This is my commentary from a blog post I found here.

Jensen Huang is the current CEO for Nvidia, the man being credited with taking the company to stratopheric heights in the last 10 years. This is mainly because Nvidia creates the best GPUs that are used in the core model training algorithms for anything AI related.

What I wanted to quickly write about was about something he said during a recent interview with Jim Cramer (yes, that Jim Cramer) that reasonated with me.

We currently live in a world where a huge portion of the tech community, i.e., software engineers particularly, live in a near constant state of anxiety. Their (our) jobs are potentially being automated away and it seems that we can’t go a single quarter without hearing about some huge company laying off a bunch of employees.

The justification? AI.

Never mind the old adage “putting the cart before the horse”, firing employees before you’ve actually realized the net gain from the technology that claims to reduce the need for them.

Apparently Jenson sings a slightly different tune. First, the setup:

Huang was talking about the ability of AI to elevate the capabilities of humans when CNBC’s Jim Cramer asked him why companies are laying off people, saying they want to do more with less.

His response is what I’d like to highlight here:

A frustrated Huang responded, “Because you’re out of imagination. For companies with imagination, you will do more with less. For companies that are, you know, when the leadership is just out of ideas, they have nothing else to do, they have no reason to imagine greater than they are. Then when they have more capability, you know, they don’t do more.”

As someone currently living through some of this and experiencing more and more consistent layoffs, along with “forced PIP’s” or even quotas for them, this really struck home.

He’s compared engineers’ usage of AI similar to how CAD is used by mechanical engineers - i.e., it’s a tool that you use to become more productive. So he’s definitely not an AI skeptic.

But I echo what he said here so much.

I’ve had so much pressure to simply “use AI” in my career lately that I genuinely feel like its required usage is missing the mark entirely.

What exactly are you doing with AI? Is it to simply use a tool or is it to use that tool to accomplish some task that furthers the goal of the company?

Is its usage making the customer’s experience better, however you define the customer to be?

Or is it just a way to pad your numbers and make it look like you’re a 10x engineer? And by extension, is this an attempt to make your company look like it’s doing more than it really is?

I think the simple, required usage of AI is the wrong metric.

It seems that a lot of companies these days, in their attempts to skirt from the repurcussions of the enshittification of their products, are using this as a scapegoat to throw their employees under the bus. And hopefully prop up their failing stock prices temporarily until their respective golden gooses are killed.

But that’s the next CEO’s problem, I suppose.

We’ve known for years that tracking developer’s commit and PR counts isn’t a good way to measure engineer productivity, why would this suddenly be different?