Tech CEO applauds an employee selling their dog to accommodate return-to-office • Hacker News Board

Re: Tech CEO applauds an employee selling their dog to accommodate return-to-office

#61

Post by bmelton » Thu, Apr 20, 2023, 2:12 PM UTC

koromak wrote: post #43

Seriously, are any of you "increasing output" with AI? I get like 10 good lines of code a day from Copilot. I don't even try ChatGPT anymore, as its only useful if you're writing boilerplate. Everything thats actually hard about my job requires the full context of the rest of the codebase, within repo and without, and architectural knowledge of the problems we're trying to solve. I read another post here yesterday th…

I'm not a content creator, but while I would never rely solely on AI to write content that I expected to be useful, I do use it for drumming up ideas and have found that (at least for me) its most effective utility is in generating outlines.

When I'm writing things informally (like HN posts) rarely allows me to do so clearly and linearly, and I am constantly either leaving out entire paragraphs that I just assumed I'd already written or am over-responding to things because I keep seeing blanks and just keep filling them. ChatGPT (and presumably all the copywriting tools that rely on it) is much better than I am at giving me a checklist of touchpoints to hit.

Re: Tech CEO applauds an employee selling their dog to accommodate return-to-office

#62

Post by jen20 » Thu, Apr 20, 2023, 2:12 PM UTC

exhibitapp wrote: post #12

Won't comment directly on the strange rant. But it highlights the reality that something has seriously changed since the pandemic. I have multiple employees that insist on staying home due to their dogs. The amount of discussion around employees' dogs is on another level now, partially due to the anxiety these dogs have when their owners go into the office. It's all very different than prepandemic, I for one never he…

I suspect some are using it as a more reasonable-sounding proxy for “fuck being around coworkers who cannot shut up for 30 seconds in their open plan office, cannot correctly apply deodorant in the morning, want to talk non-stop to give the appearance of working, and want to commute to some shitty suburban business park with no facilities anywhere near by”.

I’d honestly rather work in a dog park than that kind of environment.

Re: Tech CEO applauds an employee selling their dog to accommodate return-to-office

#63

Post by tristor » Thu, Apr 20, 2023, 2:12 PM UTC

koromak wrote: post #43

Seriously, are any of you "increasing output" with AI? I get like 10 good lines of code a day from Copilot. I don't even try ChatGPT anymore, as its only useful if you're writing boilerplate. Everything thats actually hard about my job requires the full context of the rest of the codebase, within repo and without, and architectural knowledge of the problems we're trying to solve. I read another post here yesterday th…

Their company writes blog spam used for "SEO" for scam products. It's completely reasonable to expect ChatGPT to increase output, because the prompt could be as simple as "Give me a 2500 word blog post in an optimistic tone of voice about human muscle development, and reference the sources used on Wikipedia. During the article link to X at least 6 times." and voila, one customer's scam product down. Repeat 50x.

Re: Tech CEO applauds an employee selling their dog to accommodate return-to-office

#64

Post by jen20 » Thu, Apr 20, 2023, 2:13 PM UTC

jcutrell wrote: post #36

gedy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that some folks are a little weird about their pets, but after 3 years working from home, these animals do get trained to assume someone is around. Dogs shred stuff, etc.

Also, some people treat their inanimate cars with more loyalty and love than a pet, so it’s not really that weird.

Some people treat anthropomorphized _companies_ with that loyalty and love, so it doesn’t seem weird at all.

Re: Tech CEO applauds an employee selling their dog to accommodate return-to-office

#65

Post by idontwantthis » Thu, Apr 20, 2023, 2:14 PM UTC

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #56

sybercecurity wrote: post #19

"In the video, Clarke levies some big accusations at his staff. Among them: that 30 remote employees had entirely stopped logging on in a “quiet quitting” coup. He expressed suspicions that some of Clearlink’s developers had been holding down positions at other companies without Clearlink’s knowledge. He told content writers they should be using AI to increase output “30-50 times our normal production.” This sounds l…

Regardless of the tone and attitude of the rant, is it not concerning that 30 employees, all of whom are remote and not on PTO, have not even opened their laptops in a month? If I were in leadership, I'd be concerned too. Hell, my company MDM will automatically revoke many permissions if it doesn't get an automated device check-in at least once every two weeks or so.

Why is it worth complaining about? If it’s true then just fire them.

Re: Tech CEO applauds an employee selling their dog to accommodate return-to-office

#66

Post by xeromal » Thu, Apr 20, 2023, 2:15 PM UTC

tedivm wrote: post #3

This title doesn't do it justice- I hope his rant about how working moms aren't fair to the company gets him sued.

I know these are dangerous grounds to tread on, but I do struggle with working parents sometimes.

