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Appearing productive in the workplace

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Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#441

Post by gib444 »

roncesvalles wrote: post #59
ryandrake wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I remember that one. Great article. Also spawned a decent discussion about how optics and "keeping up appearances" always matters, often a lot more than we think they do.

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),…

> men look more leadership-material by dressing simple and consistent, for women it's the opposite

This made me think back to the people I've seen rise through the ranks: the women started off dressing very conservative and as they got to senior exec positions, started wearing very bright and powerful outfits. The men on the other hand started with bright t-shirts/polos etc, but then ended up in more conservative suits.

Never noticed that before

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#442

Post by gehsty »

Where does it end, I don’t see people using AI less as time moves on.

I’ve not seen a cohesive statement on what the world looks like when LLMs can do work perfectly (which on a long enough timeline is coming).

Do Google/ Anthropic / OpenAI capture all value, do clients still want consultancies, if the client wants something that a human would use to do something does that project hold any value in an LLM dominant world, why even bother.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#443

Post by sublimefire »

One important part is not expanded on - incentives. If you really think about it that is the crux of the problem. If I am recognized for creating documents, PRs, features, decks, token use, and NOT for doc/PR/deck reviews or feedback or fixing features, then the outcome is what we see now.

An example of a new feature in the company goes the following way:

- some request is raised by person1

- PR is generated with an "agent" by person2

- PR is reviewed using an "agent" by person3

- feature is merged and shipped

- person1 is happy and records a video with a feature to be shown to the clients

- in a next call with the leadership this feature is declared as a success

It all looks good until you look at the implementation, not only that there is very little time to intervene. I find myself recently trying to quickly review PRs before they get quickly merged, just to be on a safe side as people do not even look at the code.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#444

Post by Bombthecat »

sublimefire wrote: post #443

One important part is not expanded on - incentives. If you really think about it that is the crux of the problem. If I am recognized for creating documents, PRs, features, decks, token use, and NOT for doc/PR/deck reviews or feedback or fixing features, then the outcome is what we see now. An example of a new feature in the company goes the following way: - some request is raised by person1 - PR is generated with an…

You already realised that you aren't paid to review code manually. Why waste the time? And maybe even get the wrath of your management by "wasting" time?

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#445

Post by auggierose »

The right use of AI requires stellar leadership, and to be honest, I don't think that kind of leadership exists. I am using AI just for myself, and the traps and pitfalls I encounter are so many. For example, I generate an article on a topic, and while this is very useful to get started, I then have to go through every sentence because AI makes some overconfident statements that are just not true in this form. This is still very helpful, because then I have to think about why they are not true. But I don't see how that can ever scale, how would I know that colleagues are also diligent like this?

AI is incredible in three scenarios: a) what I just described, to get you started, b) to generate artifacts that can be rigorously checked (and I don't mean tests, I mean proofs), c) where your artifacts don't have a meaningful notion of correctness, like a work of art.

c) is a matter of taste, b) certainly scales, but a) is where I think trust will be essential, and I am not ready to trust anyone with that except myself.

Oh, and I think currently, c) is applied to software engineering, by people who cannot distinguish the engineering from the art part of software. Which is just funny right now, and will eventually be catastrophic.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#446

Post by vultour »

yoyohn wrote: post #408
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"!

My colleague had a problem with commit messages, so now they're all written by AI. I don't know what depth of hell he managed to get the prompt from, but they're all now in the format "Updated /path/to/file: fixed issue in thingamabob", which means they're all at least 200 characters long and half of it is the file path, an absolutely pointless thing to put in a commit message. The best part is that whenever you look at GitLab or GitHub, instead of seeing the commit message next to the file you just see the file name again, then the message is cut off.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#447

Post by uncircle »

yard2010 wrote: post #362
red_hare wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are so far removed from the process they can claim they are any % more productive and no one is able to contradict them. Call it a ‘productivity theatre’

The economic reality check is going to be devastating. It won’t be a crash of AI as a tech, it will be a crash of every ‘AI native’ company that does not even know what is their product any more.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#448

Post by AnthonBerg »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #236
AnthonBerg wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not at all indicate the effort that went into doing the thing. Clearly not. I propose that what you enjoy is having a token of the appearance of effort, easily constructed and easily observed and easily suitable for low-effort handling of these proxy objects for actual work.

I think you’re missing the sarcasm in their comment. They’re saying that the emoji usage is telling them that very little effort was put into the PR and that they’ll treat it accordingly.

Haha! Thanks!!!

My apologies!, sincerely.

(If only the message I was responding to had had emojis and checkmarks for me to efficiently process it!!!!)

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#449

Post by vannucci »

grvdrm wrote: post #199

> 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…

Our team is assessing some new tools and one of our VPs produced a document just like this and none of us read it because it was obvious that it was generated slop and way too long. I don't get what value such tomes are actually providing when you're comparing three SaaS tools against each other.
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