Technology

CEO of enterprise-software powerhouse IgniteTech.

Can someone tell me what they do? They don't have a Wikipedia Article and their website is mostly AI slop.

"Doing Our Part to Make the World a Greener Place"

Clown company. You can't promote AI and do a claim like that at the same time.

Just like an AI. Instead of learning from mistakes, he repeates them, and denies any wrongdoing.

"The marketing and salespeople were enthused by the possibilities of working with these new tools, he added."

https://youtu.be/KHJbSvidohg#t=13s

I see the same push where I work and I cannot get a good answer to the most basic question:

"Why?"

"We want more people using AI."

"Why?"

". . ."

Late stage capitalism rewards management for any appearance of change. It really doesn't matter whether the results of that change are good or bad. And even a CEO who keeps destroying companies can always find a similar position elsewhere. The feedback loop is hopelessly broken.

"Vaughan was surprised to find it was often the technical staff, not marketing or sales, who dug in their heels."

So the people that understood it best were sceptical, and this didn't give him pause.

Can someone explain to me why all these empty suits dick ride LLMs so hard?

Does he still have a company at all?

This type of shortsightedness should be punished. I mean AI can be useful for certain tasks but it’s still just a tool. It’s like these CEOs were just introduced to a screwdriver and he’s trying use it for everything.

“Look employees, you can use this new screwdriver thing to brush your teeth and wipe your ass. “

What if we just swap CEOs with psychopathic assholes that only... oh wait.

You have to use AI! For what? I dunno, figure it out or you're fired! <- a genius businessman, apparently...

This blind lemming-like rush towards AI that so many CEOs seem to suffer from seriously resembles cult behavior or severe drug addiction, my god...

Vaughan was surprised to find it was often the technical staff, not marketing or sales, who dug in their heels. They were the “most resistant,” he said, voicing various concerns about what the AI couldn’t do, rather than focusing on what it could. The marketing and salespeople were enthused by the possibilities of working with these new tools, he added.

Imagine that.

As a paid, captive squirrel, focusing on spinning my workout wheel and getting my nuts at the end of the day, I hate that AI is mostly a (very expensive) solution in search of a problem. I am being told "you must use AI, find a way to use it" but my AI successes are very few and mostly non-repeatable (my current AI use case is: "try it once for non-vital, not time-sensitive stuff, if at first you don't succeed, just give up, if you succeed, you saved some time for more important stuff").

If I try to think as a CEO or an entrepreneur, though, I sort of see where these people might be coming from. They see AI as the new "internet", something that for good or bad is getting ingrained in everything we do and that will cause your company to go bankrupt for trying too hard to do things "the new way" but also to quickly fade to irrelevance if you keep doing things in the same way.

It's easy, with the benefit of hindsight, to say now "haha, Blockbuster could have bought Netflix for $50 Millions and now they are out of business", but all these people who have seen it happen are seeing AI as the new disruptive technology that can spell great success or complete doom for their current businesses. All hype? Maybe. But if I was a CEO I'd be probably sweating too (and having a couple of VPs at my company wipe up the sweat with dollar bills)

You probably don't want to work at a company like that anyway.

Today, I ran into a bug. We're being encouraged to use AI more so I asked copilot why it failed. I asked without really looking at the code. I tried multiple times and all AI could say was 'yep it shouldn't do that' but didn't tell me why. So, gave up on copilot and looked at the code. It took me less than a minute to find the problem.

It was a switch statement and the case statement had (not real values) what basically reads as ' variable' == 'caseA' or 'caseB'. Which will return true... Which is the bug. Like I'm stripping a bunch of stuff away but co-pilot couldn't figure out that the case statement was bad.

AI is quickly becoming the biggest red flag. Fast slop, is still slop.

I think as a society we need to go through this, watching companies fail and shareholders losing their shit before the perpetrators of Assumed Intelligence end up in court.

I have mixed feelings about the employees who are caught up in this .. let's call it what it is .. scam.

It's easy to say .. you lost your job because your boss is an arsehole, but how much influence did each individual really have in the overall process?

I've been looking for the next paid challenge for five years .. well before this AI scam was perpetrated on the world. Despite having 40+ years industry experience and an aging population, my own age appears to be a barrier for the HR teams relying on the same tools that is causing them to lose their jobs.

As I said, I think this needs to blow up before it gets better, hopefully before I'm too old to do meaningful work.

Of course he would. He could probably give hitler lessons on oven design.

That CEO:

God, this article is so full of bullshit my phone stinks. And I'm not even an AI-phobe

"Vaughan was surprised to find it was often the technical staff..."

Tell me you're completely out of touch with your company and what it does without telling me you're completely out of touch with your company and what it does. FFS how is this guy the CEO? Oh, he's one of the founders? Brilliant.

Vaughan says he didn’t want to force anyone. “You can’t compel people to change, especially if they don’t believe.”

But he did. Change or be fired, basically.

“You multiply people…give people the ability to multiply themselves and do things at a pace,” he said, touting the company’s ability to build new customer-ready products in as little as four days, an unthinkable timeline in the old regime.

Ooh I bet some nefarious hacker types will be salivating at the incredibly rushed code base that is probably a spaghetti mess and as insecure as fuck.

Vaughan disclosed that the company, which he said is in the nine-figure revenue range, finished 2024 at “near 75% Ebitda”—all while completing a major acquisition, Khoros.

I had to look up EBITDA - some interesting points to consider when you look at this metric he used:

A negative EBITDA indicates that a business has fundamental problems with profitability. A positive EBITDA, on the other hand, does not necessarily mean that the business generates cash. This is because the cash generation of a business depends on capital expenditures (needed to replace assets that have broken down), taxes, interest and movements in working capital as well as on EBITDA.
While being a useful metric, one should not rely on EBITDA alone when assessing the performance of a company. The biggest criticism of using EBITDA as a measure to assess company performance is that it ignores the need for capital expenditures in its assessment.

Hmmm... I'm no accountant (I leave that to my actual accountant), but surely if they were being profitable it would sound better to say something like "We've remained profitable throughout and our earnings per quarter are on par if not greater than before."?

I've never heard of this jackass nor his shitty software. I feel privileged.

Has ai ever disagreed with anyone? That's probably why it's so popular with rich 'people'

Granted, my ideas are all baller as fuck. But still..

I wonder if he thinks we're dumb or just doesn't care. They'd have been laid off either way. "Return to work", "Stack ranking", "AI refusal", whatever you say bro.