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

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

#111

Post by pathartl »

elicash wrote: post #75
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…

To your first question, I am. And higher quality, not just quantity. As far as code, it's admittedly not the main part of my job and not my biggest strength, so yeah I need the help. I ask it to solve small problems, not write the entire thing. For my writing, most recently I used it to incorporate social pressure into membership emails (peer influence and social proof). On your last point, my first job in politics w…

Agreed, it's good in small chunks. Sometimes I'll feed it a prompt to generate new code to double check my approach is valid. Sometimes it's shown I am the better architect, other times it's made me aware of parts of an API that I did not know about. Ironically, it's helped me the most in writing recursive code.

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

#112

Post by cagey »

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.

During COVID while I was WFH full time, I had a corporate IT-owned laptop whose primary purpose seemed to be to receive massive quantities of security updates and new security software installs, and reboot (it felt like!) every few hours, and run sluggishly when not obviously engaged in the above activities. After a day or two of this, I unplugged it and stored it in my closet for the remainder of my tenure with that employer (more than 1 year).

During the time that laptop lived powered off in my closet, I ran Citrix RDP (client on a personal desktop PC) to access a "engineering-owned" (vs corporate IT-owned) desktop PC located "at the office" on which I did 100% of my normal work.

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

#113

Post by Server6 »

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…

It's not the dog. It's the commute and not wanting to be in the office/micromanaged. The dog is just the excuse. I've been WFH since 2017 and will never go back, it's not worth it (at least for me).

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

#114

Post by TodPunk »

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.

I'm local to the area of the company. Peeps in the community here have said they issue ridiculous old or underpowered laptops for many positions and that many if not all of those 30 employees are likely using their personal machines because they're more comfortable to the employee.

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

#115

Post by knodi123 »

vitorsr wrote: post #48

> He told content writers they should be using AI to increase output “30-50 times our normal production.” Take it easy on the Kool-Aid.

That's actually reasonable, if you consider that these employees are literally paid to mindlessly churn out blogspam. That's at least something that AI can do flawlessly and efficiently.

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

#116

Post by JohnFen »

cagey wrote: post #112
lopkeny12ko wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

During COVID while I was WFH full time, I had a corporate IT-owned laptop whose primary purpose seemed to be to receive massive quantities of security updates and new security software installs, and reboot (it felt like!) every few hours, and run sluggishly when not obviously engaged in the above activities. After a day or two of this, I unplugged it and stored it in my closet for the remainder of my tenure with that…

I left my work laptop in the office and remoted in to it from home. I didn't want to have company equipment in my home for an extended period of time.

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

#117

Post by Balgair »

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…

Yes, by ~20x.

Copy-pasting a comment of mine from a few days ago:

We decided at work to run a little experiment with GPT3 to see if/how-much it was 'worth it'.

Since baseball is back and most of us are fans, we decided to write a baseball simulator. We each had a Friday afternoon to write one up. Half of us got to use the free GPT3, and half had just regular googling. After the jam, we'd compare notes at the bar and see what the difference, if any, was.

Holy cow, was there ever a difference.

Those without GPT3 got pretty far. Got the balls and strikes and bases and 9 innings. Most got extra innings down. One even tried the integration with ERA and batting stats in the probabilities of an event occurring but was unable to get it done.

The GPT3 group was estimated to be 2 weeks worth of work ahead of the googling group. Turns out, there is a whole python library for baseball simulations and statistics. The googling group didn't find that, but GPT3 just prompted it outright on the first query for everyone using it. This group got the basics of the game done in ~30 minutes. Managed to get integration with actual MLB statistics. Built somewhat real physics simulators of balls in play and distances, adjusted for temperature and altitude. Not all of them at once, but a lot of really great stuff.

Aside: Did you know that MLB publishes, in real time, all 6 degrees of freedom for a ball, from where it leaves a pitchers hand to where a catcher/batter interacts with it? They put out the spin rates in three axes! Wild stuff.

Our conclusions were that it's totally 'worth it' and is a ~20x multiplier in coding speed. It spits out a lot of really bad code, but it gets the skeletons out very quickly and just rockets you to the crux of the problems. For example: it gave out a lot of jibberish code with the python baseball library; like trying to pass a date into a function that only takes in names. But it gives you the correct functions. Easy enough to go and figure out the documentation on that function.

Like I said, it's a ~20x multiplier for our little experiment.

Action Items for management: Pay whatever you have to and let us use it all the time.

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

#118

Post by nathanaldensr »

throwaway2729 wrote: post #86

I work at a tech company that purports to build the metaverse. Initially they allowed people to go remote. Now they are walking back on it and asking people that don't want to return to take a package. A quite sad story of someone who has a few months old baby at home. They moved to a different city since their manager approved it. Now they have to be back in the Bay Area 3 days a week (in the middle of the week) sin…

Name and shame.

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

#119

Post by PragmaticPulp »

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.

> 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?

One of the employees commented that the company gave a lot of people outdated Thinkpads, so they use their personal computers at home.

I had a company-issued laptop that I only used when traveling. If the company looked up stats on laptop use, I would have been near the bottom of the list for that reason. Doesn't mean I wasn't working.

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

#120

Post by orev »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #119
lopkeny12ko wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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? One of the employees commented that the company gave a lot of people outdated Thinkpads, so they use their personal computers at home. I had a company-issued laptop that I only used when traveling. If the company looked up stats on laptop use, I would have been near the bottom of the list fo…

In many companies, using your personal device is grounds for immediate termination.
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