I understand having children does take time, but I've experienced a parent that ends up being available around 4 hours a day while they are the linchpin in a certain part of the process that prevents a job from being completed. They're slow to respond to messages, emails, and calls and sometimes async responses are just not good enough when we have contractors ready to put equipment into the ground.

Just seems like at some point, the role should be part time and not involved in some crucial aspect of the process. My complaint should probably be towards the company though and not the parent.

Re: Tech CEO applauds an employee selling their dog to accommodate return-to-office

#67

Post by whstl » Thu, Apr 20, 2023, 2:15 PM UTC

koromak wrote: post #43

Seriously, are any of you "increasing output" with AI? I get like 10 good lines of code a day from Copilot. I don't even try ChatGPT anymore, as its only useful if you're writing boilerplate. Everything thats actually hard about my job requires the full context of the rest of the codebase, within repo and without, and architectural knowledge of the problems we're trying to solve. I read another post here yesterday th…

I kinda did, I guess.

I use ChatGPT to generate backend classes or Typescript types from JSON data, to generate unit tests from files, sometimes it also does some browser tests. I also write some parsers so it helps extending syntax a bit (but it's not too good at that). It also helps extracting localization keys, at detecting un-localized keys in HTML templates.

If a project has a lot of boilerplate, then it's definitely more than 10 lines per day. But not exactly "good lines". :)

Re: Tech CEO applauds an employee selling their dog to accommodate return-to-office

#68

Post by dpkirchner » Thu, Apr 20, 2023, 2:16 PM UTC

koromak wrote: post #43

Seriously, are any of you "increasing output" with AI? I get like 10 good lines of code a day from Copilot. I don't even try ChatGPT anymore, as its only useful if you're writing boilerplate. Everything thats actually hard about my job requires the full context of the rest of the codebase, within repo and without, and architectural knowledge of the problems we're trying to solve. I read another post here yesterday th…

I think I am. I don't know how much of my time is spent writing boilerplate but it feels like a lot. Reducing that time is a big win.

Recently I've successfully used ChatGPT to generate:

* TS declaration files for existing JS

* test fixtures that cover boundary conditions

* a regular expression that includes backtracking and optional named capture groups

The last one was pretty neat. I gave it sample data and it gave me a regular expression along with JS code I could copy into a node REPL for testing. It didn't get the task right immediately but we were able to iterate until we got the right solution. My regex-fu is weak when it comes to backtracking so this saved me a lot of time.

Re: Tech CEO applauds an employee selling their dog to accommodate return-to-office

#69

Post by DonHopkins » Thu, Apr 20, 2023, 2:16 PM UTC

koromak wrote: post #43

Seriously, are any of you "increasing output" with AI? I get like 10 good lines of code a day from Copilot. I don't even try ChatGPT anymore, as its only useful if you're writing boilerplate. Everything thats actually hard about my job requires the full context of the rest of the codebase, within repo and without, and architectural knowledge of the problems we're trying to solve. I read another post here yesterday th…

I've actually found it useful for "decreasing output", or distilling uncharted mountains of my own bullshit down into neatly organized buckets of bullshit.

The stuff I want to write about, I've usually written about many times in different contexts over many years. I can stuff all that into GPT-3, and it will summarize and organize it into a nice outline that I can edit, populate, and elaborate myself by talking or typing. So it's all my stuff, but GPT-3 has more of a subtractive and organizational role than a generative role. It does a pretty good job converting lots of redundant huge walls of text, flame war campaigns, and axe grinding diatribes, into concise outlines, introductions, summaries, lists, comparisons, etc.

I'm using it to organize, remix, and synthesize lots of papers, articles, postings, emails, conversations, notes, transcripts of video demos and talks, and other things I've written into a coherent 8 module "Vaster Class in Game Design". (Like a Master Class, but Vaster!)

Re: Tech CEO applauds an employee selling their dog to accommodate return-to-office

#70

Post by arbitrage » Thu, Apr 20, 2023, 2:16 PM UTC

exhibitapp wrote: post #12

Won't comment directly on the strange rant. But it highlights the reality that something has seriously changed since the pandemic. I have multiple employees that insist on staying home due to their dogs. The amount of discussion around employees' dogs is on another level now, partially due to the anxiety these dogs have when their owners go into the office. It's all very different than prepandemic, I for one never he…

During the pandemic, my dog became accustomed to having a human around 24x7.

I cannot leave my dog for hours at a time without finding that he has thrown a tantrum -- urinating or defecating in places inside the house, or destroying something.

Because of this experience, I will likely never have a dog as a pet again. He didn't use to be this needy -- it's the constant presence of humans that made him this anxious when they are away. But until my dog passes, the situation is at a stalemate.