Honestly, of all the people that should be sweating LLMs taking their jobs, it should be enterprise consulting folks - especially the ones at places like McKinsey. A large portion of those jobs involve writing bullshit rehashed documentation that nobody reads, which is a specialty of LLMs.
McKinsey and other consulting companies aren't really paid to consult so much as they are paid scapegoats. Management just needs someone to blame if something goes wrong. LLMs won't really ever replace them.
Not just to blame. They also sell credibility to a lot of managers and bosses.
I've experienced it often enough that upper management doesn't listen to their own employees.
Ultimately, a consultant comes in, talks to employees, suggests the exact same thing to the same people, and they love it.
Having that branding on the ppt slides sells ideas. If you're a project manager or department lead and need to push through an idea but your boss won't let you? Try hiring a consultant who will sell it to your boss.
It's so hard to tell whether these people are genuinely stupid, or just pretending to be because that's what they think will be rewarded (and the latter might be correct and a non-stupid thing to do!)
I wonder if anyone will include the "prompt engineer" in their CV/Resume. Otherwise, if one of the future employers decides to crosscheck a title that's anything different than what your current employer wants to call you, then it may lead to a credibility loss.
From a _consultancy_ it feels a bit on the nose. Do you have a system that's mostly working at the moment? We'll migrate that at huge cost to something else (for little upside, but it'll get sold in really well to senior management)
This marketing effort is aimed at shareholders, not customers or employees. The stock has been tanking hard and she's just replicating the strategy of staying in AI related news hoping for a bump. Hopefully it works, for the employees anyway, so they can dump their own shares.
> 81% of executives say metaverse related technologies are inspiring their organization’s vision or long-term strategy
> 90% of executives anticipate an increase in the level of resources their organizations will dedicate to metaverse related technologies in the next 3-5 years
> $1T executives expect 4.2% of their revenues coming from metaverse in the next 3 years—a value of $1 trillion
If ever there was an argument that executives would be more productive members of society if they were flipping burgers, it's this website.
At least with AI there’s some actual value there, the consulting firms have to jump on every trend because they market themselves as “thought leaders”. I expect a lot of AI shake out this year, people will find where it works and where it doesn’t as well as begins to realize AGI isn’t right around the corner. I’ve gone from pretty skeptical to cautiously optimistic about LLMs with respect to code. I was working on something a couple weeks ago and ran out of free tier claude. I was willing to pay the $20 out of my own pocket to keep using it for work tasks. That forced me to rethink my stance.
This is very, very funny. Pathetic too, of course. But mostly very funny. Has it ever delivered much more than boiler-plate consultancy packaged in buzzwords at the best of times? Now with added slop!
Accenture is more like a body shop or software factory than a traditional consultancy.
Their business model is based on the fact that most non-tech companies have a deeply seated prejudice against paying software and system engineers high salaries and that most of their software engineering senior leadership is hopelessly out of date in technology, but are well-connected with the rest of the leadership team, and can't be replaced directly by more competent, younger people.
So they spend vastly more money to outsource things to Accenture than they would do paying good salaries to engineers. But then, the idiots at Wall Street are allergic to any dollar spent on salaries, while always thinking dollar wasted on companies like accenture is "investment" and thus "a good thing".
I came to the conclusion the most executives in big non-tech enterprises fear an overly powerful IT and actively take decisions that have the goal of making IT less powerful.
It is not very different from ancient Roman Emperors making sure generals that were too successful or popular ended up suffering some funny fatal accident.
Actually, back in the day Andersens (and EDS) were some of the few companies that could deliver really big systems (for all their faults) e.g. https://accountancyage.com/2000/03/16/andersen-consulting-to... . Each year a number of analysts had nervous breakdowns, I worked with one of them.
I worked on some very large very emergency contact tracing, disease surveillance, and vaccine management implementations during covid. Someone on one of my teams ended up in an inpatient facility after a breakdown. Having senior leadership break down in tears on calls was unusual but not unheard of during that time either. Analysts and others at that level went from ok to very not ok in about 90 days. No one cares about consultants, they get ground to dust and then replaced with another team. I was paid well but it was a tough time.
Accenture is a big place, it has a “nice part of town” where there’s genuinely good people who do good things. There’s also the boring part of town where they just “turn the crank and go home”. There’s also “the wrong side of the tracks” that’s just career nightmare fuel.
It’s kind of sad to see everyone being walked out of the factory, the final shutters on the modest profession of programming. I guess this is kind of exactly what it would look like, that bittersweet moment of ‘it’s actually really happening, and it’s actually really sad’.
Part of me wishes we could freeze time, that if we could just keep it like this, this many jobs, this many people, keep it a nice small village …
But this tidal wave before us doesn’t care. So long folks.
Most of people here think "I will be fine, only the other guy gets fired, programmers always will be needed". And we are tempted by new shiny stuff or we think using llms will help us keep the job but really by agreeing to what is happening and not being skeptic and standing against we dig our career graves. Kind of tragedy.
If you view yourself as a "backend developer" or, worse, "a react developer" then sure. If you view yourself as a "person who solves business problems with technology" then the only thing AI does is enable you to do more.
Then become a business owner? Im not sure what the argument is. That industries should resist change because somewhere down the line they become obsolete?
Even actually being irreplaceable doesn't help if management doesn't agree.
And increasing costs 10 fold due to letting go of someone that were doing two teams worth of work on some internal system he had 20y of experience with wont show up in some table in some power point.
That was probably the feeling of thousands of scribes when the printing press spread and more people could afford to buy books. The art of writing, including calligraphy, still exists, but primarily as a hobby.
If you are 40 and haven't transitioned from a linear employee to manager or a small shareholder, your trajectory is that of jaded sadness. I write this to those who are still young enough to read and listen.
Almost all of the couple-hundred employees laid off at my company in the past year have been managers.
For me, I paid off all my debts, and I'm reducing my spending to build up a big stockpile to weather a rough period or large salary decrease. TBH I'd rather find other kinds of work than lean into AI tooling. It's so boring & demoralizing.
this happened with all manner of engineering in America. Industry is power-driven, and only-workers do not protect a place to stand. At the same time, massive fortunes were made, and many, many companies died. Its not a static environment.
> Curious job titles are also popular in the media and entertainment industries, including at Walt Disney, where technical experts who design and build its theme parks are referred to as “imagineers”.
Sorta shit you can pull off if you're Disney, absolutely not something you can pull off if you're fucking Accenture. People as old as me may remember the KPMG song[0]
'Guys, know how we figured out the basics of what we do, and we teach the interns and juniors it, and everyone just gravitates towards a workable model? Yes? Well, forget all that, lets learn how to do that much, but ignore everyone else in the hopes we never have to hire juniors or interns again!'
