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If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
491–500 of 551 posts
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#492[dead]
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#493"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.…
This is the policy I was always told to exercise about cold emails, both those I receive and those I send. Someone seems to have spent weeks reading your books and papers before emailing to meet with you? Make time for that guy. Someone just asks if you've got time to meet about your work because they'd like to work for you? LOL they didn't check enough to realize you're not a supervisor.
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#494"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. Y…
When I'm a newbie at things, I tend to have the opposite problem: I can overthink things to Hell and gone, but since I don't know what I'm doing, I focus on the wrong things and 80% of my effort is worthless. Like trying to make a multithreaded GUI in tkinter in Python: I tried to find a good way to do it, but the answer is a brief "Don't do that, use root.after() instead so your worker function can run in the main thread without blocking the event loop." I just had the wrong mental model and put forth effort an expert would have avoided entirely.
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#495"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.…
Short responses are increasingly becoming a signal of genuine human attention.
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#496A 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…
As someone who pushed ~4x the median PRs on my team before LLMs were a thing, I kind of think the problem here is PRs as a concept. Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans, it definitely can't scale to agents. And the exact same things you would need to safely give up on PRs for human developers (auto-formatters, linters, comprehensive end-to-end tests, continuous deployment pipelines, etc), are also things that…
I had one contributor who would submit hundreds of lines of disconnected changes. One of his PRs was isolated as being the source of the bug.
After some hours of work, I discovered that his actual semantic change was one line of code, and was the source of the bug. The rest was just reshuffling code around with no apparent purpose.
At a recent meeting, the agenda was generated by LLM. About 20% of the action items were hallucinations.
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
People are not generally answering interview questions based on instinct, but rather based on what they think the interviewer wants to hear to get the job. I would have interpreted this is as a leetcode style algo question and started by treating it as such, even though IRL my first instinct would be "get a lib that does it". Awful, awful strategy.
It appears that either answer would be accepted, and so I'm fine with it. If it really is there is one correct answer then I'm against this. This feels like a problem where a good enough solution can be done in the time of an interview if you do it by hand (though if anyone knows about dates they will expect there is a lifetime of fixing special cases left if you don't use the library) I prefer fizz-buzz as a questio…
I mean, any answer is "accepted" in the sense that the whole point is to let me see how you think about solving simple problems. What has been distressing is seeing the number of applicants who can't even try, when it's the trying I want to see.
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Y…
I don’t formalize anything that extreme for my teams because I can’t diagnose people, but I know that things like anxiety, imposter syndrome and a whole wack of things that aren’t related to work get involved. It’s acceptable to ask for help. I like to know what people have tried but sometimes they don’t know how to start. And that’s a great place to start. I guess we all have different styles but some may be more in…
Yeah, after the dozenth time with the same person where the "help" is "playing 20 questions to finally get the stack trace out of them which they should have sent in the first place and then then error explains exactly what is wrong and what they need to look at next" you might feel a little different about it. Or not.
End of the day, though, there's a huge, obvious difference between "asking for help" and "asking for someone to do all my thinking for me".
As a _person_, I'm very sympathetic to why that might be happening. I will do everything I can to help. And sometimes it does feel like I'm bordering on practicing psychology without a license.
As someone responsible for making sure _everyone_ is getting paid this month so they can keep a roof over their head and their kids fed, I do need to be mindful of and address issues that are dragging the entire team down. Regardless of why it's happening, if we're in a situation where you are doing the more company more good by _not showing up to work_ (you're contributing negatively), we have a problem and it needs to be addressed. We can work together on addressing it, but we can't ignore it.
For whatever it's worth, every single person on the team I manage says one of the things they love most about working here is how helpful and cooperative everyone is. Everybody's always happy to hop on a call and work through stuff together and really has a mindset of a rising tide lifting all boats--people are always volunteering to pitch in and help others before being asked. I like to think I've had some part in creating that environment. I am _more_ than happy to _help_. I had to starting making a distinction between "helping" and "doing someone's work for them" because I was getting burned out from overwork. I made it "formal" because I work with the kind of people who really appreciate clear rules and guidelines for things, including communication
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, okay! Would you mind explaining what does "comparing wording, not exact text" mean?
It's a very poorly written way of saying that instead of storing your text it uses a hash of your text to sign. When you want to check the signature you only need to hash the text to check, again without touching the server.
I must agree that is quite poorly phrased
Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Y…
I’d add that it’s basic respect and decency for your fellow humans who are paying for the attention with their own life.
Yeah, that's a reason to do it too! And one I'd hope would land with most people, but "respect and decency" aren't universal unfortunately.