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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

#371

Post by IshKebab »

swiftcoder wrote: post #273
jvanderbot wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gently, as long as you work with humans, you should consider yourself working _for_ those humans. Everyone needs shared state to work from, and that's just the cost of doing business. That said, sometimes low-trust environments are the issue, not PRs. In a higher trust environment, PR review is a helpful thing you usually desire, not dread.

> In a higher trust environment, PR review is a helpful thing you usually desire, not dread Respectfully, in a high-trust environment, feedback should be delivered well before the PR stage. If you've let someone write a whole bunch of code without having a shared understanding of how the solution should work, you may have earlier process issues that PRs are papering over

Depends on the change. Certainly most PRs don't need feedback before the PR is ready - the task is too obvious, and there's little to feed back on before there's any code.

For bigger changes, of course you need feedback on designs. But that could easily be in the form of draft PRs.

I definitely would push back on anything that required feedback before PRs. That's way too much process. Just going to slow you down for no benefit.

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

#372

Post by [deleted] »

gwd wrote: post #335

"Don't expend more effort than they are" has actually long been a good principle to have internalized. Someone done only cursory research before asking a question on a mailing list? Give a cursory answer. Someone obviously spent hours trying to figure things out on their own? Give them a good chunk of your time. Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind.…

[deleted]

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

#374

Post by Silasdev »

I had a new colleague on the team, who I had to on-board. I gave him a few simple tasks, just to get him into the whole setup. He literally copy/pasted my task description into Claude and asked it to complete the task. To begin with, I didn't suspect this, so when he asked for more help, I gladly wrote up a detailed explanation with more information and detail for him to learn. Little did I know, he never read it but put it directly into Claude. Not even sure how I should handle it, but my first instinct was to get extremely annoyed.

Maybe this is just how things are going to be. But in that case, I'm done spending my time being a helpful idiot talking indirectly to a robot through another person.

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

#375

Post by suncemoje »

Archer6621 wrote: post #358
gwd wrote: post #335

"Don't expend more effort than they are" has actually long been a good principle to have internalized. Someone done only cursory research before asking a question on a mailing list? Give a cursory answer. Someone obviously spent hours trying to figure things out on their own? Give them a good chunk of your time. Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind.…

These kinds of principles are sensible at their core, and I am a big proponent of the mindset, but the main problem as a sibling comment pointed out in a way is that this assumes that everyone is striving for an honest and accurate correlation between display of effort and value, and that everyone is looking deep enough into and behind that display to recognize the true value behind it. But actual effort, let alone v…

I experienced a similar interaction recently, where this principle was hard to apply, when I was emailing with a CTO / hiring manager who had some "deeper" screening questions. It was essentially:

1. HM: AI generated email with "tailored" questions

2. Me: AI assisted response with answers (I confess)

3. HM: AI generated email with a "thoughtful" response + invite

4. Me: AI generated "thank you & looking forward" response ...

Looking back at the thread, I have to laugh and cry at the same time. It's so obvious and sad.

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

#376

Post by inigyou »

Telaneo wrote: post #365
jappgar wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes considerable energy to train models and run inference. You can't dismiss AI generated content as "low effort", but you can dismiss it as a wasteful diversion.

The person copy-pasting an AI response is generally not the person who trained said AI. Even if the total amount of effort is fairly large, the amount of effort put in by the person you're actually interacting with, is generally small.

Back when people would train Markov bots on IRC that was actually something novel for the first 30 minutes and you could appreciate it because they put in the work

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

#377

Post by gwd »

bluGill wrote: post #341
gwd wrote: post #335

"Don't expend more effort than they are" has actually long been a good principle to have internalized. Someone done only cursory research before asking a question on a mailing list? Give a cursory answer. Someone obviously spent hours trying to figure things out on their own? Give them a good chunk of your time. Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind.…

> Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind. "I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter." - Blaise Pascal. The length of the response doesn't indicate effort.

Sure; I was using shorthand. Sometimes a whole edifice of ideas rests on one shaky one; and if you can challenge that one the whole thing falls apart. But even being able to identify the shaky one demonstrates engagement. That's really the key.

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

#378

Post by inigyou »

Aurornis wrote: post #102
treesknees wrote: post #22

This exactly reflects my feelings lately. I have a specific coworker who has gone somewhat overboard - every single code review, answer to any question on email or Teams, every new story, even their personal opinions during a design or ideas meeting, are all direct AI output with no massaging or human touch or review. They're working on planning out an upcoming project, and I just get verbose and long documents to re…

I've seen this, too. There is a workplace personality that sees the job as a 2-player game between themself and the corporation. They think the game is to min-max their effort to personal career benefit, and they don't care how much it inconveniences anyone else. Before AI they had to actually put in work, or at least play games of trying to steal credit from other people without getting noticed. Now that AI appeared…

That is their job. Their job is whatever gets rewarded, and that's what gets rewarded, apparently.

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

#379

Post by nucleardog »

gwd wrote: post #335

"Don't expend more effort than they are" has actually long been a good principle to have internalized. Someone done only cursory research before asking a question on a mailing list? Give a cursory answer. Someone obviously spent hours trying to figure things out on their own? Give them a good chunk of your time. Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind.…

I've had this same policy since before AI. I kind of formalized it for myself (and this team) after enough instances of "I'm trying to do X. It's not working. Help." type messages.

You need to put as much effort into the question as you expect someone to put into the answer.

It's not "fairness" or "AI" or anything else, it's that doing this any other way fundamentally fucks up the team dynamics.

You have a problem. You want someone's help. If the cost to you is effectively nil (or negative, since you're asking someone to do your job for you), but the cost to the other person is non-zero, then incentives aren't lining up here. Pretty quickly that person is going to start carrying too much load and become a bottleneck.

It can also mask that the context of the work is too concentrated in one person, and does little to nothing to help build that elsewhere in the team.

The other end of this is exactly what you're saying--put as much effort into the answer as they put into the question. You're not doing anyone a service by taking their low effort input and giving them high effort output, least of all yourself. If someone asks "how do I X", that's low effort. If you happen to know the answer off the top of your head, spare a few sentences to explain or point them where in the code they need to be. If you don't know, don't go track it down for them.

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

#380

Post by nkrisc »

bandrami wrote: post #295
nkrisc wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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" Sounds like they know this question is a “gotcha” question but just misinterpreted which direction you were going with it. Some will ask a question like this expecting you to treat it like a puzzle and outline how you’d solve it as-is; others ask it as a way to…

No, it's a pretty good interview question because it tells me if somebody's instinct is to reinvent the wheel or not. What I didn't expect was how many people couldn't say how a wheel even works.

But that's why the context of the question is important. It's not clear from your comment, but I'd give a different answer if the question was strictly academic in nature (reinventing the wheel) or focused on practical work realities (use a library).
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