As I'm slowly burning through the slog of a job search process, I'm experiencing/observing something from several employers, and I just want to call it out, because it really bothers me.
I've been a software developer for literally 35 years, 28 of those "professionally" (making money doing it). There've been a lot of tools come and go over that long a period of time. I wrote code in notepad.exe and then I graduated to Dreamweaver, and I used it to write code (no I didn't use or like the wysiwyg stuff). There've been countless dev tools, libraries, frameworks take over the scene, some were good some were crap.
In addition to software dev tools, I've used a whole variety of other tools from spreadsheets to word processors to .... and then there's all the SaaS products, hundreds of them... look just fill in the blanks. The point is, I've had the occasion to use (or at least be exposed to) a ton of different tools that make up "what it takes to do a job".
You know what never once happened in that entire career? I never once had an employer monitoring how many formulas I was writing in Excel. I never had a employer metering, mandating how much I maxed out on the number of bullet lists I put into my Word documents.
The work was the work. The tools you used to get the work done, largely didn't matter. Somewhat, but not really. As long as you got the work done, and you were aware of what tools you had available to you to get the work done... that's what mattered in the end. We actually used to criticize employees who blamed their tools (or lack thereof) for falling short of the expected work output.
But now? SO many companies seem to be so hyper focused on micro-managing how workers engage with AI in their job tasks. Like, they've elevated this to the interviewing process, even. They want you to get on a call and demonstrate to them how you use AI to do some task they give you. You have to sign AI pledges (yes, really), just like NDAs. No matter whether you can do the task without AI, they want to see you use AI, or it's a pass.
Can you imagine if you had a job interview, and with a straight face they looked at you and asked you to walk them through how you'd google-search to figure out some set of information?!? I've NEVER heard of that.
I'm happy with my relationship to AI. I think it's making me more productive. It's improving my output quality. But I've developed my own "way" of doing it, and it doesn't look like how others do it (on either side of the adoption/rejection curve).
Concerningly, I'm getting the impression that, not only am I expected to leverage AI as a tool in doing work for employment, I'm actually expected to follow a very particular -- and extremely optimistically hyped -- "maxxing" way of AI work.
They're not interested in whether I can do the work *with* AI, because... it seems... the work now *is* AI. That's what most seem to be hiring for: to *do* AI. It's not *do work with AI*, it's... *do AI as work*.
Yikes. WHY!? | 64 comments on LinkedIn
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