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Appearing productive in the workplace
101–110 of 686 posts
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yeah, the developers who will argue and teeth-gnash about using an ORM for weeks on the hope it will save a few hours perceived as boring or obvious are, simultaneously, annoyed and upset at being told to save time with super tools that save time and effort…
Pay no attention to the software output or quality or competitive displacement of the people selling you tools. LLMs, like cheesy sales strategies, are something so lucrative the only thing you can really do is sell them first come first serve to other people. Makes so much sense. Why make infinite money when you can sell a course/tool to naive and less fortunate companies? So logical.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Minimum word lengths were really a terrible idea and I wonder what arguments were used to get all the teachers to buy into that system.
Have a second of critical thinking on this topic will make it abundantly obvious why this line of questioning is anti-education and anti-intellectual. You write in school to practice. No just composition, but grammar, spelling, individual sentences. Practice requires volume. Subject yourself to a classroom of kids that you must teach to write, and throw out minimums. Will some students do fine? Sure, of course, and w…
Why not have the students write more essays instead?
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#104> "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…
the product of llms being trained on SEO fluff articles that pad out everything so they get as high in the results as possible
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the best uses of AI I've found is code reviewing stuff I've written either entirely myself, or even code generated in a previous session.
Yes or boiler plate! I usually go in and tweak it anyways because it's not good. But it does help. This agentic coding thing is madness to me. I switched over to small local models. I do not need the vibe coder expensive models at all
But those giant models get the boilerplate correct the first try! You're totally right though. My favorite thing to do these days is to hand craft the code in the middle of the app, then tell AI to make me a rest endpoint and a test. I do the fun/important part. :D
Though, that's coming from someone who can't justify thousands on personal hardware and is instead paying $20/month to Openai. Might as well use the best.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Minimum word lengths were really a terrible idea and I wonder what arguments were used to get all the teachers to buy into that system.
It’s easier to judge an objective output like number of words than subjective like quality. Same as lines of code, etc.
I guess, but have you actually encountered a teacher grading an assignment solely based on word count?
I certainly wish more teachers encouraged parsimony and penalized fluff and bullshittery, but I'd be surprised to find them doing it outside of some narrow cases where the point is just to make you write something at all.
Tthey generally want to encourage their students to engage with the topic at a certain level and practice the thinking needed to research, structure, and implement an argument of a certain length. They want you to put at least 5 pounds of idea in the 5-10 pound idea bag.
If you're convinced you've hacked word economy and satisfied the assignment except for this goshdarnpeskyminimumwordcount, you're probably misunderstanding the lesson the instructor is willing to read through a bunch of bad writing to impart and cheating yourself.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#107> "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…
I just don’t read this crap. The problem solves itself since anyone sending me that isn’t going to bother to follow up about it anyway.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Minimum word lengths were really a terrible idea and I wonder what arguments were used to get all the teachers to buy into that system.
Have a second of critical thinking on this topic will make it abundantly obvious why this line of questioning is anti-education and anti-intellectual. You write in school to practice. No just composition, but grammar, spelling, individual sentences. Practice requires volume. Subject yourself to a classroom of kids that you must teach to write, and throw out minimums. Will some students do fine? Sure, of course, and w…
> Subject yourself to a classroom of kids that you must teach to write, and throw out minimums.
Strawman argument; the correct thing to do is not to throw out minimum word count and leave it at that, rather to emphasize the role of brevity and concision while still being sufficiently thorough.
It's widely understood that LOC is a poor measure for many coding purposes, so it shouldn't be controversial that word count is an equally flawed measure for prose.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#109> Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. Status updates that were once three sentences are now bulleted summaries of bulleted summaries. I've been on the receiving end of this and it sucks. It shows lack of care and true discernment. Then you push back and again, you're arguing with Claude, not the person. I don't know what the solution is here. :(
Solution is to normalise that using LLMs is not cool anymore
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#110> "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…
I just don’t read this crap. The problem solves itself since anyone sending me that isn’t going to bother to follow up about it anyway.
Unfortunately, there is pressure to treat this stuff in good faith. Maybe the PR author really did write all this. Maybe they really did spend 6 hours writing this document.
So, I approach it in good faith, but I do get upset when people say "I'll ask claude". You need to be the intermediary, I can also prompt claude and read back the result. If you are going to hire an employee to do work on your behalf, you are responsible for their performance at the end of the day. And that's what an AI assistant is. The buck stops with you. But I don't think people understand that and that they don't understand they aren't adding value. At some point, you have to use your brain to decide if the AI is making sense, that's not really my job as the code/doc reviewer. I want to have a conversation with you, not your tooling, basically.