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Appearing productive in the workplace

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Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#191

Post by grvdrm »

pmg101 wrote: post #75
funimpoded wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wor…

I agree with everything you've said, but don't you think quite a lot of things have also been like this before, just to a lesser degree? I've often had the sense that most of what is done inside companies is a kind of performance of work rather than work itself. Mostly all a big status game between various different factions. All actual value provided by just a few engineers here and there who are able to shut out th…

I often think that executive level work is about changing the executive team and writing memos about changing the executive team. Then there’s a different team with different members and they begin the cycle again. Repeat over and over again.

The number of times I’ve seen a HTML memo sent from the assistant of the executive that says “from the desk of…” with babble about new leadership.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#192

Post by ijk »

awakeasleep wrote: post #72
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.

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.

Where I encounter it at the higher education level is that academic-level research almost universally has maximum word counts or page counts rather than minimums: if you think you can get your point across in fewer words, you should. No reviewer is going to object to the paper being too short, so long as you succeeded in making your case.

John Nash's Ph.D. Thesis is notorious for being short: it's still 27 pages (typed, with hand-written equations and a whopping total of two citations) but that's an order of magnitude below average. On the other hand, most of us don't invent game theory.

Students used to minimum-word-count essays sometimes have to do some self-retraining to realize that the expectation is that you have more that you want to say than you have room to say it, and the game is now to figure out how to say more in fewer words.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#193

Post by marcosdumay »

danaw wrote: post #129

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…

On troubleshooting, either LLMs used to be better, or I'm in a huge bad luck strake. All of the last few times I tried to ask one, I've got a perfectly believable and completely wrong answer that weren't even on the right subject.

On code review, the amount of false positives is absolutely overwhelming. And I see no reason for that to improve.

But yes, LLMs can probably help on those lines.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#194

Post by yfw »

AIorNot wrote: post #25
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…

Yes I get your frustration, the same thing is happening across orgs these days as claude and co-work has become widespread. Wisdom is a thing, so is competence. Humans have it or they don't but machines do not (yet), but the massive capabilities of the tools are also something that can't be ignored. We can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's going to take some cycles of learning the ropes with this technolo…

Have you not seen the principals and seniors being offered the door or buyouts?

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#195

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

#196

Post by funimpoded »

pmg101 wrote: post #75
funimpoded wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wor…

I agree with everything you've said, but don't you think quite a lot of things have also been like this before, just to a lesser degree? I've often had the sense that most of what is done inside companies is a kind of performance of work rather than work itself. Mostly all a big status game between various different factions. All actual value provided by just a few engineers here and there who are able to shut out th…

> I agree with everything you've said, but don't you think quite a lot of things have also been like this before, just to a lesser degree?

That’s exactly the reason LLMs and friends are so dangerous to companies, and it’s so hard for them to resist using them in useless/counter-productive ways. They’re excellent at faking signs of effort and work that companies can hardly help but reward, absent any actual way to measure manager effectiveness (and approximately nobody knows how to measure that, in the wild). This takes the form of gilding and padding on a lot of communication, none of which adds actual value but it does cost money directly and indirectly (time wasted sorting out which parts of a document are intentional and meaningful, and which are plausible but irrelevant LLM inventions, for instance)

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#198

Post by coldtea »

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...

The practical part of their job for them is to show up and to get paid.

Who cares about features or functional - of whether they even know what functional means in that case?

That's how it looks more and more...

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#199

Post by grvdrm »

> The cost of producing a document has fallen to nearly zero; the cost of reading one has not, and is in fact rising, because the reader must now sift the synthetic context for whatever the document was originally about. Each individual decision to elongate seems rational, and each is independently rewarded — readers are more confident in longer AI-generated explanations whether or not the explanations are correct [5]. The collective effect is that the signal in any given workplace is harder to find than it was before any of this began. The checkpoints have been hidden, drowned in their own paperwork, even when the people drowning them were genuinely trying to “be brief”

I just finished working with a client that is producing documents as described in this quote. The first time I recognized it was when someone sent me a 13-page doc about a process and vendor when I needed a paragraph at most. In an instant, my trust in that person dropped to almost zero. It was hard to move past a blatant asymmetry in how we perceived each other’s time and desire to think and then write concise words.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#200

Post by coldtea »

skirmish wrote: post #172
jrockway wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 res…

> I do get upset when people say "I'll ask claude" The dude is just acting like a manager with a technical employee (agent) who does the hands-on work. If you are upset about this you should be hopping mad about the whole manager-director-VP-SVP hierarchy above this dude.

As long as each part of the hierarchy understands what they need to know at their level and what they produce, I have no problem with "the whole hierarchy".

You're saying this as if it's some rebuttal ad absurdum, when it's absolutely the case: when the higher layers don't understand what they do, we have a problem with that too, and that's been true since forever. Remember Dilbert and Office Space, and making fun of the ignorant middle managers and execs?

In this case, what we're complaining about is coders not understanding the code they ship (because some AI wrote it and they don't bother to review it or guide the AI fully).

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