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Appearing productive in the workplace

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Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#361

Post by mikestorrent »

hilariously wrote: post #207
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?

First saw it in overly peppy Rails libraries and using gitmoji more than 10 years ago.

Imagine how much work that all took... carefully colourizing your CLI.... and now it just gets spat out

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#362

Post by yard2010 »

red_hare wrote: post #332
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 for an "AI-native" company now and have found this to be the case. EVERYONE (engineers, pms, managers, sales) uses Claude Code to read and write Google Docs (google workspace mcp). Ideas, designs, reports. It's too much for one person to read and, with a distributed async team, there's an endless demand for more. So for every project there's always one super Google Doc with 50 tabs and everyone just points the…

This is literally losing the whole process to a stochastic parrot.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#363

Post by danaw »

groos wrote: post #272

As I am continually amazed at how well Claude 4.7 deals with highly complicated C++ code, I am also becoming painfully aware of the developing situation mentioned in this article: I no longer completely understand the code it is editing, not because I'm incapable of doing it, but because I have not authored the changes. I am trading throughput for understanding, and, eventually, judgment.

nail on the head. the loss in understanding, learning and context is often not worth the increase in volume of output

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#364

Post by mikeshi42 »

While I agree with some of these observations - the research cited in the article really do not match the claims at all from what I can tell.

> An NBER study of support agents [2] found generative AI boosted novice productivity by about a third while barely helping experts. Harvard Business School researchers found the same pattern in consulting work [3].

The first work cited was a research study on GPT-3(!) from 2020. Which is a barely coherent model relative to today's SOTA.

The second HBS research study literally finds the opposite of what's claimed:

> we observed performance enhancements in the experimental task for both groups when leveraging GPT-4. Note that the top-half-skill performers also received a significant boost, although not as much as the bottom-half-skill performers.

Where bottom-half skilled participants with AI outperformed top-half skilled participants without AI. (And top-half skilled participants gained another 11% improvement when pared with AI). Again, GPT-4 model intelligence (3 years ago) is a far cry from frontier models today.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#365

Post by wincy »

tharkun__ wrote: post #310
dr_kiszonka wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 agree. I send 2 sentence replies to most things my bosses boss sends me. He’s near retirement, dude doesn’t want me to send him a book. He knows the thinking under the work our team is doing is solid.

The only time I send something longer is if it’s a postmortem for some prod issue, which I write by hand.

I use AI every day, often multiple agents at once, but knowing when it’s appropriate and when I need to be the one thinking really hard about something.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#366

Post by sschueller »

Art9681 wrote: post #335

Counterpoint: If humans shipped perfect products they would no longer havejobs. The majority of time spent in an organization is fixing problems humans caused. For good reasons and bad excuses. We are not machines. What we, collectively as a species are building now with AI is a mirror that reflects the failures and successes we contributed to. No engineer here has a perfect record. No senior or principal either. We…

Human mistakes in code usually have reasoning behind it. You can understand how the engineer made the mistake.

AI mistakes aren't like this, mistakes look like someone was lobotomized mid coding.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#367

Post by stellalo »

Animats wrote: post #215

The OP has an amusing side point - LLMs have automated sucking up to management. There is a large market for that. His main point, though, is this: I have a colleague ... who spent two months earlier this year building a system that should have been designed by someone with formal training in data architecture. He used the tools well, by the standards by which use of the tools is currently measured. He produced a gre…

It doesn’t look like OP or the specific paragraph is describing an LLM problem, but rather a people problem

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#368

Post by wincy »

randycupertino wrote: post #292
dr_kiszonka wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 go through this with my vendor budgets and contract negotiations right now. We are encouraged to put all their proposals in AI and have it refute each point. I know for a fact they are putting my negotiations in their own AI and having it counter-propose my points. It's an arms race of my AI fighting against their AI. Where does it end.

It’s the Red Queen’s Race, where we all run as fast as we can to stay in exactly the same place.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#369

Post by aryehof »

wazHFsRy wrote: post #353

As everyone is an expert now[1] on paper I think it is unfortunately time for a shift again. For years I was big proponent of asynchronous remote work. But it seems like the only reasonable way forward is to discuss things face to face. I still prefer to prepare things async, but then discuss them in person to understand if people actually understand what they are talking about. So far I also have a good time with re…

I like the idea of face-to-face discussions. My only fear is that many of the new generation will say they really prefer that we text or slack instead.
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