Appearing productive in the workplace • Hacker News Board

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#461

Post by tovej » Thu, May 07, 2026, 9:50 AM UTC

tappio wrote: post #415

tovej wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maximizing profit for the corporation is the goal of any corporation by law, isn't it? Apparently not in the US, but for example the Finnish law explicitly states that the goal of a corporation is to generate profits for the shareholders. If you for example give away company assets for free, it can be considered breaking the law. This probably is just culturally different understanding of the phrase, because US corpo…

Oh I'm aware of Finnish law on the matter (moikka), and that is my point. I think the LLC (OY), which is the political institution that creates this profit maximizing incentive, is _the_ main driver of the current multi-crisis situation that he world finds itself in.

LLCs and the profit motive will not save us from climate change, they will drive us deeper into it. Sustainable human living and continuous economic growth are not compatible.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#462

Post by dmacj » Thu, May 07, 2026, 9:53 AM UTC

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…

> The "elongation" of workplace artifacts resonated with me on such deep level

Well put. I generally skip AI-generated PR descriptions for this reason as they tend to miss the forest for the trees. Sometimes a large change can be explained by a short yet information-rich description ("migrate to use X instead of Y", "Implement F using pattern P") that only a human could and should write.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#463

Post by gnz11 » Thu, May 07, 2026, 9:53 AM UTC

beachy wrote: post #230

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…

My friend built a construction management SaaS entirely via Claude. It looked damned impressive, and it kind of worked to demo, but he is in no way a programmer, though he understood the problem domain very well. I asked a few basic questions: - where is the data stored? - How would you recover from a database failure? - does it consume tokens at runtime? - what is the runtime used at the back end? - why are the web…

> I think however that all that is needed to bridge the gap is some very simple feedback from an expert at the right time.

I don't think it's as simple as that. What will most likely happen is that the vibe coders will quickly eat up your time asking for validation and feedback if you are not careful. You are also now implicitly contributing to their project, which if it goes south, could come back to bite you. If the vibe coders are pushing code in the org, then they should become part of the formal review process like any other junior programmer.

They should also be forced to do daily stand-ups, sit in meetings and explain their code like the rest of us.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#464

Post by tovej » Thu, May 07, 2026, 9:54 AM UTC

zkmon wrote: post #405

tovej wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

You have it backwards.

Why is profit a goal? It's nolever a goal in and of itself, it can only ever be an instrumental goal. "With profits, we can achieve ".

If profit is the main goal of all economic activity, then we are doomed to destroy humanity and the environment.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#465

Post by CWwdcdk7h » Thu, May 07, 2026, 9:55 AM UTC

So the opposite of quiet quitting is loud slopping?

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#466

Post by sesm » Thu, May 07, 2026, 9:58 AM UTC

zkmon wrote: post #403

sesm wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But it's a team sport. For example, in Dota 2 you should be trying to dominate your opponents. If you are trying to dominate your teammates instead (by prioritizing better KDA) you are most likely ruining the game.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#467

Post by casperb » Thu, May 07, 2026, 9:58 AM UTC

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 is happening at my place as well. I am a senior leader, but I find it hard to push back on this. I something looks plausible and everyone has reacted with a thumbs up (but probably only skimmed the document), when is the first one saying “what is this shit?”

The length itself is not an indicator per se, but you can sense when it is not honest. If others do not have a sense for it, it seems like complaining about something new.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#468

Post by serial_dev » Thu, May 07, 2026, 10:01 AM UTC

dmacj wrote: post #462

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…

> The "elongation" of workplace artifacts resonated with me on such deep level Well put. I generally skip AI-generated PR descriptions for this reason as they tend to miss the forest for the trees. Sometimes a large change can be explained by a short yet information-rich description ("migrate to use X instead of Y", "Implement F using pattern P") that only a human could and should write.

We need to demand better from our coworkers and from ourself.

Young "AI native" coworker opens PRs with 3 screen slop description, I flagged that "I know he ain't reading all that, and therefore I ain't reading all that", so he should just give a max half-screen overview. I expect that the PR description makes sense, is correct, and have been reviewed by the person opening the PR. You can still use agents for that, but at least there is a chance with shorter descriptions that it's not completely bs.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#469

Post by casperb » Thu, May 07, 2026, 10:03 AM UTC

globular-toast wrote: post #454

seniorThrowaway wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I paste something from an AI into chat, I always identify it as such by saying something like "my claude instance says this:". I also don't blindly copy paste from it, I always read it first and usually edit it for brevity or tone. Feel like this should be the absolute minimum for sending AI content to a person.

Even that is pretty useless because we have no idea what context "your Claude instance" has. All you're doing is dressing up some bullshit to look authoritative. When I started my PhD I was already really good at typesetting with LaTeX. I started to bring in fully typeset works in progress for my supervisor to read through. These proofs often had fatal flaws. He asked me to stop typesetting until after the work had b…

Can confirm. I saw some fresh out of college colleagues do this in text docs. Al nice markup, but the text content was very drafty. I always sent them back to keep the format concept-y if you are tuning the text first.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#470

Post by saghm » Thu, May 07, 2026, 10:06 AM UTC

npodbielski wrote: post #393

fhe wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it was only after I had to manage others that I realized the logic for a lot of these simplistic metrics and rules. they are in place to hold accountable the worst performers. a simple example is when i introduced flexible work hours. it was fine with most people, but there are always a few members that abuse the system. they stretch it to the very limit to what can be interpreted as "flexible". as a manager it posed…

Could not you just say to those few: 'you can't because I do not trust you'? You are the manager after all, your job is not to make them feel good but to make them work.

I don't think "some people on the team have privileges and others don't based on the manager's discretion" would be healthy in the long run either. Can you imagine interviewing for a team, asking about the PTO policy, and finding out that it varied like that? It would look pretty indistinguishable from "the people who that manager likes have special treatment" to me. You could hide it from prospective employees, but not knowing about it beforehand and then finding out from one of my teammates that the manager revoked their privileges (who presumably would have a chip on their shoulder about it and present the info with their own biases) would make me concerned that there was a bait-and-switch and now I'm stuck on a toxic team.