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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

#201

Post by wayeq »

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…

> What's a 20% productivity gain if I constantly feel deflated by work that used to energize me?

I think it's called 'capitalism'

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

#202

Post by graphime »

_verandaguy wrote: post #97
graphime wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Driving everyone's QoL to be as bad as possible will lead to increasing enshittiffication in the entire market. Consumers will be spoiled for choice between deeply mediocre options. Besides, what's the point of adopting new technologies if it's not to increase the quality of life? If everyone just exists in service of the product development lifecycle, who and what are the products actually for?

> If everyone just exists in service of the product development lifecycle, who and what are the products actually for?

Anyone holding passive index ETFs in their brokerage / 401k / pension accounts.

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

#203

Post by graphime »

BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #167
graphime wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Is everyone entitled to a high quality of life Yes.

> Is everyone entitled to a high quality of life

Only finite land available in high QoL areas such as Orange County California, New York City, or Hawaii, depending on your lifestyle.

You want to tell us who is allowed to live there?

Because sure as hell won’t fit all 345 million people in America with a desire for higher QoL

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

#204

Post by emacdona »

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…

> When you know you're essentially babysitting the workhorse to ensure it doesn't go off the rails

I don't have data to support this (other than, I guess, my LinkedIn feed), but my impression is that the management class is pushing AI _way_ harder than the worker / craftsperson class.

And if that's true, I think it's perhaps because it's something they understand: you tell AI to do something, and (with varying degrees of success and less complaining)... it does that thing.

To the extent that I've seen craftspeople adopt AI, it's been because they recognize its usefulness as a tool to further their craft. I don't meet many craftspeople that enjoy watching any[one|thing] do their work for them.

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

#205

Post by kqr »

elevation wrote: post #23
kstenerud wrote: post #15

I've found that setting good guardrails, and running in a sandbox so that the agent doesn't keep asking tedious permission questions, makes things go a LOT smoother. Generally, I spend anywhere between 15 mins and an hour setting things up (depending on how well the project is set up for AI work), and then set the agent going, coming back in a half-hour to an hour to check its progress. Generally, the tooling keeps i…

> sandbox so that the agent doesn't keep asking tedious permission questions > 80% of the questions the agent asks me require a lot of thought. 20% of what it does needs correction. I've found even the permissions questions give me veto power over fruitless lines of exploration, especially in planning mode. For instance, it wants to use tools I don't have installed to access information that I have made available els…

This is my impression too. Whenever it needs permissions outside of a small set of defaults I've allowed, it's often because it's trying to do something ridiculous that it doesn't need to do.

I think the yoloist counter-argument is "So what? Let it. It'll take longer that way and consume more tokens, but you can work on something else in parallel instead of being hooked in to this one session".

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

#206

Post by banannaise »

StefanBatory wrote: post #106
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…

> That's going to give back the productivity gain and more, while also decreasing my quality of life. Unfortunately though, what does that matter? Your employer does not care how do you feel. You are paid to bring them benefits, they aren't running a charity. If you do feel down, that is your issue and you shouldn't let that influence how you work. Just to be clear, I don't like that either. But it is what it is.

Mental health is health. Negative mental health impacts are particularly significant when your job is to perform mental labor.

It's not defiance, it's reality: if you drag down my motivation, that's going to drag down my productivity. I don't really have much active control over that.

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

#207

Post by archagon »

StefanBatory wrote: post #106
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…

> That's going to give back the productivity gain and more, while also decreasing my quality of life. Unfortunately though, what does that matter? Your employer does not care how do you feel. You are paid to bring them benefits, they aren't running a charity. If you do feel down, that is your issue and you shouldn't let that influence how you work. Just to be clear, I don't like that either. But it is what it is.

That is when you unionize and make them do what you want.

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

#208

Post by anoyomoose »

soared wrote: post #25

I spend at least 6 hours a week arguing with bots owned by other teams, as I’m unable to reach a human before I bypass their bot. 10k person company, clients are paying for my time.

Soon all communication will start with bots talking to bots trying to find a human. It's already happening with phone calls.

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

#209

Post by prewett »

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…

> you will eventually hit a point where you start thinking it's all meaningless ... You come to a point where you realize that you're not doing anything that creative

I hit that point after about 5 years. At the time, software development was mostly desktop applications (which are sadly defunct), and UI frequently doesn't require much in the way of algorithms. Then I focused on the challenge of design a UI that matches the user's mental model, which lasted about five years. After another a stint in mobile games and apps, I started doing contracting. The key for me was the concept of serving someone else' vision (instead of my own vision of FIRE), and some HN conversation on some of Steve Job's videos on work. This all boiled down into an attitude of "I will solve your problem (and you will pay me)" (from Job's discussion with the guy who designed the NeXT logo).

As a contractor, sometimes I solve your problem with a cool algorithm, sometimes by simply implementing your pixel-perfect design, and sometimes with a true-Agile back-and-forth of vague design into concrete software. Since I switching to the "I solve your problem" perspective, I haven't had any problems with feeling frustrated at just being a code monkey implementing stuff I don't need to think about. (However, I have discovered that I get really bored doing server stuff, and it doesn't save me from that. I just like something concrete, and not having to debug by putting in print statements and wading through thousands of lines of output, with only the reward that the variable contents is now correct. Turns out I want to see something. I get unreasonably excited about going from a blank screen and slowly populating it with widgets.)

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

#210

Post by gamblor956 »

skrebbel wrote: post #191
unlikelytomato wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How this goes is the engineers start raising arguments in meetings full of nerdy technical terms such as “refactor”, “technical debt” and “accidental complexity”. As time progresses, more of them say more of this. At some point management learns that when engineers say engineery words like this you sometimes gotta say yes and let them do it even if it means urgent features are delayed, or the engineers will walk.

Let them walk. Good programmers can write code that doesn't degrade the customer experience.

In the last 15 years it's been all about the programmer's experience and user-facing software is objectively slower, buggier, and more resource intensive.

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