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

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131–140 of 148 posts

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

#131
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…

You used GPT to crank out a bunch of boilerplate.

Not to create (or even make meaningful changes to) an actual, working system. With actual users.

There is huge chasm of difference between the two.

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

#132
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…

Same for me, I find Copilot to be a huge waste of time overall. It has a tendency to complete fields that don’t even exist, doesn’t check types, and it’s slow as a cow. It also comes in place of perfectly good deterministic intellisense when it has no idea what I want to write.

It’s helpful for autocompleting pure algorithms but that’s about it. And even then, I feel like I waste time reviewing its output and making sure it does what it says it does. I can write these algorithms myself slower but more reliably.

It’s really not worth its price.

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

#133
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…

What I'm finding it most useful for is grokking some new subject rapidly, so the output multiplier is directly related to how well i know the subject im working on. At work, I know the tech stack pretty well so I'm not finding it that valuable, i use it to remind myself of bits and peices here and there. In my free time ive been working in some areas and frameworks i dont know at all and the output increase really is…

That is exactly what I have found to be most useful. Not saying there arent other good uses, but boy, does it accelerate trying out new things.

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

#134
That’s the problem. I was working somewhere they signed a seven year lease before the pandemic. The push for RTO was from the board and the CEO because they want ROI on their lease. This sounds eerily familiar to that workplace I was at.

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

#135
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And at many companies, it's not.

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

#136

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…

When I worked in the office I drove home during lunch, let the dogs out, scarfed down food for ten minutes, then headed back to work. I know others that just cage their dogs for eight hours (which I would never do to my dogs) or took them to doggy daycare every day, which the average day-rate around me is $40/day per dog (and I have two dogs, so it would be $80/day, or $1600/month). My new job is downtown and at leas…

Why not just not have a dog? Even kids aren't this much of a difficulty. Why do people want such an inconvenient and expensive pet? It seems like either virtue signaling or wealth signaling to me.

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

#137

Well, strictly speaking, it's more responsible than neglecting the dog. So in that sense, I applaud it too. But it was basically forced on the employee, unfortunately.

It wasn't really forced. The employee chose to get an ultra-high-maintenance pet that required the employee to be home all day long, because the employee assumed they'd never have to go back to office work for the dog's lifetime. That was a really bad assumption, and a bad bet to make.

The employee could also have chosen to keep the dog, and just hire dog sitters M-F to keep it company. Apparently they didn't want to do that, or they couldn't afford it, in which case it's questionable why they thought they could afford such a pet in the first place.

IMO, people really need to re-think their ideas about dogs as pets. Dogs are pets for rich people, full stop. They're pets for showing off how much money you have, because you can afford silly luxuries like working from home (most of the working population can't do this), or hiring a dog walker, stuff that used to be normal only for rich celebrities. Nowadays, it seems like all Americans think they're entitled to having such a pet, no matter how much it inconveniences their life, their employment, their family, etc. How Americans ever got this idea, I'm not sure, because it wasn't like this 25 years ago at all. Back then, people who had dogs lived in more rural places and kept them in the (large) back yard in a doghouse; they sure as hell didn't plan their day around a dog.

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

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You used GPT to crank out a bunch of boilerplate. Not to create (or even make meaningful changes to) an actual, working system. With actual users. There is huge chasm of difference between the two.

Two teams of elves were told to make a simple toy. One team used a special tool, and the toy they made was much better. If Santa saw this, wouldn't he probably encourage his elves to use the special tool on more complex toys?

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

#139
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…

There must be some people out there with skillsets so low/shallow that these AI tools really do seem like a productivity boost

What a titillating thought, how much more skillful and deep we are than all those people!

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

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked in the office I drove home during lunch, let the dogs out, scarfed down food for ten minutes, then headed back to work. I know others that just cage their dogs for eight hours (which I would never do to my dogs) or took them to doggy daycare every day, which the average day-rate around me is $40/day per dog (and I have two dogs, so it would be $80/day, or $1600/month). My new job is downtown and at leas…

Why not just not have a dog? Even kids aren't this much of a difficulty. Why do people want such an inconvenient and expensive pet? It seems like either virtue signaling or wealth signaling to me.

Or... Perhaps people love and feel responsible for their pets?

This problem doesn't seem new to me. Startups letting people bring their dogs to work was a benefit before remote.

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