Engineers should probably form unions.

I got dinged on my latest review for not participating enough in the team channels, and I feel like I’m back in middle school. Apparently, shipping clean, bug-free code ahead of schedule takes a backseat to not dropping enough memes in the #random channel. My manager literally told me that social presence is a core metric for our remote culture this year. Is this normal? I’m so grumpy about it.

We need to stop the AI initiative. This is becoming a wrecking ball, and I only foresee getting worse. How can we make noise to put these types of software to its end?

If every employee had an AI assistant that doubled their productivity, would companies hire fewer people or expect twice as much work?

My company strongly encourages us to use copilot for coding. I have two “vibe coders” in my team. Sometimes they do funny things (like writing a separate java class with getters for two constants, complete with a test class - all AI generated and absolute BS), but most days, it’s taking a toll on the rest of us. The most annoying part is that the management praises the “creative duo” while we struggle, trying to put out their fires and keep the code quality decent.