Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
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Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
1–10 of 134 posts
Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
#2The devops ppl talked about culture too. Seemed not too helpful.
Afaict toxic managers and C-level managers make for bad culture.
Now what?
Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
#3Can 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.
Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
#4If this is true, almost all of big tech is becoming unproductive; so that follows.
Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
#5I 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 blog posts for constructive criticism?
Or even managers? I look at the market forces at play, and I just don't think many (any?) organization successfully create an incentive structure where performance on intangibles (specifically management) can be assessed well enough to make a bad culture into a better culture. I've worked at zero places where managers where seriously held to account for how "motivated" their employees were; when there were surveys of engagement engineers almost never truly believed they were anonymous (and why would they?) and were hesitant to give honest feedback.
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.
Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
#6Can 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.
No, its not. Since when did stack overflow or google find and fix thousands of security issues.
Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
#7The 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 realize that they're sinking. (That doesn't make you a rat!)
Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
#8Can 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.
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 the discussion. You're rolling the dice if you expect AI to explain itself, as it can only ever know at most what it scraped from (stackoverflow and poorly documented github repos).
As it was not too long ago, searching on stackoverflow was already a hail mary play. AI just makes the problem worse. At best, with AI there's a lot of reinventing the wheel with no hope of ever doing better than merely approximating the wheel.
Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
#9Can 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.
No, its not. Since when did stack overflow or google find and fix thousands of security issues.
I’m old enough to remember computers replacing thousands of pages of paper.
Re: Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
#10It's easier to deploy AI than it is to create good culture.