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Appearing productive in the workplace

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Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#151

Post by voxl »

smileysteve wrote: post #117
bonesss wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is definitely ¾ of what you pay a mechanic to do; 1 publisher writes a maintenance manual for a car; mechanics all around the globe can use that to work on that specific car. It's the mechanics that don't reference Google or the Haynes manual that are more likely to get it incorrect. As a kicker, mechanics also have a pricing book for the task, they know how many hours a task will take on a certain car (rounded…

You are not responding faithfully to the comment. A mechanic looking up the schematics in a manual understands them. Just because they haven't memorized the material does not make it the same. This is more analogous to looking up a function in the documentation that you forgot about.

This is clearly not what the post was referring to, which is instead like googling how to fix a pipe in your home when you've never done any plumbing before in your life. Can it work out? Sure, depends on the issue, can you cause your pipes to freeze, your house to flood, or sediment build up to completely block a pipe? Yes.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#152

Post by LPisGood »

roncesvalles wrote: post #59
ryandrake wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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),…

> If you stay past 4:30pm, you're destined to be an IC forever

I have never heard this said before. I wonder how true it is in general

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#153

Post by Melatonic »

danaw wrote: post #104
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…

the product of llms being trained on SEO fluff articles that pad out everything so they get as high in the results as possible

Yeah that was my guess as well.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#154

Post by jcgrillo »

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…

Speaking not as a professional mechanic, but as someone who maintains a car, two trucks, a tractor, a couple boats, and has googled quite a lot of torque specs in my time... If you're googling torque specs in 2026 you're gonna have a bad time. They're frequently just flat out wrong, especially the AI summaries ;). Use the authoritative source of truth--the shop manual published by the equipment manufacturer. Accept no substitutes.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#155

Post by northfield27 »

Excellent article! Aptly describes what I have been feeling and thinking about the claims many AI optimists make.

---

> He produced a great deal of code, [...] He could not, when asked, explain how any of it actually worked. [...] When opinions were voiced even as high as a V.P., he fought back.

AI has democratized coding, but people have yet to understand that it takes expertise to actually design a system that can handle scale. Of course, you can build a PoC in a few hours with Claude code, but that wouldn't generate value.

The reason why we see such examples in the workplace is because of the false marketing done by CEOs and wrapper companies. It just gives people a false hope that "they can just build things" when they can only build demos.

Another reason is that the incentives in almost every company have shifted to favour a person using AI. It's like the companies are purposefully forcing us to use AI, to show demand for AI, so that they can get a green signal to build more data centers.

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> So you have overconfident, novices able to improve their individual productivity in an area of expertise they are unable to review for correctness. What could go wrong?

This is one much-needed point to raise.

I have many people around me saying that people my age are using AI to get 10x or 100x better at doing stuff. How are you evaluating them to check if the person actually improved that much?

I have experienced this excessively on twitter since last few months. It is like a cult. Someone with a good following builds something with AI, and people go mad and perceive that person as some kind of god. I clearly don't understand that.

Just as an example, after Karpathy open-sourced autoresearch, you might have seen a variety of different flavors that employ the same idea across various domains, but I think a Meta researcher pointed out that it is a type of search method, just like Optuna does with hyperparameter searching.

Basically, people should think from first principles. But the current state of tech Twitter is pathetic; any lame idea + genAI gets viral, without even the slightest thought of whether genAI actually helps solve the problem or improve the existing solution.

(Side note: I saw a blog from someone from a top USA uni writing about OpenClaw x AutoResearch, I was like WTF?! - because as we all know, OpenClaw was just a hype that aged like milk)

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> The slowness was not a tax on the real work; the slowness was the real work.

Well Said! People should understand that learning things takes time, building things takes time, and understanding things deeply takes time.

Someone building a web app using AI in 10 mins is not ahead but behind the person who is actually going one or two levels of abstractions deeper to understand how HTML/JS/Next.js works.

I strongly believe that the tech industry will realise this sooner or later that AI doesn't make people learn faster, it just speeds up the repetitive manual tasks. And people should use the AI in that regard only.

The (real) cognitive task to actually learn is still in the hands of humans, and it is slow, which is not a bottleneck, but that's just how we humans are, and it should be respected.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#156

Post by pocksuppet »

wutwutwat wrote: post #137
idle_zealot wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not supposed to read the Jira ticket. You're supposed to paste the link along with instructions for your Claude agent to "do this ticket, no mistakes," then raise an MR for whatever it writes. The text is a wire protocol between agents. If a PM doesn't care enough about the requirements to write, or even read them, then would they even notice if the code works or not? Why would they care about that? What does…

> then would they even notice if the code works or not? it's literally their job to ship functional product features...

Everyone's job is to please their manager. Their job is shipping functional product features only if that's what their manager likes. In functional companies, that should be the case. There aren't many functional companies.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#157

Post by paodealho »

InexSquirrel wrote: post #132
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

God I hate the emoji and checkmark usage so much. It feels so try-hard cutesy. Just give me normal bulleted items, I can read.

I like them. It tells very clearly how much effort went into someone's work.

I like them even more on code comments. It tells _precisely_ how much effort went into the pull request, so I don't spend time reviewing lazy work.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#158

Post by Swizec »

chao- wrote: post #135
Swizec wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I write the words that I hear in my head, as though I am speaking. With the exception of timed, in-class essays, I always turned in papers far in excess of any minimum during high school. In college, I took a constructive writing course because I thought "Hey, easy A!" After the second or third week, the professor told me that, while the class had a word minimum, I would also be given a separate word maximum . She sa…

I write a lot and have on several occasions tried dictation as an initial draft authoring step. It was trash every time.

Good for thinking through a concept but unsalvageable in the edit phase. Easier to throw away and rewrite now that you know what to say.

Nowadays I like conversation as an ideating step. Talk to a bunch of people, try to explain yourself until they get it, see what questions they ask. Sometimes in HN threads like this :)

Then write it down.

You get super high signal writing where every sentence is load bearing. I’ve had people take my documents and share them around the company as “this is how it’s done”

It can take weeks of work to produce a 500 word product vision document. And then several months to implement, even with AI.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#159

Post by luxuryballs »

Well this unlocked a new fear, I can imagine all the similar “nests” of AI generated content out there being created right now, I am likely to have to untangle one some day, or at least break it to someone that it’s garbage, almost as if the AI itself has built a nest and is hoarding artifacts but it’s actually the human deciding to bundle up the slop and put a bow on it.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#160

Post by 2ndorderthought »

pkulak wrote: post #105
2ndorderthought wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I hear you in the local model upfront cost. I lucked out and I like to play video games and took my GPU a little to seriously. Buyers remorse is now gone I guess.

You can get pretty good results with even smaller models. Cant prompt and pray with them as much though. So I get it.

Deepseek is like pennies. I might sign up with them one day

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