Just wait till AI starts taking managerial roles. Instead of annual reviews it'll be hourly reviews. "You only have five background AI coding sessions in progress right now. PIP!"
AI is making us work more
121–130 of 270 posts
Re: AI is making us work more
#122Site is down to me, but I agree with the argument. I speak for myself: I think AI has removed a lot of small barriers that would naturally slow my work down, increasing dissatisfaction and stress with it. Without barriers, productivity increases and with it, work satisfaction. It's just nice to get things done(tm) faster and at a lower effort due to the quality of the virtual assistant.
This is certainly something I have felt. The idea of spending a day or two debugging a small problem, coming up with the right regex, or setting up boilerplate is all gone. Now it's 30 seconds, and you're right back to the high level "what do I build next" thinking. Which is great, and has unblocked so much productivity, but I do miss some of the grunt work. I feel like it helped spawn new ideas and gave you some tim…
> coming up with the right regex
Yes, and this a meme I have in my mind of LLM engineers talking to each other and a balloon: "If we could just get the right regex done in a few seconds we'd win the entire global programming community."
Re: AI is making us work more
#123Yes, this is why it's better to be a contractor/individual right now. You need to capture this efficiency yourself. You have access to the same tools faster than BigCos, so go hard in the paint. If you estimate 3h, and it takes 15m it's up to you how to reconcile this. Personally I bill the 3h.
Don't lie, just bill by the job/task.
Initial build
database integration
accessibility
speed
Re: AI is making us work more
#124Fascinating to see this much attention toward a post nobody can seem to access.
Re: AI is making us work more
#125Re: AI is making us work more
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only advantage is that if the company is more efficient they'll be less likely to fire you because the business is failing. They'll just be firing you to eliminate a cost.
When a buyer shops at a lower priced store, they are also eliminating a cost. No one seems to bemoan that, but for some reason a buyer of labor qualified as “employee” eliminating costs is different than a buyer of say, a new roof shopping around or going to Costco to spend less than the full service grocery business.
people complain all the time that Walmart and dollar tree drive local groceries out of business though
Re: AI is making us work more
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is just empirically not true. Increase in productivity has lead to broad increase in prosperity (with one relatively recent but currently very important caveat, the housing market). Now, if what you actually want is to be relatively more prosperous and have more status that's a game you can keep playing forever. But you really don't have to, to simply be better off than all people in the past with far less work.
A bigger caveat is that measuring improvement by 'prosperity' is both vague (are you using GDP, GDP/capita or GDP/capita of the lowest 10%) and arbitrary (perhaps a better measure is the life expectancy of the poorest 10%).
That does not seem like a caveat at all, given that the improvement is completely obvious for all of these.
Re: AI is making us work more
#128I was never excited for automation. Automation doesn't mean we do less. It means that we do as much work, and now also the work has a higher complexity ceiling; you need to understand the systems that are being automated, and need to maintain the automation. More things are possible, but everything is more complex, and of course, you still need to work 40 hours a week. Products don't get better either, but that's mor…
My first engineering job was non-SW, and had a lot of manual work. I automated a lot of it. Yes, it led to more work. What would take half a day could now be done in an hour. So we now had to produce 4x more. I spent 4 years there automating left and right. Everyone silently hated me. One of the problems with my automation was that it allowed for more and more Q/A. And the more you check for quality issues, the more…
I have a friend who automated his entire days work down to the click of a single button. He did not tell management because they were pretty scummy. He got written up for not "looking busy" despite his output being higher than his coworkers.
Business is stupid. They value busy-ness over productivity.
Re: AI is making us work more
#129Yes, this is why it's better to be a contractor/individual right now. You need to capture this efficiency yourself. You have access to the same tools faster than BigCos, so go hard in the paint. If you estimate 3h, and it takes 15m it's up to you how to reconcile this. Personally I bill the 3h.
Don't lie, just bill by the job/task. Initial build database integration accessibility speed
Implying that I'm lying is a tall tale, I am capturing the efficiency of my own efforts. Sorry you see it that way. Consider your employer sells your time for more than they pay you and you'll see it my way.
Re: AI is making us work more
#130Yes, this is why it's better to be a contractor/individual right now. You need to capture this efficiency yourself. You have access to the same tools faster than BigCos, so go hard in the paint. If you estimate 3h, and it takes 15m it's up to you how to reconcile this. Personally I bill the 3h.
> Personally I bill the 3h. So, fraud? If you put a fixed price based on 3 hours, that's of course fine. If you lie about how long work takes you, that's fraud. Unless your bids are what you bill not what it takes, and you would bill the same 3 hours if it took you 4. In which case it's a fixed price under a different name.
Keep working at FANG. I will not undercut myself to large organizations where I am a rounding error to their budget. Simply not doing it.
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2006/08/14/you-can-probably-stand-...