I will never understand how is it that such idiots repeatedly make it to the top.
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2026
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It’s partly the fact that hundreds of millions of people the world over, possibly several billion people, believe that they only got there because they were competent and do nothing to stop them.
it's all about the networking at that level. Doesn't matter how much of a blithering idiot you are so long as you know a guy who knows a guy to get you in.
MBAs and such are trained in being confident without knowing anything besides different business grifts.
csuites and ceos, are all the result of nepotism, there isnt such a thing as working your way up ofr those positions.
So they thought it would be free forever, and are surprised by the usage based pricing? I wonder what will happen when ai companies need to be profitable and increase prices accordingly
they thought by paying for AI in its current form will lead to less employee overhead , thereby reducing cost. which dint happen.
I replaced all my software team with agents which can work 24h a day on the product and now none of the software works and I'm out $600000 waaaaaa
- Exec
The bigger problem might be what it will cost to get things back where they need to be. Probably a lot more than $600k. How many of the knowledgeable developers are willing to come back to clean up the mess? Any of them? And at what salary? Possibly a lot more than they were paid before they were kicked out. If you can't rehire the original developers then you might find others with the required technical skills - but probably not with the domain knowledge. And now costs and times increase further.
Upvote for Samus. 👍
Better than Drake, fo sho
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It's like these assholes have never heard the phrase "too good to be true".
People who get paid exorbitant sums for doing exceptionally little probably try to avoid that concept
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Anyone who fell for this grift deserves it and much worse.
People, usually who have never done the job, still love to argue that it can compete with software devs and infra engineers.
The sad part they don't see (or maybe care about) is while it can't currently (and absolutely not llms) they're pushing a narrative that we should automate everyone and everything which is dangerous and moronic.
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an astonishing 29 percent of [execs] had no idea where the growing costs associated with AI were coming from.
The headline combined with the quote just make me laugh so much, I love it
This is what happens when the people in charge of everything are entirely separated from reality.
Those same idiots have been in charge of everything for decades, blindly doing whatever suited them.
They got duped and didn't have the technical competence to see it or trust their staff to negotiate it.
Every IT / Developer out there knew it was a bad idea. The C-Staff was sold by the billionaires that you will go AI or you will be left behind.
My own CEO is simultaneously telling us to use AI for as much as we can and telling us to reduce costs as much as possible.
The "you'll be left behind" nonsense makes me laugh. Left behind from what exactly? Lol
The sales pitch is:
All your competition is going AI. They're be producing 10x the work with mouth breathing morons at the keys, while you're stuck paying millions to subject matter experts.
They're scared ot death that the tenuous hold they have on their market segment will be severed if their competition outflanks them in this, so FUD wins.
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I told my boss this:
- Right now the AI race has a lot of similarities to the dotcom bubble. The subject is packed with risky loans based on huge debts. Those huge debts are expecting to be paid as AI becomes profitable, but AI companies are largely loosing money.
- All those loans and infrastructure create the burden of sunk costs leading to a desperate need to succeed.
- The people feeling that desperation are the same people who own the largest marketing, news, and social media networks in the world.
- As a result, there’s a lot of hype around AI. A lot of “kool-aid,” and everyone wants you to drink it. If you drink the kool-aid, that means you’re also bought into the problem. You also need it to succeed, thus making their problem into your problem.
I explained to him that mature, professional use of AI is going to wind up following a similar path to data engineering. It’ll start with bullshit standards, “prompt engineers” and the like, but eventually SE disciplines are going to define who makes best use of AI. You’re going to have niche use cases for daemon AIs, local LLMs, and remote models. You’ll have stronger frameworks around session management, context management, agent permissions, …
It’s not going to be like this forever, “dump all your shit into our web upload and let the AI figure everything out in one go.” It’s going to become more fragmented, bounded, dare I say deterministic… orchestratable.
Then I told my boss, it would be better if he could frame his excitement around these future use cases… so we can skip the kool-aid stage and get right into the good stuff.
He agreed, until about a week passed. Then it was AI hype again.
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It's funny because they do this to other people; they just never thought it'd happen to them. FAFO 🫡
- Build up reliance on AI, which looks really cheap
- You can now replace employees with AI so fire away!
