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Appearing productive in the workplace

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Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#41

Post by proofofcontempt »

ryandrake wrote: post #27
proofofcontempt wrote: post #19

What is described here closely resembles my experience too. My company is full of managers who haven't written code in years. They hired an architect 18 months ago who used AI to architect everything. To the senior devs it was obvious - everything was massively over engineered, yet because he used all the proper terminology he sounded more competent to upper management than the other senior managers who didn't. When…

I'm sure they're even more all-in on AI every month. "We will surely succeed if only we AI even harder!" This is how self-reinforcing delusions work. "AI will close the gap" is the fixed belief, and any evidence that comes in is interpreted such that it strengthens that belief.

Pretty much this. It's like a cult mentality. Those who critique the approach or push back get sidelined. There are demos every week of essentially Claude loops and MCP integrations and those of us not reaffirming the ideas stopped getting invited.

Heard some wild statements in the past few months. A couple that come to mind:

- "we don't need to review the output closely, it's designed to correct itself" - "it comes up with the requirements, writes the tickets, and prioritises what to work on. We only need to give it a two or three line prompt"

The promise of this agentic workflow is always only a few weeks away. It's not been used to build anything that has made it to production yet.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#42

Post by wcfrobert »

> "Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. Status updates that were once three sentences are now bulleted summaries of bulleted summaries. Retrospective notes, post-incident reports, design memos, kickoff decks: every artifact that can be elongated is, by people who do not read what they produce, for readers who do not read what they receive."

Great article. The "elongation" of workplace artifacts resonated with me on such deep level. Reminded me of when I had to be extra wordy to meet the 1000 minimum word limit for my high school essays. Professional formatting, length, and clear prose are no longer indicators of care and work quality (they never were, but in the past, if someone drafts up a twelve page spec, at least you know they care enough to spend a lot of time on it).

So now the "productivity-gain bottleneck" is people who still care enough to review manually.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#43

Post by hn_acc1 »

saganus wrote: post #31
AIorNot wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I get your frustration, the same thing is happening across orgs these days as claude and co-work has become widespread. Wisdom is a thing, so is competence. Humans have it or they don't but machines do not (yet), but the massive capabilities of the tools are also something that can't be ignored. We can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's going to take some cycles of learning the ropes with this technolo…

From past experiences (and I'm sure I'm not alone here), I can almost guarantee that the senior devs did communicate the problems, but they were ignored or brushed aside. Very seldomly does middle/upper management truly listens to engineers, unless there's buy-in from the CTO/VP to champion the ideas and complaints.

Over time, as devs get more experience, they have seen countless fads come and go. Some worked, some screwed things up, etc. - NONE were the silver bullet / savior that they were touted to be by adherents. So they learn a default "no" or "slowly" response to "we need to do this ASAP" from management who only see $$$. I mean AI companies are telling management that devs will resist AI because "it's so good it will let you replace them", so management is getting their views reinforced by devs saying it's a bad idea.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#44

Post by ryandrake »

nlawalker wrote: post #11

>People who cannot write code are building software. People who have never designed a data system are designing data systems. Most of it is not shipped; it is built, often for many hours, possibly shown internally with great vigor, used quietly, and occasionally surfaced to a client without much fanfare. This made me think of How I ship projects at big tech companies [1], specifically "Shipping is a social construct…

Yea, I remember that one. Great article. Also spawned a decent discussion about how optics and "keeping up appearances" always matters, often a lot more than we think they do.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#45

Post by proofofcontempt »

saganus wrote: post #31
AIorNot wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I get your frustration, the same thing is happening across orgs these days as claude and co-work has become widespread. Wisdom is a thing, so is competence. Humans have it or they don't but machines do not (yet), but the massive capabilities of the tools are also something that can't be ignored. We can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's going to take some cycles of learning the ropes with this technolo…

From past experiences (and I'm sure I'm not alone here), I can almost guarantee that the senior devs did communicate the problems, but they were ignored or brushed aside. Very seldomly does middle/upper management truly listens to engineers, unless there's buy-in from the CTO/VP to champion the ideas and complaints.

The CTO got fired last month, presumably for poor performance. And the director that has taken is place is now all in on AI because he's desperate to turn things around but has no idea how.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#47

Post by ryandrake »

proofofcontempt wrote: post #41
ryandrake wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure they're even more all-in on AI every month. "We will surely succeed if only we AI even harder!" This is how self-reinforcing delusions work. "AI will close the gap" is the fixed belief, and any evidence that comes in is interpreted such that it strengthens that belief.

Pretty much this. It's like a cult mentality. Those who critique the approach or push back get sidelined. There are demos every week of essentially Claude loops and MCP integrations and those of us not reaffirming the ideas stopped getting invited. Heard some wild statements in the past few months. A couple that come to mind: - "we don't need to review the output closely, it's designed to correct itself" - "it comes…

> The promise of this agentic workflow is always only a few weeks away. It's not been used to build anything that has made it to production yet.

"We just need a swarm of many agents, all independently operating open-loop, creating and resolving tickets continuously. We will surely ship to production soon after implementing that!"

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#49

Post by Swizec »

wcfrobert wrote: post #42

> "Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. Status updates that were once three sentences are now bulleted summaries of bulleted summaries. Retrospective notes, post-incident reports, design memos, kickoff decks: every artifact that can be elongated is, by people who do not read what they produce, for readers who do not read what they receive." Great article. The "elongation" of workplace artifact…

> Reminded me of when I had to be extra wordy to meet the 1000 minimum word limit for my high school essays.

Minimum word lengths are the greatest dis-service high school and college have ever done to future communication skills. It takes years for people to unlearn this in the workplace.

Max word counts only please. Especially now with AI making it so easy to produce fluff with no signal.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#50

Post by oxag3n »

Software Engineering seems to be quite unique to enable this due to few factors:

* Many software engineers didn't do real engineering work during their entire careers. In large companies it's even harder - you arrive as a small gear and are inserted into a large mechanism. You learn some configuration language some smart-ass invented to get a promo, "learn" the product by cleaning tons of those configs, refactoring them, "fixing" results in another bespoke framework by adjusting some knobs in the config language you are now expert in. Five years pass and you are still doing that.

* There are many near-engineering positions in the industry. The guy who always told how he liked to work with people and that's why stopped coding, another lady who always was fascinated by the product and working with users. They all fill in the space in small and large companies as .*M

* The train is slow moving, especially in large companies. Commit to prod can easily span months, with six months being a norm. For some large, critical systems, Agentic code still didn't reach the production as of today.

Considering above, AI is replacing some BS jobs, people who were near-code but above it suddenly enjoy vibe-coding, their shit still didn't hit the fan in slow moving companies. But oh man, it looks like a productivity boom.

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