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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

#121

Post by zwischenzug »

I see some similarity to how I felt when library management/wrangling became a huge part of software development.

In the last century I enjoyed crafting my own 'libraries' of functions that I could then use on the projects I worked on. As time went on, there was less and less of a point doing that as the odds rose near to 100% that there was 'a library for that' thing I was working on, so I was encouraged/forced to download it and use it.

It solved problems and was quicker than writing bespoke code (and libraries were hardly a new idea), so the logic was hard to deny, but I enjoyed my job less over time. Now I've risen up the ranks and now code mostly for fun (yes, I use AI to write functions for me) I look at what it must be like to enter the industry and think it all looks very different to how it did when I started.

You could argue that AI has done this much faster than it did in my early career, so people have less of the 'boiling frog' experience I had, and more of a 'sudden shock' to the system.

It's sad, but I've been doing this to other industries all my career, so I can hardly complain.

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

#122

Post by stringfood »

tarkin2 wrote: post #105

I theorise that many social ills come from workers having less pride in their skills and achievements, and a greater sense of social alienation, due to automation. If you spend countless hours at work, and you partially define yourself by your work, and you realise you are easily replaceable then I cannot imagine this comes without mass social malaise that manifests itself elsewhere. When you know you're essentially…

I'll be in my woodshop!

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

#123

Post by delecti »

tarkin2 wrote: post #105

I theorise that many social ills come from workers having less pride in their skills and achievements, and a greater sense of social alienation, due to automation. If you spend countless hours at work, and you partially define yourself by your work, and you realise you are easily replaceable then I cannot imagine this comes without mass social malaise that manifests itself elsewhere. When you know you're essentially…

> I theorise that many social ills come from workers having less pride in their skills and achievements, and a greater sense of social alienation, due to automation.

Welcome comrade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

I agree entirely. Even in an idealistic fully egalitarian post-scarcity society, to truly be happy I think most people would need to do work that they can feel a sense of accomplishment about. The problem is that work at most jobs is increasingly just toil. Any possibility to scrape some tiny flakes of satisfaction out of the toil gets removed, often for no good reason.

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

#124

Post by apical_dendrite »

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…

A better way to put it is that these things do have value to the customer, the customer just doesn't have a way to understand how the work you're doing provides value because it's the part of the product you don't see. If you clean up technical debt, improve test coverage, improve your deployment systems, etc, it doesn't change the immediate customer experience in a meaningful way, but it does allow you to deliver the changes that customers do see faster and with fewer risks.

This quote makes it seem like the work is self-indulgent, and I have seen that happen sometimes, but it's not half of what we do.

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

#125

Post by krapp »

erikerikson wrote: post #102
krapp wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't have the luxury of finding joy and meaning in their work. You aren't hired to have fun, you're hired to create value and wealth for your employer. Just do what literally everyone else does and grind through it until you get a pension and hope it's enough to let you die with a bit of dignity.

Here in stupid town we stab ourselves with knives. It hurts and we get infections but everybody does it. We don't even remember why we do it any more but we do so you have to as well. The real problem is the amount of value that gets left on the table. Also, mental health is just as much a part of health and well-being as the physical.

We know why we do it. We do it because we live under a system that requires most of us to bleed for our supper. And now tech is being normalized to work like every other job, and techies get to feel the knife. A lot of people are going to be shocked to realize what their actual relationship to capital has always been.

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

#126

Post by juleiie »

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…

Many successful people in their 40s could quit work already if they only decreased their monthly costs.

I think it is more important than ever to manage your wealth in a way that sustains you from capital alone in a world where employment gets progressively more toxic.

The way to achieve it is buying maintenance efficient and cheap car, make renovations smart, make good choices all around to minimise expenses. Operate your life like a corporation. First, cut the expenditures.

For me the ability to do whatever I am interested in at the moment, is worth almost any sacrifice.

Then I can seek one time contracts or short time jobs that fulfil my mental needs.

My monthly expenses are no more than 5000 dollars and mostly consistently less than that.

Which is okay because the money spending doesn’t bring me any joy nowadays. The money isn’t what gives me happiness. Only other people can provide that and activities that are dirt cheap usually, like reading or broadly understood hacking

Consumption is a short lived and deceptive joy that causes more guilt than whatever dopamine it is worth really. Governments hate people like me which means I must be doing something right.

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

#127

Post by chris_money202 »

lionkor wrote: post #82
jmuguy wrote: post #43

I don't see a lot of talk about how AI development breaks the old feedback loop of write code, watch it run, change it, repeat. I really hate sitting around waiting for the agent to get done planning, reading the plan, then waiting for the agent to get done coding. It's those 5-10 minute windows when its working that really sap my patience and suck all the fun out of our jobs. Writing code by hand is just more fun.

You can still write code by hand. Just do that, you will run into tasks that are too boring, those you can do with an LLM.

I think a lot of developers who enjoy writing code are in an internal battle knowing they could write it themselves or AI could do it and probably do at same speed or many times faster. It's a contradiction as a developer because we always want to do whatever it is we are doing at the optimal speeds but we also like writing code. So, you're being forced to choose where you stand at a fundamental level.

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

#128

Post by marcosdumay »

masfuerte wrote: post #54
marcosdumay wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The box is stochastic by design, and has an untraceable amount of complexity between its context and output by nature. It may be fun to look at inputs and outputs, but it's not hackable and trying to map one into the other is more like astrology than a science.

It's copromancy. Picking through the clanker's doings in an attempt to predict the future.

It feels like Greek mythology should have some metaphor for "apparently simple structure that is so complex it leads anybody that studies it into madness". But I can't think of any name to put there.

Maybe the idea of complexity is too modern.

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

#129

Post by busterarm »

SoftTalker wrote: post #118
ge96 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 swit…

I've definitely found what you're describing at bigger companies, but I also previously had experience writing software at smaller non-technology companies.

Legal marketing specifically. Weirdly, my work had more impact, respect and longevity there than the place where I'm a much more senior engineer supposedly directing the work of a whole organization of engineers. I had it better where I was a 1 of 2 than a leader among hundreds.

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

#130

Post by sanderjd »

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…

Yeah I definitely agree with this. AI has become very useful to me, but it has also definitely automated some of what used to be my favorite parts of my work.

I am having some success in working to acquire a taste for different parts of the work. But I suspect that this won't be an option for most people.

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