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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

#171

Post by threetonesun »

kentm wrote: post #157
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.

> Do the engineers not derive enjoyment in their jobs from making the customer experience better? Quite a few don't, no. Different people derive enjoyment in different things and some of the best engineers do not find satisfaction in "delivering better customer experience" but in working with, and improving, cool technology. Its up to management to find areas of the business where they can deploy these people in a wa…

Platform and internal dev teams have customers as well. I'm not terribly frustrated that you don't get this. I've certainly worked with devs (and managers) who wanted to push new technology for the sake of using new technology, and they should have found a side project as an outlet for this.

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

#172

Post by oudlys »

raini wrote: post #169
Aurornis wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so what may be happening is that bosses see that output is at 80% (productivity down!) If an initiative produces only 80% of the previous results and you’re paying large token bills on top of the same wages, the AI is going to get cut off. > i've seen a number of articles claiming things like "devs self report they'er +x% more productive with AI, but actually they're -y% LESS efficient!". Are you thinking of the ol…

I think the old report you're referencing is this [1] from July 2025, but I can't find a new report. This [2] links to a new dataset at the bottom (that maybe shows improvements?) but it seems like they chose not to write it up because of perceived flaws in their study. Is there a more relevant report I'm missing? [1]: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... [2]: https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-…

I read this today and found it super valuable in evaluating METRs research.

https://arachnemag.substack.com/p/the-metr-graph-is-hot-garb...

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

#173

Post by lenerdenator »

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…

Then they'll fire you, find someone who will work for the wage that the now-degraded productivity justifies, and get them to use the AI.

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

#174

Post by Arainach »

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.

Plenty of value comes from things the customer doesn't care about.

Customers want features as fast and as cheap as possible. I derive joy from solid test suites that avoid me getting paged while on call and team processes that don't allow config changes on Friday so pages don't happen on the weekend.

Very few craftspeople derive their joy from the customer experience. An electrician isn't happy because their work allows me to watch TV. A carpenter isn't happy because a new set of stairs lets me get to the basement faster. They're happy because of their perception of the quality of their work. This goes away when the visible or fun parts are no longer "their work"

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

#175

Post by 98codes »

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

Far too many introverts in software development for that.

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

#176

Post by unlikelytomato »

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…

Perhaps those “good engineers” need a reminder of who enables their situation to exist at all.

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

#177

Post by butterlesstoast »

This is something I am very curious to learn from others since I am, relatively speaking, quite new to HN.

HN posts seem to go from very supportive to very critical of AI with very few articles striking a balance.

Was there a time or technology phase in the past (I'm thinking perhaps when everyone was going over to GraphQL just because of the hype) that you recall being similar to this? If so, how did you maintain curiosity without feeling yourself go through the extremes of "This is the worst / best thing to ever happen"?

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

#178

Post by root_axis »

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…

An hour out of every work day doesn't seem low to me.

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

#179

Post by rconti »

comboy wrote: post #16
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…

I kind of enjoy exploring black boxes, trying how different inputs are mapping to differences in outputs. It's kind of like hacking. The problem is, they keep altering the box.

The third sentence got to what my objection was going to be. It's fun trying to make the thing do what you want it to do! That's why many of us like computers. It's the randomness that sucks and makes the process unsatisfying.

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

#180

Post by oudlys »

intended wrote: post #5

Understanding what is going on with AI productivity is … frustrating to say the least. The best I can say is that genAI is a self reported a 20% efficiency boost, and for a very (very) small group of people, it’s maybe a 2-3x boost. (And if you are at a frontier lab, you go fly into the big bucket of exceptions) At this point, for most use cases, AI productivity is either the equivalent of giving people 3D printers,…

>Understanding what is going on with AI productivity is … frustrating to say the least.

Agreed. I think one of the hardest things about it is that productivity != value. You can push all the code you want, but if it's not driving revenue up or cost down, it doesn't matter economically.

Here is the best data I've been able to find. An observational study of 4000 teams over 2 years across many different organizations. Data gathered from their task management, version control, and CI/CD tooling. Critically - this is not survey data. It's much more direct measurement.

https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways

Faros argues that teams are seeing about a 16% throughput improvement (PR merge rate) with heavy AI use.

I argue here that their data actually indicates negative absolute impact on throughput.

https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap

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