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Appearing productive in the workplace

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Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#501

Post by lqet »

> The first is when novices in a field are able to produce work that resembles what their seniors produce [...]. > The second is when people generate artifacts in disciplines they were never trained in.

There is a third shape. Experts who have become so reliant / accustomed to AI that it dilutes their previously sharp judgment and, importantly, taste. I am seeing more and more work produced by experts which seems strangely out of character. A needlessly verbose text written by someone who was previously allergic to verbosity. An over-engineered solution (complete with CLI, storage backend, documentation, unit tests) for a trivial problem which that person would've solved by an elegant bash one-liner only 3 years ago. The work itself is always completely immune to any rational criticism, as it checks all the boxes: extensive documentation, scalable, high test coverage, perfect code style, and for texts perfect grammar, non-offensive, seemingly objective. But, for lack of a better word, it simply lacks taste.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#503

Post by globular-toast »

reenorap wrote: post #219

The cope-ism in this blog post is palpable. The author is genuinely offended that someone who doesn't know how to code is daring to invade his turf. It's pretty sad that this is how he is reacting. I, for one, welcome the new paradigm shift of vibe coders entering the field. I still think I have a competitive advantage with my 30+ years of coding experience, but I don't think it's wrong for vibe coders to enter my tu…

Would you have some random bloke with ChatGPT work on and test the electrical wiring in your house? Or would you prefer someone who actually understands what they are doing? What about software that calculates expensive material requirements and cutting? What about medical software that can make decisions about your health?

It just sounds like you work on very low stakes software, probably CRUD apps if I had to guess. But software can be a lot more than. If written competently it can make decisions and do calculations that have real consequences.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#505

Post by Dumblydorr »

whstl wrote: post #429
nly wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing you describe is recognisable to me. It just seems like you chose to work at bad places.

That's the crazy thing about criticizing the industry in general: you can't really get away with it without someone calling you incompetent, point blank! :D What I am describing here is FAANG (two of them) and every startup (two YC) or enterprise (a big Fintech) that copied it. If you happen to "like it", perhaps it's time to think about accepting how other people don't. I even prefaced it with "for me".

That was a low effort comment, I agree with you and I downvoted theirs. HN rules specify comments should drive the conversation forward. They used n=1 anecdata and called your employers bad places, oversimplifying the complexities into a simplistic 3 letter word.

Let’s keep the short caustic comments to ourselves people. The world is crazy enough without making other peoples days worse with drivel!

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#506

Post by danparsonson »

yard2010 wrote: post #383
a34729t wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly enough, a coworker recently told me that I likely don't have much room for advancement at my employer, given my race. He said look at the race of the people on the ladder above you (it's mostly one race), and then look at yourself. Also, being tall. Easiest way to identify management is height.

Honestly this brings tears to my eyes. It's like humans would never get past that obstacle and unlock the next level cooperation..

Even more frustrating is that in many ancient empires, racism essentially didn't exist. The trans-Atlantic slave trade was a big driver of it, as a way to "justify" the evil.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#507

Post by northernsausage »

bonoboTP wrote: post #494
northernsausage wrote: post #412

My line manager using a lazy single line description of a product is generating whole product listings and HTML for our web shop, never checking it. SEO is poor, views and conversion are collapsing. Upper management is responding to my serious issues with ChatGPT bullet point lists that don't address the problem. Video conferences I can see people typing into and reading back GPT instructions, suppliers are sending A…

What is your company producing? Do you think it's worth being passionate and enthusiastic about? Or is it perhaps reasonable to just do the bare minimum to get a paycheck? People see that it's bullshit anyway and the job doesn't result in any actual positive impact in the world. So why care?

It's a small family run company that turns over multi million on bespoke stone pieces. AI is rotting away at the core of the business from leadership to customer service. I was passionate before the rot, but I've got a new job starting in 5 weeks and I can't wait. Perhaps you are self projecting a little, these people got employed on good wages and have the skills the just don't use them anymore. I hate the future.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#508

Post by AbbeFaria »

> because the reader must now sift the synthetic context for whatever the document was originally about

> time wasted using AI on tasks that did not need it, on artifacts no one will read, on processes that exist only because the tool made it cheap to construct them. On decks that spell out things that previously didn’t even need to be said or were assumed.

I work at MSFT and at-least in my org, this is happening at warp speed. Every document I read, my first thoughts are what is the kernel of the idea that the writer was trying to convey ? Because 95% of the content of the doc is just verbiage. You can always tell its verbiage, the em-dashes, the rhythmic text, the green check mark emoji etc. We are hoping that volume of output will make up for the quality or lack thereof. More markdown files, more AGENTS.md file but is that making us better developers ? It certainly is giving the illusion that we are faster but I don't know how management thinks this will lead to tangible impact on the top line or bottom line.

In my experience, some of the best writing (in design docs and PM specs) at MSFT have been human written. You can see the clarity of purpose from the writer, ithere is no need to read it again, it is equivalent to having a 1-on-1 with the writer themselves. But AI written slop, the less said the better.

This piece hits home, I wonder how the experience is at other Big Tech companies.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#509

Post by tyingq »

skydhash wrote: post #476
mike_hearn wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's circular though. Why does that content get ranked highly? Because it gets a lot of backlinks, long clicks, etc. So people seem to like it.

> Why does that content get ranked highly? Search engines only show a snippet of the content and that always looks convincing. It's the whole content that is off and, unfortunately, a few seconds/minutes can pass before you realize it (If you ever do).

Well, and Google's proxy read of "quality" might have flawed assumptions. A concise page where you get what you need and leave quickly might read as "high bounce rate".

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#510

Post by mrspuratic »

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…

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