@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The BBC report cited mainly focused on the marketing industry, with the fixing mistake people being the copywriters. This gives a strong vibe of Madman, where you have the “old-fashioned” copywriters and the tension between market research.
psycho_driver@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Let them burn.
iAvicenna@lemmy.world 8 months ago
jsomae@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
AI is only effective if used sparingly and cautiously by someone with domain knowledge who can identify the tasks (usually menial ones) that don’t need a human touch.
systemglitch@lemmy.world 8 months ago
AI now offers to post my ads for me on Kijiji. I provide pictures and it has been accurate on price, condition, category and description. I have a lot of shit to sell and was dreading it, but this use removes the biggest barrier for me getting it done.
Even helped me figure out some things I was struggling to find online for reference. Saved me at least an hour of tedium yesterday.
Excellent use case.
ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
This is the best description of AI I’ve seen so far.
jsomae@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
In the situation outlined, it can be pretty effective.
Awkwardparticle@programming.dev 8 months ago
The biggest point is that you must be an expert in the field you are using it in. I rarely get fooled by hallucinations and stupid bugs because they are glaringly obvious to me. The best use case is having the llm write code for using a library that has poor documentation, that am going to use once, and I am too lazy to learn. These tools are scary when used by juniors, they are creating more work for everyone by using llms to code. I just imagine myself using this when I was a fresh grad, it is terrifying. It would have only been one step up from vibe coding.
jsomae@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
may well be a Gell-Mann amnesia simulator when used improperly.
ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
I feel so bad for recent grads. First COVID then AI/LLMs, it’s such a bad time to be starting out. I feel so fortunate that I’m well into my career and can use AI responsibly without having to worry too much about it.
Vinstaal0@feddit.nl 8 months ago
Some good examples from the bookkeeping/accounting industry is automating the matching of payments to the invoices and using AI to extract and process invoices.
derpgon@programming.dev 8 months ago
This 1000x. I am a PHP developer, I found out about two months ago that the AI assistant is included in my Jetbrains subscription (All pack, it was a separate thing before). And recently found about Junie, their AI agent that has deep thinking (or whatever the hell it is called). I tried it the same day to refactor part of my test that had to migrated to stop using a deprecated function call.
To my surprise, it required only very minor changes, but what would’ve taken me about 3 hours was done in half an hour. What I also liked was that it actually asked if it can run a terminal command to verify thr test results and it went back and fixed a broken test or two.
Finally I have faith in AI being useful to programmers.
For a test, I took our dev exam (for potential candidates) and just sent it to see what it does just based on the document, and besides a few mistakes it even used modern tools and not some 5 year old stuff (like PSR standards) and implemented core systems by itself using well known interfaces (from said PSRs). I asked it to change Dependency Injection to use Symfony DI instead of the self-made thing, and it worked flawlessly.
Of course, the code has to be reviewed or heavily specified to make sure it does what it is told to, but all in all it doesn’t look like just a gimmick anymore.
vivalapivo@lemmy.today 8 months ago
it doesn’t look like just a gimmick anymore.
It still does 😞
jsomae@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Absolutely, this matches my experience. I think this is also the experience of most coders who willingly use AI. I feel bad for the people who are forced to use it by their companies. And those who are laid off because of C-levels who think AI is capable of replacing an experienced coder.
_haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
AI: The new outsourcing?
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 8 months ago
Companies with stupid leaders deserve to fail.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Well what ends up happening is some company will have a CEO.
He’ll make all the stupid decisions. But they’re only stupid from everybody ELSES perspective.
From his perspective, he uses AI, tanks the companies future in the chase of large short term stock gains. Then he gives himself a huge bonus, leaves the company, gets hired somewhere else, and gets to say “See how that company is failing without me? That’s because I bring value to the brand.”
So he gets hired at the neeeext place, meanwhile that first company is failing because of the actions of a CEO no longer employed there, and whom bailed because he knew what was coming.
These actions aren’t stupid. They’re plotted corruption for the benefit of one.
The_v@lemmy.world 8 months ago
No that never happens /S
I used to work with a supplier that hired a former Monsanto executive as their CEO. When his first agenda came out I told their sales team them they were idiots to have fun looking for a new job a few months.
The CEO bailed after 2 years to start his own “consulting business.”
1 year later the company lost 75% of their market share and was laying off people left and right. They are still afloat barely.
After a couple years “consulting”, the CEO went to another company in 2023. He didn’t bounce fast enough and got caught on this one. He was fired 2 weeks ago and the company shut their doors except for a handful of staff to facilitate the firesale of the companies assets.
AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 8 months ago
What’s really stupid about this cycle is that some of these fail-upward executives genuinely believe the crap they’re spewing. Weirdly, I think I respect the grifting executives more
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 8 months ago
McNamara fallacy at its finest. They hear figures and potential savings and then jump into the hype without considering the context. It is the same when they heard of lean manufacturing or Toyota way. Companies thought it is cost saving rather than process improvement.
