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Appearing productive in the workplace

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Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#401

Post by sesm »

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…

You won't ship a perfect product even if you make 0 mistakes. Software maintenance is adapting the product based on feedback from the outside world which you could never get during development.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#403

Post by zkmon »

sesm wrote: post #397
zkmon wrote: post #394

Dismissing this as just another anti-AI blog could appear a shallow dismissal, but in reality, it 8s mostly the pain of adapting to the change. The writer has certain framework of norms or world where good and bad are well defined, and that he knows what's desirable and what's not. This is not new. This happened with every new technology or paradigm change. The old norms take a while to adapt to the new world and it…

Are you talking about dominating your peers to get a promotion?

External success for any business is defined as dominating the peers in selling. People call it as "wins". This percolates into internal context as well. Business units compete with other, teams compete, and peers within a team compete or performance ratings. If you say you never think of competing with your peers, you are probably not being honest.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#404

Post by great_psy »

zkmon wrote: post #394

Dismissing this as just another anti-AI blog could appear a shallow dismissal, but in reality, it 8s mostly the pain of adapting to the change. The writer has certain framework of norms or world where good and bad are well defined, and that he knows what's desirable and what's not. This is not new. This happened with every new technology or paradigm change. The old norms take a while to adapt to the new world and it…

Problem is that it does not produce better or more work, it actually shifts the work to a different/future engineer. Today’s slop which gets engineer 1 a promotion, is engineer’s 2 problem next month when they are oncall and the codebase makes no sense.

Your horse riding analogy, is like riding a horse into battle without your weapon because it’s slowing you down. Sure you got through the enemy first by outmanoeuvring, but you missed the point all together. Maybe you got a shiny medal but all your mates are dead.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#405

Post by zkmon »

tovej wrote: post #396
zkmon wrote: post #394

Dismissing this as just another anti-AI blog could appear a shallow dismissal, but in reality, it 8s mostly the pain of adapting to the change. The writer has certain framework of norms or world where good and bad are well defined, and that he knows what's desirable and what's not. This is not new. This happened with every new technology or paradigm change. The old norms take a while to adapt to the new world and it…

Quality of work is not the goal? What is the goal, then? Maximizing profit for the corporation? I would not want to work anywhere where that is the only goal, even at the employee level. Maximizing profits is not very popular at the moment, for good reason, look at what it's done to the world.

If profit is not the root goal, only hobbies exist, not work or any business. Quality is a means for profit, never the root goal. People pretend that quality and performance are the root goals, because they don't want say the fact that those two are the means for profit.

Even for opensource, the quality and performance are desirable aspects only because success of that opensource is directly tied to it's usage in profit-oriented products.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#406

Post by skor »

yes, imho part of the problem of vibe coders is that training data is full of low quality advice/code, and it seems to me you won’t ever get rid of it. A perfect feedback loop to clean training data from bad advice/code without massive human intervention seems impossible as well.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#407

Post by wazHFsRy »

sevenzero wrote: post #388
wazHFsRy wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I agree with you, but the reality for many of us is that this is not under our control?

Yea absolutely, but can't you talk to the people responsible for hiring? Seems like a thing that should be communicated within the company as it really disrupts things. Given that a lot of you do not have impact on hiring decisions I'd sign your face to face point, despite me not understanding the benefit of seeing if someone actually has the expertise, as most likely you also wont be able to unhire them. Can't we so…

Those are often also people who are in the company for a long time already, not only newly hired. I think AI makes it just so easy to be lazy.

I guess my hope with the face to face is that people take the feedback and learn to do the actual work again. Right now it feels like a lot of this kind of collaboration and what is okay and what no has to be figured out.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#408

Post by yoyohn »

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 had me crack up!

I used to have a colleague (senior engineer) who never cared to write a single line in Pull Request descriptions, as if other people had to magically know what he meant to achieve with such changes.

Now? His PRs have a full page description with "bulleted summaries of bulleted summaries"!

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#409

Post by lollobomb »

operatingthetan wrote: post #400
lollobomb wrote: post #399

Fuck, yes. This. I work in an "AI-first" startup. Being "The Expert", my work has become 90% reviewing the tons of crap that confident BD people now produce, pretending to understand stuff that has never been their domain, proudly showing off their 20-pages hallucinated docs in the general chat as the achievement of their life. "Heads up folks, I wrote this doc! @OP can you review for accuracy and tone pls?" And don'…

Well you can hack the people. Send them on wild goose chases, make them simplify their documents, start quizzing them on the contents of their documents, make them do presentations, the list goes on. Getting hazed for doing shitty work sucks and people will catch on.

Heh, I could do it for my subordinates (and I don't need to, I made pretty clear with them that I have zero tolerance for this shit and they seem to comply), but for other teams it's not so easy, the environment is pretty brutal in terms of politics, if I start sabotaging the "SUCCESS" of some dumb BD, the manager will comply with me and the CTO.

This quote from the original blog post resonates with me:

> The room had been arranged in such a way that saying so was not a contribution; his managers were too invested in the appearance of momentum to want the appearance disturbed.

Yes, I know, I should learn to be more subtle. I just don't have the energy for this stuff. I am tired.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#410

Post by Terr_ »

switchbak wrote: post #28
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…

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…

you're basically removing a dam - resulting in far more stress on the rest of the system.

Adding to the grab-bag of useful flow-dysfunction concepts and metaphors: Braess's paradox. [0]

Sometimes adding a new route makes congestion strictly worse! Not (just) because of practical issues like intersections, but because it changes the core game-theory between competing drivers choosing routes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox

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