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Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

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Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

#111

Post by jasondigitized »

threetonesun wrote: post #96
kqr wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an important point. My light-bulb moment was when I talked to a product owner in a previous job, and I expressed surprise around an expensive planned change, because it didn't seem that valuable to our customers. He said, "Almost half of what we do is not that valuable to our customers, but it's valuable to him, and her, and him", pointing through the conference-room window at my fellow programmers, "and that…

Do the engineers not derive enjoyment in their jobs from making the customer experience better? This does track with what I've experience in my career, where we've gone from everything being to better the user experience to tech companies sort of trying to out-do each other in their technical solutions while the software continuously gets worse and more antagonistic.

There are plenty of projects that are green lit that have good intent but are bone headed when it comes to solution and implementation. Good engineers hate these types of projects. Good PMs try to avoid these at all costs but sometimes your hand gets forced because some VIP, either internal or external volun-tells you to do it.

Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

#112

Post by evilturnip »

rocketpastsix wrote: post #7

6 hours a week is low, unless its the average spread across industries. I think I spend more time in Claude Code via the CLI versus any other app I have on my laptop. Like others said, the frustration is when it gets something so wrong you just think "wow, how'd you mess that up?" but when it gets it right its kind of nice. I also dont like that I basically tell Claude what to do, and then either go to busy work or w…

Working with AI is trying to reduce the probability it'll pick undesirable paths. It's an exercise in trying to avoid what you DON'T want.

I suppose it's the same as asking someone else to take care of a feature and hoping they understand what you have in mind. The difference is that there's a lot of context that's shared between you and a human developer that is simply absent with AI.

Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

#113

Post by abc123abc123 »

banannaise wrote: post #39

This really hit home for me: In some cases, workers are also being asked to automate the parts of their jobs they enjoy most, Hinds said on the podcast, pointing to customer-service employees who enjoy building relationships but are increasingly expected to supervise AI agents instead. "That's what gives you joy and meaning at work," she said. "That is very dangerous." What's a 20% productivity gain if I constantly f…

As always... no AI-hypester ever talks about Amdahls law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law).

Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

#114

Post by mettamage »

kqr wrote: post #88
banannaise wrote: post #39

This really hit home for me: In some cases, workers are also being asked to automate the parts of their jobs they enjoy most, Hinds said on the podcast, pointing to customer-service employees who enjoy building relationships but are increasingly expected to supervise AI agents instead. "That's what gives you joy and meaning at work," she said. "That is very dangerous." What's a 20% productivity gain if I constantly f…

This is an important point. My light-bulb moment was when I talked to a product owner in a previous job, and I expressed surprise around an expensive planned change, because it didn't seem that valuable to our customers. He said, "Almost half of what we do is not that valuable to our customers, but it's valuable to him, and her, and him", pointing through the conference-room window at my fellow programmers, "and that…

By that logic, pair programming should have taken off

Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

#115

Post by treyd »

lionkor wrote: post #78

You pay per token, even on subscription models the limit is tokens. If I was valued at 1 trillion dollars, and I was in the hole enough to sink a couple small countries' GDP, maybe I would slowly start to optimize to maximize token usage. I want to sell tokens, how do I sell more tokens? Not by doing the same work in less tokens, that's for sure. This is like if you pay me by the hour and then excitedly tell me that…

It'd probably still be worth it to make tokens cheaper. Jevons paradox [1] seems to apply here, where making compute cheaper unlocks use cases that were previously priced out, increasing overall demand.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

#116

Post by tombot »

banannaise wrote: post #39

This really hit home for me: In some cases, workers are also being asked to automate the parts of their jobs they enjoy most, Hinds said on the podcast, pointing to customer-service employees who enjoy building relationships but are increasingly expected to supervise AI agents instead. "That's what gives you joy and meaning at work," she said. "That is very dangerous." What's a 20% productivity gain if I constantly f…

Most people don’t have jobs they enjoy, programmers have somehow escaped this; better pay and more “protected” time instead of doing what the rest of us were doing all along

Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

#118

Post by SoftTalker »

ge96 wrote: post #65
banannaise wrote: post #39

This really hit home for me: In some cases, workers are also being asked to automate the parts of their jobs they enjoy most, Hinds said on the podcast, pointing to customer-service employees who enjoy building relationships but are increasingly expected to supervise AI agents instead. "That's what gives you joy and meaning at work," she said. "That is very dangerous." What's a 20% productivity gain if I constantly f…

When I was given a semi-ultimatum "use AI or get fired" kind of thing for writing code I had a brief bout of depression/sadness. Whereas my friend doesn't care/says "I get paid to not work". I have gotten past it, now I'm just like, I'll do what I need to do to get paid since unfortunately I'm in a lot of debt so I need this job. I learned to code in 2013 so I like typing the code myself but now it seems like a waste…

If you're anything like me, and you stay in a coding/dev/IC track for your career because you like the work, you will eventually hit a point where you start thinking it's all meaningless. This happened before AI for me, but AI certainly reinforces it.

You come to a point where you realize that you're not doing anything that creative, or nothing you haven't done hundreds of times before, maybe every few years you switch to whatever new tech stack has gotten popular, but it's fundamentally all the same. And you start to realize that everything you do has a lifespan of a few years, and then you (or probably someone else) will re-do it.

As retirement starts feeling like it is something that will happen sooner than later, you look back and see that almost nothing you've built is still in use, or will be for very long after you're gone.

I hope to retire in about two years. At that point, I plan to not be using any technology or computers in my life for a while, or as little as possible. Maybe at some point I'll rediscover some of the fun I used to have writing programs for myself, but I suspect I'll need a long break before that happens.

Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

#119

Post by plaidthunder »

mettamage wrote: post #114
kqr wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an important point. My light-bulb moment was when I talked to a product owner in a previous job, and I expressed surprise around an expensive planned change, because it didn't seem that valuable to our customers. He said, "Almost half of what we do is not that valuable to our customers, but it's valuable to him, and her, and him", pointing through the conference-room window at my fellow programmers, "and that…

By that logic, pair programming should have taken off

I always found pair programming a bit.. hellish. Chatting about things. Rubberducking. Playing code review ping pong. All great. But the feeling of being shoulder surfed killed my ability to play around with the freedom that I do when I'm alone -- and that playing around sometimes led to better/more interesting outcomes than I'd have gotten otherwise.

Re: Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration

#120

Post by busterarm »

lubujackson wrote: post #109
threetonesun wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the engineers not derive enjoyment in their jobs from making the customer experience better? This does track with what I've experience in my career, where we've gone from everything being to better the user experience to tech companies sort of trying to out-do each other in their technical solutions while the software continuously gets worse and more antagonistic.

This is the danger of isolating engineering from customers, or even internal customer-interfacing employees. If all they see is code, they will get satisfaction from tidy code, not user happiness. One good thing about AI is it elevates product engineers because they more directly bridge the customer-product-code divide.

Not just isolating them from customers but also from engineering-adjacent work that isn't code.

I've been at a place that is basically microservices slop (several dozen services per engineer). They're all poorly maintained and at least a solid 40% of all this code that they've written could have been just a traefik or nginx configuration/container.

When you have a lot of inexperienced (relative to industry) and overworked software engineers, the solution to every problem becomes to write code and writing new code should be a last resort.

Worse still, there's just a poor general understanding of the internet protocols they're working with and of how to do distributed systems right. Unfortunately with LLMs I've been seeing this get worse, not better.

They use the LLMs for code generation but not architecture review. Bad ideas are getting fully-baked quickly before anyone with good sense can intervene.

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