The ai use mandates are odd. My guess is that the c-level execs have very little practical technical skills at this point, probably haven't written a line of code in 20 years. And they believe ALL the ai hype. They think LLM's can do anything, so any employees not using them are clearly wasting time.
The AI usage mandates are odd because why do the execs doubt that the workers try on their own to get the maximum utility out of the AI tools?
AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?
121–130 of 184 posts
Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?
#122My management chain has recently mandated the use of AI during day-to-day work, but also went the extra step to mandate that it make us more productive , too. Come annual review time, we need to write down all the ways AI made our work better. That positive outcome is pre-supposed: there doesn't seem to be any affordance for the case where AI actually makes your work worse or slower. I guess we're supposed to ignore…
Look, for most corporate jobs, there's honestly no way that you truly cannot find any kind or level of usage of AI tools to make you at least a bit more productive -- even if it's as simple as helping draft emails, cleaning up a couple lines of code here and there, writing a SQL query faster because you're rusty with it, learning a new framework or library faster than you would have otherwise, learning a new concept…
Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?
#123My CEO sent an ai generated blog today. I've never felt more frustrated reading something in my life. "x happened, here's what it means", "groundbreaking", "game-changer", "significant", "forefront of a technological shift"
Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/26/reading-code-is-li... https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... (read the bold text in the middle of the article) These articles are 25 years old.
Sadly, I've seen multiple well-known developers here on HN argue that reading code in fact isn't hard and that it's easy to review AI-generated code. I think fundamentally what AI-generated code is doing is exposing the cracks in many, many engineers across the board that either don't care about code quality or are completely unable to step back and evaluate their own process to see if what they're doing is good or n…
A strong editor is able to overcome this anchoring bias, imagine alternative approaches to the same problem, and evaluate them against each other. This is not easy and requires experience and practice. I am starting to think that a lot of people who "co-write" with ChatGPT are seriously overestimating their own editing skills.
Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look, for most corporate jobs, there's honestly no way that you truly cannot find any kind or level of usage of AI tools to make you at least a bit more productive -- even if it's as simple as helping draft emails, cleaning up a couple lines of code here and there, writing a SQL query faster because you're rusty with it, learning a new framework or library faster than you would have otherwise, learning a new concept…
It's not a good-faith question to say "here's a new technology, write about how it made you more productive" and expect the answer to have a relationship with the truth. You're pre-ordaining the answer!
Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?
#126We call these workers “pilots,” as opposed to “passengers.” Pilots use gen AI 75% more often at work than passengers, and 95% more often outside of work. Identify a real issue with the technology, then shift the blame to a made-up group of people who (supposedly) aren't trying hard enough to embrace the technology. Embody a pilot mindset, with high agency and optimism Thanks for the career advice.
Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?
#127My management chain has recently mandated the use of AI during day-to-day work, but also went the extra step to mandate that it make us more productive , too. Come annual review time, we need to write down all the ways AI made our work better. That positive outcome is pre-supposed: there doesn't seem to be any affordance for the case where AI actually makes your work worse or slower. I guess we're supposed to ignore…
> My management chain has recently mandated the use of AI during day-to-day work, but also went the extra step to mandate that it make us more productive, too.
Now they're on record as pro-AI while the zeitgeist is all about it, but simultaneously also having plausible deniability if the whole AI thing crumbles to ashes: "we only said to use it if it helped productivity!"
Do you see? They cannot be wrong.
Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?
#128My management chain has recently mandated the use of AI during day-to-day work, but also went the extra step to mandate that it make us more productive , too. Come annual review time, we need to write down all the ways AI made our work better. That positive outcome is pre-supposed: there doesn't seem to be any affordance for the case where AI actually makes your work worse or slower. I guess we're supposed to ignore…
Look, for most corporate jobs, there's honestly no way that you truly cannot find any kind or level of usage of AI tools to make you at least a bit more productive -- even if it's as simple as helping draft emails, cleaning up a couple lines of code here and there, writing a SQL query faster because you're rusty with it, learning a new framework or library faster than you would have otherwise, learning a new concept…
My report was entirely unacknowledged along with other reports that had negative findings. The team in charge published a self-report about the success rate and claimed over 90% perfect results.
About a year later, upper management changed to this style of hard requiring LLM usage. To the point of associating LLM api calls from your intellij instance with the git branch you were on and requiring 50% llm usage on a per-pr basis otherwise you would be pip-ed.
This is abusive behavior aimed at generating a positive response the c suite can give to the board.
Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?
#129We call these workers “pilots,” as opposed to “passengers.” Pilots use gen AI 75% more often at work than passengers, and 95% more often outside of work. Identify a real issue with the technology, then shift the blame to a made-up group of people who (supposedly) aren't trying hard enough to embrace the technology. Embody a pilot mindset, with high agency and optimism Thanks for the career advice.
Re: AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look, for most corporate jobs, there's honestly no way that you truly cannot find any kind or level of usage of AI tools to make you at least a bit more productive -- even if it's as simple as helping draft emails, cleaning up a couple lines of code here and there, writing a SQL query faster because you're rusty with it, learning a new framework or library faster than you would have otherwise, learning a new concept…
It's not a good-faith question to say "here's a new technology, write about how it made you more productive" and expect the answer to have a relationship with the truth. You're pre-ordaining the answer!
It is hardly feasible for an organization to budget time for replicating and validating results, form their own conclusions, for any employee form who wishes to question the effectiveness of the tool or the manner of deployment.
Presumably the organization has done that validation with reasonably sized sample of similar roles over significant period of time. It doesn't matter though, it would be also sound reasoning for leadership to take a strategic call even when such tests are not conducted or not applicable.
There are costs and time associated with accurate validation which they are unable / unwilling to wait or even pay for, even if they wish to. The competition is moving faster and not waiting, so deploying now rather than wait and validate is not necessarily even a poor decision.
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Having said that, they can articulate their intent better than "write about how it made you more productive", by adding more description along the lines of "if not then explain all the things you have tried to try and adopt the tool and what and how it did not go well for you/ your role"
Typically well structured organizations with in-house I/O psychologists would add this kind of additional language in the feedback tooling, line managers may not be as well trained to articulate it in informal conversations, which is whole different kind of problem.