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Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI

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Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI

#21

Post by throw8383784 »

zug_zug wrote: post #5

I think the points being made here are mostly good-ish. The last place I worked created a team of principles whose whole goal was to create a system to turn jira tickets into PRs and it was incredibly demotivating and bore no fruit before I left. But, and maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but I kind of wonder why we write articles like this. Like if a culture is bad, is it likely a CEO is going to be looking for random bl…

> whole goal was to create a system to turn jira tickets into PRs

I love companies like that! Everything is documented, stuff just works, CI builds...

If something is broken, you just open ticket, and responsible person takes care of it! You do not have to investigate when Judy returns from holidays...

With remote work I can spend more time with kids..

"Company culture" usually means you have to listen to shitty stories, provide social life for some lonely people, and do unpaid emotional labour!

And do not dare to say anything even remotely controversial, in this "open" environment that "foster communications"!

Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI

#22

Post by derektank »

sublinear wrote: post #8
justincormack wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, its not. Since when did stack overflow or google find and fix thousands of security issues.

What does that have to do with productivity? Bugs and security flaws are just oversights. Those oversights are caused by inattention either through fatigue or acting too quickly. An inexperienced person delegating what they don't understand to AI produces more bugs, not less. Those mindlessly copying from stackoverflow were in a similar situation, but only because they ignored or didn't understand the warnings from t…

> Bugs and security flaws are just oversights. Those oversights are caused by inattention either through fatigue or acting too quickly.

Being able to work more quickly is pretty much the definition of productivity.

Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI

#23

Post by kaffekaka »

r_lee wrote: post #15
sublinear wrote: post #3

Can we finally just admit that using AI for coding is equivalent (or maybe even slightly inferior) to web search? A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Giving junior devs or non-devs what is essentially automated stackoverflow copypasta on steroids only amplified all the downsides of inexperience that we already learned well over a decade ago.

this is just false...

Curious, how?

To me it is obvious that an org with a good culture will be more able to identify and reach its targets than a dysfunctional org lacking trust and safety.

Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI

#24

Post by newsomix9xl »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #7
newsomix9xl wrote: post #2

The devops ppl talked about culture too. Seemed not too helpful. Afaict toxic managers and C-level managers make for bad culture. Now what?

Reading your post, I just realized that "bad culture" perfectly explains what bothered me about my last workplace. So thank you for that concise tag to put on what I was seeing. As for your "now what", companies with a bad culture will be at a competitive disadvantage. Their efforts to wring more productivity out of their broken culture usually make the culture worse. My advice would be to leave ships once you realiz…

Glad I could help, but if the solution is "good culture" and culture is made by managers and C-levels, and they're not doing it, writing blogs that are, effectively, saying "good management makes people productive" is so obvious that it hardly seems worth saying.

What might be more pointed, instead of pointing to the "useful effects of good culture" why not have actual tactics on how to reform or remove bad management and preserve and expand good management?

Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI

#25

Post by pydry »

zug_zug wrote: post #5

I think the points being made here are mostly good-ish. The last place I worked created a team of principles whose whole goal was to create a system to turn jira tickets into PRs and it was incredibly demotivating and bore no fruit before I left. But, and maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but I kind of wonder why we write articles like this. Like if a culture is bad, is it likely a CEO is going to be looking for random bl…

It might be a pipe dream but I'd like to see some sort of checklist for dev companies using hard-to-bullshit objective criteria to highlight that they either have a good culture or that their culture is toxic.

I remember many years ago companies used to advertise their "joel score" (not quite the same thing but related) to attract employees.

This is something which I think investors could also use as an indicator of company quality.

A lot of cultural problems also have quite easy fixes they just require shining a light on specific abuses of executive power which simultaneously hurt employees and destroys shareholder value. There is a lot more of this than I think people realize.

Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI

#26

Post by RugnirViking »

revetkn wrote: post #14
sublinear wrote: post #3

Can we finally just admit that using AI for coding is equivalent (or maybe even slightly inferior) to web search? A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Giving junior devs or non-devs what is essentially automated stackoverflow copypasta on steroids only amplified all the downsides of inexperience that we already learned well over a decade ago.

If your position is AI for coding is equivalent or worse than web search, I am curious how you arrived there. I could see that a few years ago, but with the state of the tooling now it is hard for me to understand.

imo we're all being treated to a live demonstration of why the pareto principle is stupid. AI agents are excellent at making prototypes, and a lot of people are happy to just stop there (well, I wouldn't say happy. More like can't/won't take ownership once the rot of code they dont understand has taken hold) I find it all the time where I start side projects but fail to feel any connection to the output, I can't show people or feel proud. I need to start trying to go back to entirely no LLMs tbh

Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI

#27

Post by bitwize »

The biggest stock-price hack for a CEO is:

* announce that effective immediately, the company will begin its transformation to an "AI-first" organization, with AI driving most development workflows by end of year

* percolate the message through upper management down to line managers that they are to assure their reports that the aim of the transformation is to augment current employees, not reduce headcount

* stealthily start lopping off heads anyway

Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI

#28

Post by jubilanti »

zug_zug wrote: post #5

I think the points being made here are mostly good-ish. The last place I worked created a team of principles whose whole goal was to create a system to turn jira tickets into PRs and it was incredibly demotivating and bore no fruit before I left. But, and maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but I kind of wonder why we write articles like this. Like if a culture is bad, is it likely a CEO is going to be looking for random bl…

> random blog posts

The irony of writing this comment for a post that made the front page of one of the most widely read aggregators in tech, in said comment section

Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI

#29

Post by zug_zug »

pydry wrote: post #25
zug_zug wrote: post #5

I think the points being made here are mostly good-ish. The last place I worked created a team of principles whose whole goal was to create a system to turn jira tickets into PRs and it was incredibly demotivating and bore no fruit before I left. But, and maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but I kind of wonder why we write articles like this. Like if a culture is bad, is it likely a CEO is going to be looking for random bl…

It might be a pipe dream but I'd like to see some sort of checklist for dev companies using hard-to-bullshit objective criteria to highlight that they either have a good culture or that their culture is toxic. I remember many years ago companies used to advertise their "joel score" (not quite the same thing but related) to attract employees. This is something which I think investors could also use as an indicator of…

yeah absolutely. In theory that was supposed to be glassdoor (or blind) but I haven't found scores there to be meaningful signals.

>A lot of cultural problems also have quite easy fixes they just require shining a light on specific abuses of executive power which simultaneously hurt employees and destroys shareholder value. There is a lot more of this than I think people realize.

What do you mean? Who would "shine this light", on which executive, and who would they whistle-blow to exactly, the board? Short of embezzlement or sexual harassment (and not even all sexual harassment cases) I can't think of any cases where calling out an executive's behavior won't result in immediate retaliation. This is a genuinely tricky problem, but most of all I get the sense executives would rather own the wrong decision than have a subordinate get credit for swaying them to the right decision.

Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI

#30

Post by bitwize »

zug_zug wrote: post #5

I think the points being made here are mostly good-ish. The last place I worked created a team of principles whose whole goal was to create a system to turn jira tickets into PRs and it was incredibly demotivating and bore no fruit before I left. But, and maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but I kind of wonder why we write articles like this. Like if a culture is bad, is it likely a CEO is going to be looking for random bl…

> In short, being a CEO is a skill of crafting and debugging a machine of people, a skill that I think life gives almost no training for, and a skill that most people with that title have no awareness or aptitude for.

Indeed, but the CEO is Queen Promethium, and you are just one of the people she's transformed into a bolt to go into her infernal machine.

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