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AI is making us work more

tawandamunongo.dev

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Re: AI is making us work more

#231

Post by popoflojo »

overfeed wrote: post #207
donatj wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Business is stupid. They value busy-ness over productivity. Not stupid, just entitled to all of your innovation and productivity while you're on the clock (if waged) and off the clock (if you're salaried). If you've shown yourself to be an outlier - that's great for the business - and congratulations, you've aet yourself a new baseline. Isn't class economics just delightful[1]? The only employees who have a more di…

But that is stupid. If they incentive innovation and productivity gains they could do more business. They don't have to give you the full value of your improvements to incentivise you.

Re: AI is making us work more

#232

Post by swat535 »

beachy wrote: post #142
BeetleB wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 read a great article a while ago (can't remember where) when they tasked some embedded guys with building a somewhat complex front end app. When it was done, there were no bugs. Not a single issue. They asked the embedded guys how they had accomplished it. They said "we didn't know bugs were allowed". Many people have never authored or even been involved with a high quality piece of software, so they just don't kno…

I mean they don't care about bugs because it doesn't affect sales or bottom line..

Everyone is used to terribly software with awful security holes and performance so why rock the boat?

It's not like average normies will complain.. after all, they are probably used to swimming in an ocean of ads, telemetry and junk. Investors will cut the execs a check regardless, the only thing that matters is piling on more features and growing.

There are _zero_ consequences for writing bad software.

Re: AI is making us work more

#233

Post by godelski »

bravetraveler wrote: post #224
godelski wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is as soon as everyone returned to office they did care. Even while remote many employers acted like they were being cheated because employees would work less or distribute their work throughout the day. We have a tendency to scream crisis while stock prices and market caps rapidly rise. Every little downturn is evidence for the cry, but that doesn't change the trend. They keep saying that the share holde…

On the cheat topic: don't forget things like 'r/overemployed' . People truly taking advantage of, and ruining, what could be a nice situation. Sure, some of it's made up, but the response is certainly genuine. CEOs and middle-management are loud and clear: get back to the office/work yourselves to the bone. I've never had to attend so many pointless Teams calls just to prove presence... until this started making the…

  > Why such a soft apologist?
To be clear, I'm not defending them. I'm doing the opposite...

  > I didn't stop caring until they started
I've never been a "loud laborer" but boy is it crazy how far those people go now. What little work they can get done as long as they do it loudly... (and I'm not criticizing the employee for this, I'm criticizing the one rewarding them. Same reason about comp. I've never been upset at a coworker who is making significantly more than me. I don't feel cheated by them. I feel cheated by the person who duped me into thinking my rate was the wage.)

Re: AI is making us work more

#234

Post by mousefriend »

ashanoko wrote: post #139

To be honest the self confidence of ai is rubbing off on the species in a good way. As in suddenly there is somebody there who beliefs in you, unlike that family that constantly sabotage you, the partner that tries to keep your ego in a "handleable due to absence of success" shape. And all those ideologies that want to cripple any one standing out, they can take a hike. So what if its confidently wrong, at least it b…

> So what if its confidently wrong, at least it beliefs more in you then the rest of the species.

I have to believe this is satire.

Re: AI is making us work more

#235

Post by figers »

butlike wrote: post #222
bakugo wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I reject commits like this Which is a great idea until your superior asks why you're holding back the vibe coders and crippling their 100x productivity by rejecting their PRs instead of just going with the flow.

Which is the hill you get paid to die on as a manager. Die on the hill and ask for your severance package.

Yup, better to die on that hill and have a code base that's manageable vs a mess that gets out of your control that you still die on!

Re: AI is making us work more

#237

Post by DrewADesign »

hirvi74 wrote: post #133
DrewADesign wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah contracted flat rate and hourly billing are just different. If you’re billing someone for time and not deliverables, it’s not ethical to bill someone for more time than you spend on it because you were more efficient. The ‘right’ way to do it is be able to deliver more than everyone else so you get a lot more work, undercut your competition, and take a bigger market share. If you’re not willing to do that, use a…

> The ‘right’ way to do it is be able to deliver more than everyone else so you get a lot more work, undercut your competition, and take a bigger market share. You are absolutely correct from a business perspective. However, I just cannot shake the feeling that I am so 'over' this society that we have created. I'm near my breaking point, I swear. Each passing day, I just think living off the grid sounds better and be…

I work in manufacturing, having left software. You won’t find me extolling the virtues of tech freelancing.

However, what I said would be even truer then than it is now. Our modern society lets people obfuscate things like saying you’re charging for time but retrospectively increasing the hourly rate like 20x because you felt like you had a really great 15 minutes. But if the guy selling you grain agreed to pay $10/day plus materials for four days to make him nails, but you personally think you made four days worth of nails in one day, you might ask him if this was enough and then if so move on to the next job… but if he finds out you charged him for four days work while you were making horseshoes for someone else, you’re gonna have a real big problem.

The real problem is living in a society where extracting as much as possible out of everyone you deal with is not only acceptable, it’s expected.

Re: AI is making us work more

#238

Post by [deleted] »

anarticle wrote: post #130
HWR_14 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-...

[deleted]

Re: AI is making us work more

#239

Post by abandonliberty »

jrowen wrote: post #203

This is due to the flawed cornerstone of our culture that a person's job is their worth and value and purpose in the world. This was necessary when the combined efforts of our labor were still not enough to provide basic needs for the people. The dream of automation was always to fix that. We did that, and more. We have long had the technology to provide for people. But we invent tons of meaningless unnecessary jobs…

>It's the same reason vacuum cleaners didn't reduce the amount of cleaning work to be done.

It's true that some of the some of the capacity created by technology was consumed by increasing standards, the data do show a significant reduction in time spent on chores in spite of this.

1965-2011 hours spent on housework decreased 40%, while male housework doubled and female housework halved. The proportion of mothers working went up 90%, but somehow time spent with children went up 70% for men and women, again with improvements in gender equality.

Technology dramatically improved the efficiency of household chores. People invest some of that efficiency into further quality of living improvements or work, and still got to spend more time with their family.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/03/14/chapter...

If you go further back in time the differences would be even more stark.

Yes, we can do better. Expectations on parents have gotten ridiculous, and much of this additional time is spent ferrying their children between 10 different extracurriculars. We spend a lot of time chasing more (thanks, dopamine) which could be spent enjoying what we have.

But the lack of understanding that technology and science have led to dramatic improvements in quality of life has led us to start turning our backs on it as a species, and we will pay a huge price for that.

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