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If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

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Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#231

Post by jstummbillig »

I increasingly find that I don't care whether I am talking to an anonymous AI or an anonymous human, and believe that we will increasingly stop caring.

Because why not? AI will simply on average be nicer to talk to than most humans, with clearer thinking and better arguments, less contradictions, and easier to comprehend.

I don't know how humans could compete with that (but it also does not seem all that horrible, given that it will be available to every human.)

This is not to say that this idea is uncomplicated or comfortable, in different ways. Just that I think it's true and that it might even be good.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#232

Post by nkrisc »

chii wrote: post #198
CoastalCoder wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like one potential interpretation of his behavior is that he values his own time more than your time. I wonder if that's occurred to him.

Everybody values their own time more than other's. The fix, imho, is for the reviewers to also use ai to review the code. However, the ultimate responsibility for the outcome(s) should be on the committer - you commit it, you own it, so to speak. If there's an incident, they need to be the one paged in the middle of the night. Bugs resulting from it will land on their desk. The reviewers aren't a shield/safety net.

Speak for yourself. I highly value other people’s time, to the extent that I should probably value my time higher than I do for my own sake.

Doing something that wastes other people’s time or makes more work for them than necessary makes me feel awful.

I’ve always worked in a way that respects other people’s time and I always tried to make sure I did everything I could to minimize the work I’m asking someone to do for me.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#233

Post by discreteevent »

moomoo11 wrote: post #117
satvikpendem wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. You really need to find people who don't want to play politics and instead get stuff done. I'm still not sure how to hire for these sorts of people in the age of AI, where people even cheat in interviews. Maybe probation programs? Have multiple people work for a month or two and cut those who don't succeed.

this is what I've been doing, and obviously I have a startup so I need to double-ensure that I don't onboard any bads. you can start people off as contractors too. I still think a single in person LC style (doesn't have to be LC per se, could be domain specific) logical thinking/reasoning exercise is useful. I want to ensure the person can actually put 2 and 2 together and think. This is just a fast filter. If they s…

Firing fast works both ways. If I joined your company and I thought you fired someone too fast I would leave, not because I might get fired, but because I've seen where that kind of leadership takes things.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#234

Post by 21asdffdsa12 »

crjohns648 wrote: post #208
niuzeta wrote: post #34

A very prolific coworker who fully embraced claude has inflicted the team with a flood of AI-generated PRs. About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention. I don't think anyone - including myself - _intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It's just that he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at. This single headline perfectly captures what…

Even before AI, I've worked with people who would produce a huge wall of code and ask for review, and sometimes that code was completely off base or needed a significant rework. I would always feel bad in those cases, because it's clear they spent a lot of time, and I'm going to have to say "no" and they will feel like they wasted a ton of effort. The thought process around this has started shifting for me in the las…

If they put effort into the code- they will put effort into guiding the reviewer through it.

Like : Here is the ticket, this was the goal. I set out by beginning here- but encountered problems x y z I then refactored to accomplish. Finally..

You just dont drop a blob from orbit.

Ironically, ai could generate that quite well from existing documentation (ticket, tasks and prompts) + https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vsls-con....

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#235

Post by selcuka »

andai wrote: post #223
niuzeta wrote: post #34

A very prolific coworker who fully embraced claude has inflicted the team with a flood of AI-generated PRs. About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention. I don't think anyone - including myself - _intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It's just that he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at. This single headline perfectly captures what…

I often hear people say lately, "why should I bother to read this, if you didn't even think it was worth writing?" I've been thinking about this in art. Is it the end result that matters, or the process of creating it? I once saw a hideous sculpture. Didn't like it at all. Then the video zoomed and I saw that the whole thing (quite massive) had been hand-built out of individual toothpicks, and suddenly I thought it w…

> Is it the end result that matters, or the process of creating it?

I think this comment misses the point. Let's forget about AI and assume that there are three developers: A, B, and C. Now, A is supposed to make a PR, but instead they describe it to B, and B writes the code. C reviews the PR and gives feedback. A passes the feedback and the responses between B and C.

As you see, this is not easy for either B or C, and A is totally useless in this scenario. When you replace B with an LLM that doesn't get tired or bored, only C complains about the process.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#236

Post by bandrami »

LandR wrote: post #224
bandrami wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody talks about finding that mythical 10X but in my recent hiring experience it's more like there's a whole bunch of 0Xs and the trick is finding the actual 1Xs among them.

This! All my experience in trying to hire developers has been wading through an endless stream of people who were just useless. Me: I want to represent a 2d grid, what data structure should we use? Them: A string? This was someone applying for senior engineer. Others I've had filled their CV with SQL related acronyms. But couldn't explain what a foreign key was and then stubbornly insisted that at their current corp…

I have a question I usually ask which is "How would you convert a Julian yyyy-ddd date string to a military yyyy-mm-dd date string?" (I explain how a Julian date works if they aren't familiar with it.)

The answer that almost guarantees I'll hire you is "there's got to be a library function for that, so I look in the manual". Almost as good is somebody whiteboarding how they'd convert ddd to mm-dd (and then account for leap years, etc.)

I get a disturbing number of people who say things like "I would communicate with the person asking for this to see what they're really intending blah blah"

My favorite answer was on a phone interview where he just hung up and wouldn't answer when we called back.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#238

Post by selcuka »

BoxFour wrote: post #50
Gigachad wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either that, or call them / walk up to their desk and pick a point from the wall of text and ask them to explain what they mean by it. Then watch them turn red as they have no idea what the message they sent to you means.

I think you're over-estimating how much some people care. I have had coworkers say "Oh I don't know, Claude added that" in response to questions like that without even a hint of shame or self-reflection.

I got sent a 6-page spec document with a footnote that says "this spec was created with AI, so it may have nonsensical sections. Feel free to fix them."

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#239

Post by nicbou »

andai wrote: post #223
niuzeta wrote: post #34

A very prolific coworker who fully embraced claude has inflicted the team with a flood of AI-generated PRs. About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention. I don't think anyone - including myself - _intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It's just that he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at. This single headline perfectly captures what…

I often hear people say lately, "why should I bother to read this, if you didn't even think it was worth writing?" I've been thinking about this in art. Is it the end result that matters, or the process of creating it? I once saw a hideous sculpture. Didn't like it at all. Then the video zoomed and I saw that the whole thing (quite massive) had been hand-built out of individual toothpicks, and suddenly I thought it w…

I don't think it's a matter of process vs end result. I just want to feel that a human with taste judged that it was worth my attention.

If a human put some effort into it, that's a signal.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#240

Post by faeyanpiraat »

chii wrote: post #198
CoastalCoder wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like one potential interpretation of his behavior is that he values his own time more than your time. I wonder if that's occurred to him.

Everybody values their own time more than other's. The fix, imho, is for the reviewers to also use ai to review the code. However, the ultimate responsibility for the outcome(s) should be on the committer - you commit it, you own it, so to speak. If there's an incident, they need to be the one paged in the middle of the night. Bugs resulting from it will land on their desk. The reviewers aren't a shield/safety net.

Well its obviously infeasible as during the time of the incident it is not yet known what is wrong and who caused it.

Is it even actually good to get to a point of blaming someone for an incident?

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