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 8 months ago
And no doubt struggling to blame their bad decisions on each other and preserve their salary bonuses.
iAvicenna@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Nah all they have to say is “that is what the guy from the XYZ consultancy suggested. He told me that everyone is replacing their coding teams with %95 AI assistants and a single newly graduated programmer that works for food.”
martinb@lemmy.sdf.org 8 months ago
Or just declare victory and move on to the next project quickly
fluxion@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Oh noes, who could have seen this coming
oppy1984@lemdro.id 8 months ago
What these companies didn’t take the time to understand is, A.I. is a tool to make employees more efficient, not to replace them. Sadly the vast majority of these companies will also fail to learn this lesson now and will get rid of A.I. systems altogether rather than use them properly.
When I write a document for my employer I use A.I. as a research and planning assistant, not as the writer. I still put in the work writing the document, I just use A.I. to simplify the tedious data gathering and organizing.
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 8 months ago
My daughter has used AI a lot to write grant proposals, which she cleans up and rewords before submitting. Part of her prompts include telling it to ask her questions and incorporate her answers into the result, which she says works very well and saves her a ton of time.
oppy1984@lemdro.id 8 months ago
That’s a good way to use the tool. I generally use the OpenAI option to set up a custom gpt and tell it to become an expert on the subject I’m writing about, then set the parameters. Then once I’ve tested it on a piece of the subject matter I already understand and confirm it’s working properly, I begin asking it questions. When I’m out of questions or just need a break, I go back and check the citations for each answer just to make sure I’m not getting bad data.
Once I’ve run out of questions and all the data is verified, I have it create an outline with a brief summary of each section. Then I take that outline and use that to guide me as I write. Also it seems like the A.I. always puts at least one section in the wrong place so that’s just another reason I like to write it myself and just use an A.I. summary outline.
MangoCats@feddit.it 8 months ago
I just use A.I. to simplify the tedious data gathering and organizing.
If you’re conscientious, you check AI’s output the same way a conscientious licensed professional checks the work of an assistant before signing their name to it.
If you’re more typical… you’re at even greater risk trusting AI than you are when trusting an assistant who is trying to convince your bosses that they can do your job better than you.
oppy1984@lemdro.id 8 months ago
Oh I check the citations. I’m fully aware of A.I. hallucinations.
rebelsimile@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
yes, 100%, do not use an LLM for anything you’re not prepared to vet and verify all of. The longer an LLM’s response the higher the odds it loses context and starts repeating or stating total gibberish or makes up data to keep going. If that’s what you want (like a list of fake addresses and phone numbers to prototype an app), great, but that’s about all it’s going to really do.
rozodru@lemmy.world 8 months ago
As someone who has been a consultant/freelance dev for over 20 years now this is true. Lately I’ve been getting offers and contacts from places to essentially clean up the mess from LLMs/AI.
A lot of is pretty bad. It’s a mess. But like I said I’ve been at it for awhile and I’ve seen this before when companies were offshoring anything and everything to India and surprise, surprise, they didn’t learn anything. It’s literally the exact same thing. Instead of an Indian guy that claims they know everything and will work for peanuts, it’s AI pretty much stating the same shit.
I’ve been getting so many requests for gigs I’ve been hitting up random out of work devs on linkedin in my city and referring the jobs to them. I’ve burned through all my contacts that now I’m just reaching out to absolute strangers to get them work.
yes it’s that bad.
ICastFist@programming.dev 8 months ago
How much is the pay for those gigs?
Landless2029@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Sounds like you need to start a company and per diem staff.
_haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
They learned that by the time all of their shitty decisions ruin everything, they’ll be able to bail with their golden parachute while everyone else has to deal with the fallout.
dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
Throw us some work if you like, although I already work as software engineer but wouldn’t turn down a side gig cleaning up after LLMs.
Grimy@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I imagine you aren’t talking about large companies that just let ai loose in their code base. Are these like companies that fired half their staff and realized llms couldn’t make up for the difference, or small companies that tried to make new apps without a proper team and came up short?
rozodru@lemmy.world 8 months ago
primarily medium to large companies. the smaller startups seem to know better. the former laid off a bunch of staff and in most cases offshored the work to people who ONLY use AI to build things. A few rare cases it’s been a Project Manager who paid for a Claude.ai subscription and had it build things from start to finish then push to production. If I see something that has a gradient background I know they had Claude build it.
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Retired dev here, I’m curious about the nature of the mess. Is it buggy AI-generated code that got into production? I know an active dev who uses ChatGTP every day, says it saves him a hell of a lot of work. What he does sounds like “vibe coding”, and as long as you just use AI for grunt work and keep a human is in the workflow to verify the code, I don’t see how it would differ from junior devs working under a senior. Have some companies been using poorly managed all-AI tools or what?
rozodru@lemmy.world 8 months ago
essentially, from what I’ve been dealing with, most if it is their offshore people using the AI to completely do the job from start to finish and no one is verifying anything. So it’s not even vibe coding, it’s “here’s a prompt, build it, i’m pushing it to production” coding.
