[rybosworld]

Companies over a certain size (say more than 25+ employees), are universally bad at:

- measuring productivity

- adapting to change

This article just reinforces that. Past a certain headcount, executives have little to no understanding of what IC day-to-day is like.

AI tooling doesn't fix the bureaucracy the c-suite helped to create.

[zubiaur]

And there are incentives to miss-report.

My team has gained a reputation of being some sort of firefighting crew.

We are being called by PMs when projects are failing, usually engineering-data and engineering-adjacent stuff. (Mechanical/Electrical).

We automate the heck out the processes, using a mix of AI processing, RAGs, and AI assisted coding.

We rescue the projects. Finish ahead of schedule. Make fewer mistakes. We gain additional scope. We win new projects. We bring new clients.

But when higher ups ask the people we helped about productivity gains, the most generous will say stuff like "it takes as long to review as it takes to do things manually", "They really helped on {inconsequential part of the deliverable}"

If the that is the takeaway these people were taking, they would incredibly misled. Luckily for me, I have people who deal with the politics, while my team can focus on delivery.

Our reputation keeps growing, and we keep delivering faster. The heads of the departments we work with love us, the middle rank who were doing the laborious crap, maybe not so much.