I think the real reason was there was no path to promotion for working on this. For better or worse the incentives were not aligned for great work to happen.
That's because people can't handle speed. With a natural delay, they could cool down or at least become more detached. Society needs natural points where people are forced to detach from what they do. That's one reason why AI and high-speed communications are so dangerous: they accelerate what we do too quickly to remain balanced. (And I am speaking in general here, of course there will be a minority who can handle it.)
Why even be sarcastic about it ? There is no human invention that has not exploded thanks (or because of) pornographic possibilities. HD-DVD vs Blueray, Internet...I'd even argue that XR is not as big as it could be because it is really clamped down to deviant usage !
>Add me to the list of people who acknowledge the problem but haven't heard any alternative.
Credentials like doctors and lawyers. You don't ask your surgeon for a demo before going in do you? Stakes are way higher and there are obviously bad doctors too.
Bad managers do way more damage than bad developers, and I don't think I've heard of managers having to mock manage a team for an hour, and I'm sure it's just as vulnerable to bullshitting.
What it really seems like is the lower end positions get the hoops to jump through while the upper level positions (manager and staff+ ICs) have it easy despite having way more impact and being paid more.
Lawyers go through standardized postgraduate training and bar examination. Doctors go through standardized postgraduate training and examination, following by years of residency where they practice under the supervision of fully qualified doctors.
There's no standardized postgraduate training for developers. Many CS grads are about as well prepared to work in industry as a new grad with a bachelor's in biology is prepared to practice medicine. That's something that should be corrected, but nobody agrees on whose job it is to correct it, and AFAIK there are no changes on the horizon that will.
> I don't think I've heard of managers having to mock manage a team for an hour
Companies do suck at hiring managers externally, but on the other hand, I've seen bad managers get hired and fired/"resigned" in less than six months. The pay and position does seem to come with a higher degree of accountability, even if I don't always agree with how a company enforces it.
Edited to add: Licensing is an imperfect and onerous system, and we resort to it in the case of doctors and lawyers because they often work unsupervised providing high-stakes services to members of the public who aren't qualified to judge their competence or the quality of the service they provide. Hiring a developer into a software development team is as close to the opposite situation as you can get.
There are tons of doctors and lawyers that are bad. If you aren't vetting them as much as you can then you're going to wind up with some pretty bad apples eventually.
If people can explain their decisions, I'd say it's fair game. It would be nice to know up front if someone used AI of course.
The other implication here is that if a candidate can use AI for a take home and ace the interview, then maybe the company doesn't have as tough of problems as it thought and it could fill this seat quickly. Not a bad problem to have.
