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Appearing productive in the workplace

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Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#51
post #8

Back around 2005, I worked with a guy who was trying to position himself as the go-to expert on the team. He'd always jump at the chance to explain things to QA and the support team. We'd occasionally hear follow-up questions from those teams and realize that he was just making things up. He was also had a serious case of cargo-cult mentality. He'd see some behavior and ascribe it to something unrelated, then insist…

> He ended up promoted to management.

I bet, with such qualities he is VP by now.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#53

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…

"hired an architect 18 months ago who used AI to architect everything"

Huh? 18 months ago? I've been using it that long - it wasn't able to do that back then....

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#54

>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…

If that happens globally where AGI and engineer replacement is "shipped" as a social construct, I'm afraid real software engineers (who can write and understand production ready systems) will be the vocal minority who can't do anything.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#55

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 saw something really similar happen at my last few jobs. 2 jobs ago vibe coding wasn't even viable but some of the people went so hard on making everything so much more bloated with LLMs it was so hard to get yes or no answers for anything. 1 line slack, 20second question would get a response that was 2 pages of wishy washy blog posts with no answer. Follow ups generated more hours wasted.

My last job we watched a PM slowly become a vibe manager of vibe coders. He started inserting himself into technical discussions and using ai to dictate our direction at every step. We would reply but it got so laborious fighting against a human translating ai about topics they didn't understand people left. We weren't allowed to push back anymore either or our jobs would get threatened due to AI. Then they started mandating everyone vibe coded and the amount of vibe coding as being monitored. The pm got so disorganized being a pm and an engineer and an architect(their choice no one wanted this)that they would make multiple tickets for the same task with wildly different requirements. One team member would then vibe code it one way and another would another way.

It was so hard to watch a profitable team of 20 people bringing in almost 100million of profit a year go into nonutility and the most pointless work. I then left. I am trying my best to not be jaded by all of these changes to the software industry but it's a real struggle.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#56
post #15

> Never ask a model for confirmation; the tool agrees with everyone. Ditto. LLMs will somehow find fault in code that I know is correct when I tell it there’s something arbitrarily wrong with it. Problem is LLMs often take things literally. I’ve never successfully had LLMs design entire systems (even with planning) autonomously.

It's also wrong advice. After an LLM produces code, asking it if it's correct (in a variety of other ways) can often find actual problems with it.

Also, all code is wrong in the wrong context, all code is right in the right context, the reason AI cannot one shot a complete architecture is that it's not a defined and possible task - if you fully specify the architecture the AI isn't designing anything, and if you don't fully specify the architecture how is the AI going to resolve ambiguity without either guessing, asking questions to make you do the necessary work, or refusing to work until it's fully specified?

AI is a stochastic process, it's more like finding the answer to a particular problem using simulated annealing, a genetic algorithm, or a constrained random walk. It's been trained on code well enough that there's a high density probability field around the kinds of code you might want, and that's what you see often - middle of the road solutions are easy to one shot.

But if you have very specific requirements, you're going to quickly run into areas of the probability cloud that are less likely, some so unlikely that the AI has no training data to guide it, at which point it's no better than generating random characters constrained by the syntax of the language unless you can otherwise constrain the output with some sort of inline feedback mechanism (LSP, test, compiler loops, linters, fuzzers, prop testing, manual QA, etc etc).

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#57

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 think for a lot of companies, AI is a destabilizing force that their managerial structure is unable to compensate for. When you change the economics to such a degree, you're basically removing a dam - resulting in far more stress on the rest of the system. If the leaders of the org don't see the potential downsides and risks of that, they're in for a world of hurt. I think we're going to see a real surge of compani…

I increasingly see “AI” as a sort of virus tuned to target management, specifically. Its output is catnip to them, and it’s going to be unavoidable for those who want to look good to superiors and peers (i.e. the #1 priority for managers) even as it adds no actual value whatsoever to what they do. People under them, too, will have to start burning tokens on bullshit to satisfactorily perform competence and “doing work”. Meanwhile, none of this is actually productive. It’s goddamn peacock feathers.

It’s like some kind of management parasite. I’m not even sure at this point that it’s going to lead to an overall productivity increase whatsoever for most sectors, because of this added drag on everything.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#58

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 think for a lot of companies, AI is a destabilizing force that their managerial structure is unable to compensate for. When you change the economics to such a degree, you're basically removing a dam - resulting in far more stress on the rest of the system. If the leaders of the org don't see the potential downsides and risks of that, they're in for a world of hurt. I think we're going to see a real surge of compani…

> I think for a lot of companies, AI is a destabilizing force that their managerial structure is unable to compensate for.

Absolutely. Giving a traditional company AI is like giving an unlimited supply of crystal-blue methamphetamine to a deadbeat pill addict.

It enables and supercharges all their worst impulses. Making a broken system more 'productive' doesn't do shit to make the users better off.

The work output everyone produces doubles, but the ratio of productive to net-negative work plummets.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#59

>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.

One of the bitter lessons I learned in my SWE career is that looking the part is almost everything. The meme boomer advice of "dress for the job you want, not the one you have" is remarkably true if you broaden the definition of "dress". Race, gender, lookism, age, everything matters in your career.

Career progression gets easier just by being the right age, or being the right race (whatever that is at your company), or being the right gender (again, depends on your company). Grooming and personal fitness are easy wins. I've never seen an obese or unkempt executive or middle manager.

Even the way you move makes a difference. If you stay past 4:30pm, you're destined to be an IC forever. Leadership-track people leave the office early even if it means taking work home, because it shows that you have your shit together. Leadership-track people eat lunch alone, not at the gossipy "worker's table". And of course, the way you dress matters (men look more leadership-material by dressing simple and consistent, for women it's the opposite). It's all about keeping up appearances.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#60

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…

"hired an architect 18 months ago who used AI to architect everything" Huh? 18 months ago? I've been using it that long - it wasn't able to do that back then....

I had a similar situation 2 years ago. Correct these tools could not do those things, but people still used them for it. As well as diagnosing their dogs with cancer and whatever else.
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