Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?

Summary

I think there’s pretty clearly a divide in AI perception between executives and individual contributors (ICs). Executives seem to love it and evangelize it (going so far as to creating mandates at their companies for AI usage). But ICs are typically much more skeptical of its usage. You can see the divide show up everywhere from Hacker News comment threads to internal Slack debates about adopting coding agents.Here’s my current posit for why there’s such a big divide: executives have always had to deal with non-determinism and focus on nondeterministic system design, while individual contributors are evaluated by their execution on deterministic tasks.Managing non-deterministic systemsExecutives have always had to deal with non-determinism. That’s par for the course:People being out sick or taking time off unexpectedlySomeone not finishing an important project and not talking about it until far too late in the processPeople reacting to an announcement in an unexpected wayA feature being built in a way that doesn’t make sense with respect to the rest of the product, but does technically achieve objectives.More generally, if you’ve ever taken a Chaos Theory class in math, you’ll know that nonlinear, chaotic systems emerge when individual agents in a system are all acting with different inputs, utility functions, etc. Systems become slightly easier to manage if you’re able to make those utility functions consistent (you’re able to get a grasp on system dynamics).A manager’s job is to create a model of the world and align everyone’s utility functions, knowing that there’s a large amount of non-determinism in complex systems. So it makes sense that as a manager, you’re ok with a decent amount of this.AI is something that is non-deterministic but has a lot of characteristics of a well behaved chaotic system (specifically a system where you can understand the general behavior of the system, even if you cannot predict the specific outcomes at any point in time).For example:...