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Appearing productive in the workplace

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Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#161

Post by lynguist »

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…

But how is your writing fast enough that you don’t pause and drown the hearing in your head?

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#162

Post by zephen »

bambax wrote: post #35

I intensely agree with everything that's being said in TFA; this however could be nuanced: > Never ask a model for confirmation; the tool agrees with everyone If asked properly, LLMs can be used to poke holes in an existing reasoning or come up with new ideas or things to explore. So yes, never ask a model for confirmation or encouragement; but you can absolutely ask it to critique something, and that's often of valu…

There is always a chance that the LLM will hallucinate something wrong. It's all probabilities, quite possibly the closest thing to quantum mechanics in action that we have at the macro level. The act of receiving information from an LLM collapses its state, which was heretofore unknown.

However, your actions can certainly influence those probabilities.

> If asked properly, LLMs can be used to poke holes in an existing reasoning or come up with new ideas or things to explore.

Since, at the most basic level, LLMs are prediction engines, and since one of the things they really, really want (OK, they don't "want", but one of the things they are primed to do) is to respond with what they have predicted you want to see.

Embedding assertions in your prompt is either the worst thing you can do, or the best thing you can do, depending on the assertions. The engine will typically work really hard to generate a response that makes your assertion true.

This is one reason why lawyers keep getting dinged by judges for citations made up from whole cloth. "Find citations that show X" is a command with an embedded assertion. Not knowing any better, the LLM believes (to the extent such a thing is possible) that the assertion you made is true, and attempts to comply, making up shit as it goes if necessary.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#163

Post by 2ndorderthought »

LPisGood wrote: post #144
2ndorderthought wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bigges…

How can you read a 1k lone change? What are you doing where 200kloc is even remotely acceptable? That’s like half a percent of linux.

How do I do that? It takes a while.

Don't ask me. It wasnt 200k it was like 170 something. I can't say too much but it was some big weird ETL pipeline using some weird database. Tons of weird algorithms for displaying data, by storing it all in memory? I don't know man I wasn't allowed to talk to whoever had swarms of agents create it. From what I understand of it it was a complete hazard

Linux kernel has I think tens of millions of lines of code for reference.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#165

Post by skirmish »

paodealho wrote: post #157
InexSquirrel wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So you just rubber-stamp the lazy work? What else can you do when this PR is assigned to you specifically for reviewing?

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#166

Post by roncesvalles »

LPisGood wrote: post #152
roncesvalles wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you stay late it looks like a) you're struggling, b) you're a try-hard, c) you don't have a life after work.

One of the most actionable low-hanging career advices I could give is be among the first ones to pack up and leave for the day. You can always continue working at home if you're not done.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#168

Post by layer8 »

bambax wrote: post #35

I intensely agree with everything that's being said in TFA; this however could be nuanced: > Never ask a model for confirmation; the tool agrees with everyone If asked properly, LLMs can be used to poke holes in an existing reasoning or come up with new ideas or things to explore. So yes, never ask a model for confirmation or encouragement; but you can absolutely ask it to critique something, and that's often of valu…

While I’m not disagreeing, if you ask the LLM to critique something, it will try very hard to find something to critique, regardless of how little it might be warranted. The important thing is that you have to remain the competent judge of its output.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#170

Post by SoftTalker »

yed wrote: post #88
awakeasleep wrote: post #72

Earlier 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.

Considering that many high school kids won’t want to put in any effort at all, how else do you convey the amount of detail and effort you expect for a given writing assignment? It’s an imperfect proxy but I can’t think of a better one.

With rubrics, or more simply the teacher could hand out an example essay at the start of the year that conveys the style and level of detail they are looking for when they assign an essay. Then they can refer to that when they make an assignment. Implicitly that gives a word count or number of pages, but allows for marking down for "too much repetition" or "needs more detail"
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