GojuRyu@lemmy.world 8 months ago
An example from work a few weeks ago. I fixed some vibe coded UI code that had made it to prod. The layout of the UI was basically just meant to be an easy overview of information relevant to an item. The LLM had done everything right except it assumed a weird mix of tailwind and bootstrap, mixing and matching css classes from both. After I implemented the classes myself it went from a single column view to grids and nested grids grouping the data intuitively. I talked with the dev who implemented it, and basically it was just something quickly cobbled together with AI until it was passable. The AI had added a lot of extra that served no function and that didn’t conform to a single css framework, but looked like it could. For months noone questioned it despite talk about that part of the UI needing a facelift.
I don’t know how representative it is, but about half the time I’m thoroughly confused about a piece of code and why it was written the way it was, the answer has turned out to be AI. And unlike when a developer wrote it, there rarely is any reason to have written it the weird way.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Think of AI as a hard working, arrogant, knowledgeable, unimaginative junior intern.
The vibe coding is great for small, self contained tasks. It doesn’t scale to a codebase (yet?).
Two9A@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Would you happen to be willing to throw work to random out-of-work devs who aren’t in your city? I may know a couple over here in England…
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Sometimes it is a bunch of Indian guys pretending to be AI!
MangoCats@feddit.it 8 months ago
We’ve hired a bunch of Indian guys who are using AI to do their work… the results are marginally better than either approach independently.
merc@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Absent Indians using AI? The AI ouroboros?
Saleh@feddit.org 8 months ago
a negative times a negative is a positive?
Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Ah so AI does create jobs, it’s the Zorg logic
millie@slrpnk.net 8 months ago
Pretty damn good jobs too, tbh.
GaMEChld@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Jean-Baptiste
Emmanuel
Zorg
cyrano@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Mushroomm@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
They should have just asked me. I knew that would be the result years ago. Writing has been on the screaming wall of faces
WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 8 months ago
Management doesn’t ask people they want to fire is firing them is a good idea. They themselves would lie like crazy to keep their job and assume therefore everything the developers say would be a lie too.
vala@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Hiring people at lower wages that is.
devolution@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Kinda like Wal-Mart trying to “save money” with self check out and now they are walking it back.
Sludgehammer@lemmy.world 8 months ago
At least in my area they’ve decided to walk back the walk back.
They went from “Self checkouts are now only for ten items or less” to “Self checkouts are permanently closed” and now they’ve gone to “Self checkouts can be used for any number of items and also we added four more”.
JoMiran@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
AI: Confidently Incorrect
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 8 months ago
All the leadership who made this mistake should be fired. They are clearly incompetent
But i guess it’s always labor that pays the price
Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
What’s sad is that the AI hype did inflate stock prices.
Most c suite’ job is to look out for the interests of investors.
Technically they did a good job. I hate capitalism
0x0@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
The power to fire lies within the leadership themselves though…
Oh, you mean an actual fire?! I like your way of thinking.
redsunrise@programming.dev 8 months ago
I wonder if there’s a market here. I feel like a company that cleans up AI bullshit would make bank lol
MagicShel@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
You son of a bitch, I’m in!
Nah, I came here to make this comment and you already have it well in hand. It’s not really any different other than the marketing spin, though. Companies have always had bad code and hired specialists to sort it out. And over half of the specialists suck, too, and so the merry-go-round spins.
ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Vibe coding is 5% asking for code and 95% cleaning up the code, turns out replacing people with AI is exactly the same.
MangoCats@feddit.it 8 months ago
Stack Exchange coding is 5% finding solutions to try and 95% copy-pasting those solutions into your project, discovering why they don’t work for you, and trying the next solution on the search list.
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I’m still not sure how this is any different than when I used stack exchange for exactly the same thing.
Well, SE code usually compiled and did what it said. I guess that part is different.
Saleh@feddit.org 8 months ago
Practically negligible then…
However how the heck have you all been using stack exchange? My questions are typically something along the lines of:
“How to use a numpy mask with pandas dataframes”
Not something that gives me 50 lines of code.
Peerpeer@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Jup. But the same goes for developers that go way too fast when setting up a project or library. 2-3 months in and everything is a mess. Weird function names, all one letter vars, no inversion of control, hardcoded things etc. Good luck fixing it.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
This is what I fight against every goddamn day, and I get yelled at for fighting against it, but I’m not going to stop. I want to build shit that I can largely forget about (because, you know, it’s reliable and logically extensible and maintainable) after it gets to a mature state, and I’m not shy about making that known. This has led to more than a few significant conflicts over the course of my career. It has also led to me saying “I fucking told you so” more than a few times.
logicbomb@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Same thing happened with companies that used outsourcing expecting it to be a magic bullet.
MisterNeon@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I hope this is true. I would like to have a job again.
bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Hope they lose billions!!