- You are now completely dependent on AI and a handful of employees
- AI company sees they have you and start jacking up rates. If you could afford paying for people before then you have the $ to pay high rates.
- Company now wonders why costs are back to where they were before and the AI isn't working out as expected.
It's particularly funny because I'm pretty sure AI companies are still selling the service below cost to try to retain market share (and drive small competitors out of business). They just aren't taking quite as big a loss on every token with the increased prices.
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The first hit was free.
Cant wait to see their reaction when AI replaces them
Here's a real a cost saving prompt:
"Translate the contents of every single document in our databases into as many languages (including dead and constructed fictional languages) as possible."
Now you can fire the one Hispanic guy you hired because you assumed he could speak Hindi.
This has been the case ever since things that seem great, like google cloud computing...and your little project just bankrupted you because you left a tap open over the weekend.
I swear, execs are some of the most gullible people on earth. I know some of them, and none of them are very bright, just very greedy.
My lesson in this came really early in my career. One of our execs was selling vapourware. Just promising our product, that we hadn't made yet, could do literally anything. Then he insisted we build it on this platform he must have had shares in the way he pushed it, only it was also vapourware and didn't do half the things it said it did.
He found it utterly inconceivable that a company would sell a product that didn't do what it said despite doing the exact same thing himself. He was completely delusional.
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Here is how it has gone down for a few companies I have visibillity on:
- Investors with enough stock to have influence demand the company use AI and cut staff
- remaining ataff struggles to fit AI into their now bloated workload
- quality slips and stumbles. a few employees are able to make the transition and cause huge AI bills while attempting to cover the workload
- everyone gets upset and nothing gets done well
It looks like investors who have also invested in AI are trying to push its use and it is stumbling all over the place. If a company cant adapt it is basically stripped for parts and sold off to companies that are handling it better.
Someone should remind those soggy, arrogant execs that down here in the developer trenches we survived web services, software as a service, outsourcing, and off-shoring. We're still here after all that and we'll still be here after AI.
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It was a matter of time honestly, anyone with the basic metrics of usage of an service was gonna get screwed over. With people you can actually say hey labor's too high and lay people off and have a shitty excuse. This is just you're stupid.
May they get utterly Forded
You'd think the cocaine-snorting classes would understand that only the first hit's free.
And if we had strong labour relationships, we'd make them fucking pay for having attempted to destroy our lives for profit.
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This reporting is basically dishonest. The execs are not confused. They knew this was likely to occur, because we all told them so.
Now, you can argue that they hoped otherwise, that they were being ridiculously optimistic. But to argue that they didn't expect it is simply unbelievable.
I think you're underestimating how clueless and braindead executives can be.
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The KPMG report, initially flagged by the Register, surveyed 2,145 senior execs across 20 countries, finding that an astonishing 29 percent of them had no idea where the growing costs associated with AI were coming from.
They're just dumb assholes
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The modern executive who got their post from being mates with the right people, having attended the right schools and relentless self-promotion isn't a highly analitical person who sistematically and in depth researches their options before chosing what to do.
This is unsurprising given that a system were the image one projects is critical to one's career progression rewards almost the opposite: they're supposed to look decisive and confident.
The myth of CxO competence is just that: a myth and the product of confusing the characteristics of the character they're playing with the characteristics of the actor, something we're definitelly egged on to do by the Media.
It's only unbelievable that the execs did not expect this for those who believe the execs are actually competent at management rather than being people born in the right families and whose greatest competence is in playing the right role for the right audience.
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If you've ever spent 10 minutes using an AI agent, you'd know that there's no way to predict how many tokens it's going to use before you give it a task. It can be $0.20 worth sometimes or $20 other times. Or anything, really.
It's only after watching it churn away for a few minutes that you can assume it's gotten stuck and have the option of pulling the plug before the bill gets run up too high. But you need to watch it like a hawk and you need to be the one paying the bill otherwise you're not going to care (e.g. workers using AI at work aren't paying for it, their company is).
Taken in aggregate across a month, that unpredictability might average out or it might explode.
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