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Appearing productive in the workplace

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Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#301

Post by itemize123 »

groos wrote: post #273

During the last few months when AI usage was mandated in our team and usage exploded, our team's throughput has barely changed. Now, if this was due to people working 2 hours a day and painting, cooking and playing golf the rest of the day, this would be a great result, but I see many people work past 6pm, and yet the output is mostly the same. We are not tackling harder problems or fixing more bugs despite authoring…

what would you say the disconnect was? Was it a simple case of that your teams' not comfortable with merging AI code?

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#302

Post by itemize123 »

futureproofd wrote: post #124

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…

is it a net-win for the company? Are the AI-TOD any good?

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#304

Post by isamu_2000 »

graphememes wrote: post #164

Instead of helping, the author fought against them, "from day one anyone could tell that the schemas were wrong", yet nobody helped him, and instead went to the vp and complained about them. sad. what a horrible place to work in

totally agree. and hearing this one-sided diatribe spoken with so much conviction makes my eyes roll to the back of my head, he just "knew" everything was all ai generated.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#305

Post by jimbokun »

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…

I remember my first semester university writing class, when on the first day the teacher told us we had learned to pad our writing in high school, and now we were going to learn how to be short and concise because every assignment would be limited to one page.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#306

Post by bitexploder »

kristjansson wrote: post #138
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…

> Professional formatting, length, and clear prose are no longer indicators of care and work quality (they never were, but in the past, if someone drafts up a twelve page spec, at least you know they care enough to spend a lot of time on it). I feel the loss of this signal acutely. It’s an adjustment to react to 10-30 page “spec” choc-a-block with formatting and ascii figures as if it were a verbal spitball … because…

It is worse because the signal is buried in the noise.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#307

Post by jimbokun »

mediaman wrote: post #130
smallmancontrov wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 everythi…

I think the “taste” approach at Apple died with Steve Jobs.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#308

Post by jimbokun »

dr_kiszonka wrote: post #176
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…

I work under the assumption that the primary audience of everything I write at work is an AI. Managers will take what I send and have it summarized and evaluated by some chatbot or agent. (Of course, I cannot send them the summary myself.) So like ATS checkers for resumes, I find myself needing an AI checker for my text. Ultimately, we will have AI write everything for another AI to parse, which will be a massive was…

I’m too lazy to tell the AI what I want to say, then copy and send its output.

I just type what I want to say and hit send. YOLO

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#309

Post by abvdasker »

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…

This paragraph hit home with me as well. I work at a large tech company that's a household name and the practice of using AI to pad out design documents has become totally out of control over the last 4 or 5 months. Writing documentation is arduous and a little painful, which as it turns out is a good thing as it incentivizes the writer to be as succinct as possible. Why the fuck should I -- along with five other engineers -- bother to read and review your design if you didn't even bother to write it?

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#310

Post by tharkun__ »

dr_kiszonka wrote: post #176
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…

I work under the assumption that the primary audience of everything I write at work is an AI. Managers will take what I send and have it summarized and evaluated by some chatbot or agent. (Of course, I cannot send them the summary myself.) So like ATS checkers for resumes, I find myself needing an AI checker for my text. Ultimately, we will have AI write everything for another AI to parse, which will be a massive was…

If that is your manager, do so, sure. But make sure your manager is "such a manager".

If I was your manager, and you sent me your seventeen page AI generated thing coz you think I'm just gonna summarize anyway and I expect something long: You misread me.

I make a point all the time to everyone that won't listen, to not send me walls of text. I'm not gonna read them. I'm gonna ignore them, close your bug reports until I can understand them because you spent the time to make them short and legible. If you use AI for that, I don't care. But I better have something short and that when I read it makes actual sense and when I verify it, holds up. If I wanted to just ask AI, I'd do it myself. You have to "value add" to the AI if you want to be valuable yourself.

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