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If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

tombedor.dev

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Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#221

Post by justanotherjoe »

moomoo11 wrote: post #117
satvikpendem wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. You really need to find people who don't want to play politics and instead get stuff done. I'm still not sure how to hire for these sorts of people in the age of AI, where people even cheat in interviews. Maybe probation programs? Have multiple people work for a month or two and cut those who don't succeed.

this is what I've been doing, and obviously I have a startup so I need to double-ensure that I don't onboard any bads. you can start people off as contractors too. I still think a single in person LC style (doesn't have to be LC per se, could be domain specific) logical thinking/reasoning exercise is useful. I want to ensure the person can actually put 2 and 2 together and think. This is just a fast filter. If they s…

Might not be solveable. At some point the effort in finding that someone might be larger than the benefit you get from just using the second, third, fourth best. Or using some flawed approximation hiring mechanism. There's just so much noise now. And it hits the good job seekers too.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#222

Post by thaumasiotes »

rodonn wrote: post #95
thaumasiotes wrote: post #48

This headline has been seeing some popularity. But it's never made any sense. This is just the labor theory of value, applied to documents. The labor theory of value doesn't work for documents any more than it works for anything else. If I do something that's easy for me, and it's valuable to you, you'll still want it. If I do something that's difficult for me, it will be less valuable to you, because the difficulty…

The problem is that I don't know before I read a doc whether or not it will be useful and valuable. If someone wants me to spend my time and attention on something they have shared, I would like them to demonstrate that they put a proportionate amount of time and effort into its production.

> If someone wants me to spend my time and attention on something they have shared, I would like them to demonstrate that they put a proportionate amount of time and effort into its production.

First: why? How does that help you?

Second: Is that actually true? Do you ever watch videos that a friend recommends to you? Even if the amount of time and effort your friend put into producing that video is zero? Do you ever read anything that a friend recommends? Even if they didn't write it?

How much time and effort, in your estimation, did jjfoooo4 put into producing this article on tombedor.dev?

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#223

Post by andai »

niuzeta wrote: post #34

A very prolific coworker who fully embraced claude has inflicted the team with a flood of AI-generated PRs. About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention. I don't think anyone - including myself - _intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It's just that he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at. This single headline perfectly captures what…

I often hear people say lately, "why should I bother to read this, if you didn't even think it was worth writing?"

I've been thinking about this in art. Is it the end result that matters, or the process of creating it?

I once saw a hideous sculpture. Didn't like it at all. Then the video zoomed and I saw that the whole thing (quite massive) had been hand-built out of individual toothpicks, and suddenly I thought it was amazing.

Perhaps an even better example: I read a story of a man in india who carved a passage through a mountain, so there would be a shorter route from his remote village to the city. He did it by hand and it took him 20 years. We seem to have an instinctive admiration for heroic effort.

In business, generally only the end result matters. Although, the end result also includes the client's perception of how the product was made... (see also: fake fairtrade etc.) In a meaningful way, the perception, the story, is reality.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#224

Post by LandR »

bandrami wrote: post #147
moomoo11 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

having worked in tech and now running my own company.. the honest truth is that maybe 10-20% of SWE (at best) are “good”. sure it is harsh but i won't lie. if you're good you'll probably relate. the rest kind of suck. i’ve never gotten anything lower than Exceeds Expectations in my career so I’ve seen how awful some engineers were. i’ve seen how amazing a tiny minority were and i made them my mentors. these days i ha…

Everybody talks about finding that mythical 10X but in my recent hiring experience it's more like there's a whole bunch of 0Xs and the trick is finding the actual 1Xs among them.

This!

All my experience in trying to hire developers has been wading through an endless stream of people who were just useless.

Me: I want to represent a 2d grid, what data structure should we use? Them: A string?

This was someone applying for senior engineer. Others I've had filled their CV with SQL related acronyms. But couldn't explain what a foreign key was and then stubbornly insisted that at their current corp they would never ever use foreign keys in their SQL database!

I've had senior engineer when asked how to check if we had a 2d array with an item at x,y tell me if anything is on the same column or row, they couldn't do it, couldn't even verbalise how to approach it.

"Web Developers" who didn't know the difference between GET and POST. Web Developers that have never heard of PUT or what it would be used for.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#226

Post by dofm »

AI generated output is rudeness.

We developers understand this when we are forced to read slop, and most of us recognise it in art and music.

I wonder if we forget that people using unthinking, default interfaces in AI generated apps might start to feel the same way: “it feels like no care was taken here so why should I give it my time?”

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#228

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway132448 wrote: post #210
chii wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody values their own time more than other's. The fix, imho, is for the reviewers to also use ai to review the code. However, the ultimate responsibility for the outcome(s) should be on the committer - you commit it, you own it, so to speak. If there's an incident, they need to be the one paged in the middle of the night. Bugs resulting from it will land on their desk. The reviewers aren't a shield/safety net.

> Everybody values their own time more than other's. This is false, you’re just oblivious to people who grew up in conditions that would make them that way.

[deleted]

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#229

Post by justanotherjoe »

pevansgreenwood wrote: post #8

Was it Blaise Pascal who wrote: I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter. The argument that "using AI to generate text is disrespectful because it took no effort to write" misses the point. Respect for the recipient is measured by whether the message serves the recipient's needs, not how it is produced. Similarly, any errors are the senders responsibility, and not the fau…

what's stopping someone to feed it to an llm and say 'make it simpler' and maybe run it twice.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#230

Post by spwa4 »

runnig wrote: post #215
niuzeta wrote: post #34

A very prolific coworker who fully embraced claude has inflicted the team with a flood of AI-generated PRs. About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention. I don't think anyone - including myself - _intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It's just that he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at. This single headline perfectly captures what…

Fight fire with fire: point copilot/claude/codex to review their PRs. Prompt "Review the PR#XYZ which is vibe coded and presumably low-quality. Find all problems, big and small. Team guidelines at docs/conventions/styleguide.md, docs/conventions/architecture.md, docs/conventions/principles.md. Post inline comments to github". Run several rounds of such reviews until the clanker fails to find problems.

And what do you do if that works?

Because the problems AI causes are fundamentally problems of good design. It has the same problems of large teams, but less politics. Do your design well ahead of time, and AI review, or a large team, will amplify what you can do. Potentially by a lot.

Do it badly (or like most companies: do it with bad knowledge of the problem or just don't do it at all) and both team and AI will make a mess of things. If the team is made up of inexperienced programmers, they won't even complain, in fact I've seen teams that like this to be happening. At least in AI reviews I've always seen "grumbling" (in the sense of what you might call mean comments)

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