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Appearing productive in the workplace

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Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#121

Post by e40 »

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…

> When called out, he would result to personal attacks.

Oh, that's bad. Sounds like a terribly toxic environment.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#122

Post by smallmancontrov »

ge96 wrote: post #114
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…

> Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. man I see this on Jira a PM or BA is like "yeah I'll write that AC for you" giant bullet list filled in a bunch of emojis and checkmarks

Does anyone know where that style came from? Did it become popular in listicles or on github or something? Or is there one person deep inside OpenAI or Anthropic who built the synthetic data pipeline and one day made the decision on a whim to doom us to an eternity of emoji bullet points?

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#123

Post by IAmBroom »

bonesss wrote: post #63
switchbak wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’m an LLM enjoyer who also thinks that ‘er ‘jerbs are safe and, taken to their logical conclusion, most LLM-stroking online around coding reduces to an argument that we should be speaking Haskell to LLMs and also in specs and documentation (just kidding, OCaml is prettier). But also, I do a little business. You’ve hit the real issue, IT management is D-tier and lacks self awareness. “Agile” is effed up as a rule, wh…

With you up until the last sentence.

When I get my car fixed, I could not care less if they googled, used a service manual, or did it by "these old 2023's always had this problem right here...". I care if it is fixed.

And as I'm currently trying to fix something on my own, for financial reasons, I assure you a mechanic with training AND google can do a better job in 1/4th the time. Because I don't have the training.

Nor do the worst people using LLMs.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#124

Post by futureproofd »

I've noticed early into AI adoption in the workplace that some colleagues took advantage of the technology by appearing to be hyper-proactive; New TODs weekly, fresh new refactoring ideas, novel ways to solve age-old problems with shiny new algorithms. Fast-forward to today, and this is occurring two-fold. Not only are they trying to appear more proactive, combining this with the fear of AI layoffs, they're creating solutions to problems before the problem has even been fully defined.

For example, I was tasked to look into a company-wide solution for a particular architectural problem. I thought delivering a sound solution would give me some kudos, alas, I wasn't fast enough. An intern had already figured it out and wrote a TOD. I find myself too tired to compete.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#125

Post by dormento »

2ndorderthought wrote: post #64
proofofcontempt wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He doesn't care. When c suite gets fired they get like half a million in severance and go rinse and repeat somewhere else

And it was the AI's fault. So convenient.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#126

Post by 2ndorderthought »

towers wrote: post #112
2ndorderthought wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The forcing of competent engineers to vibe code is something I’ll never understand. Also, I’ve heard rewriting people’s vibe coded efforts being a substantial issue, everything that engineers do nowadays seems to be code review.

It would be horrible to rewrite. Not the first commit or whatever. But after a few weeks of people not reading the code it looks more like a write only code base. I refused to go full vibe/agentic coding. So I got to see what was happening. This was only over a short period of time mind you.

There was a lot of duplicate and triplicate methods. A lot of the classes were is-a related without inheritance, not the biggest deal but it was becoming a mess.

Code I used to know well was more or less gone. It was rewritten in a way that wasn't the same approach and had lost lessons learned. Some of it had real battle wounds baked into it. Things qa passed the week before were broken in places no one thought they touched. A good deal of tests were useless or didn't mean anything for production.

Code review is more or less impossible for me. I can read maybe a 1k line change. 20-30k changes all the time? You end up saying "sure buddy lgtm". We had someone put a 200kloc change for a new feature using a 3rd party tool no one had used before. No clue, but it was not my business apparently because we needed to be more individuals now that we were using AI

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#127

Post by robocat »

Swizec wrote: post #49
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.

Same as the heavy focus on rewording in your own words: basically teaching you to plagiarise by cheating. I find it distasteful.

Even though almost copying is everywhere (patents, graphic design, business): albeit in other areas it is often applauded and less obviously deceptive.

We talk about countries copying e.g. Japan was notorious for it. I think the underlying motivation there is ownership - greedy people feeling they own everything (arts and technology). "We own that and you stole it from us" along with the entitlement of never recognizing when copying others.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#128

Post by [deleted] »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #122
ge96 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. man I see this on Jira a PM or BA is like "yeah I'll write that AC for you" giant bullet list filled in a bunch of emojis and checkmarks

Does anyone know where that style came from? Did it become popular in listicles or on github or something? Or is there one person deep inside OpenAI or Anthropic who built the synthetic data pipeline and one day made the decision on a whim to doom us to an eternity of emoji bullet points?

[deleted]

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#129

Post by danaw »

i have a strong suspicion that the most productive software teams that leverage llms to build quality software will use it for the following:

- intelligent autocomplete: the "OG" llm use for most developers where the generated code is just an extension of your active thought process. where you maintain the context of the code being worked on, rather than outsourcing your thinking to the llm

- brainstorming: llms can be excellent at taking a nebulous concept/idea/direction and expand on it in novel ways that can spark creativity

- troubleshooting: llms are quite good at debugging an issue like a package conflict, random exception, bug report, etc and help guide the developer to the root cause. llms can be very useful when you're stuck and you don't have a teammate one chair over to reach out to

- code review: our team has gotten a lot of value out of AI code review which tends to find at least a few things human reviewers miss. they're not a replacement for human code review but they're more akin to a smarter linting step

- POCs: llms can be good at generating a variety of approaches to a problem that can then be used as inspiration for a more thoughtfully built solution

these uses accelerate development while still putting the onus on the developers to know what they're building and why.

related, i feel it's likely teams that go "all in" on agentic coding are going to inadvertently sabotage their product and their teams in the long run.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#130

Post by mediaman »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #122
ge96 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. man I see this on Jira a PM or BA is like "yeah I'll write that AC for you" giant bullet list filled in a bunch of emojis and checkmarks

Does anyone know where that style came from? Did it become popular in listicles or on github or something? Or is there one person deep inside OpenAI or Anthropic who built the synthetic data pipeline and one day made the decision on a whim to doom us to an eternity of emoji bullet points?

I think it likely performed well in A/B preference tests with chat users.

I've noticed Claude does far fewer listicles than ChatGPT. I suspect that they don't blindly follow supervised learning feedback from chats as much as ChatGPT. I get Apple vs Google design approach from those two companies, in that Apple tends not to obsess over interaction data, instead using design principles, while Google just tests everything and has very little "taste."

In general I feel like the data approach really blinds people to the obvious problem that "a little" of something can be preferable while "a lot" of the same is not. I don't mind some bullet points here and there but when literally everything is in bullet points or pull quotes it's very annoying. I prefer Claude's paragraph style.

I suppose the downside is that using "taste" like Apple does can potentially lead a product design far, far away from what people want (macOS 26), more so than a data approach, whereas a data approach will not get it so drastically wrong but will never feel great.

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