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Appearing productive in the workplace

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Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#241

Post by reenorap »

sedatk wrote: post #223
reenorap wrote: post #219

The cope-ism in this blog post is palpable. The author is genuinely offended that someone who doesn't know how to code is daring to invade his turf. It's pretty sad that this is how he is reacting. I, for one, welcome the new paradigm shift of vibe coders entering the field. I still think I have a competitive advantage with my 30+ years of coding experience, but I don't think it's wrong for vibe coders to enter my tu…

> It doesn't matter if it's slop as long as it works I agree with most of what you said, but that statement doesn't take the time dimension into account. Slop accumulates, and eventually becomes unmanagable. We need to teach AI to become lean engineers too.

I have only seen AI make codebases better, and I'm talking about it making some pretty nuanced changes. I think mass-rewriting of projects is possible these days with AI.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#243

Post by jeremyjh »

beachy wrote: post #230
Animats wrote: post #215

The OP has an amusing side point - LLMs have automated sucking up to management. There is a large market for that. His main point, though, is this: I have a colleague ... who spent two months earlier this year building a system that should have been designed by someone with formal training in data architecture. He used the tools well, by the standards by which use of the tools is currently measured. He produced a gre…

My friend built a construction management SaaS entirely via Claude. It looked damned impressive, and it kind of worked to demo, but he is in no way a programmer, though he understood the problem domain very well. I asked a few basic questions: - where is the data stored? - How would you recover from a database failure? - does it consume tokens at runtime? - what is the runtime used at the back end? - why are the web…

One of the riskier bets my team is currently making is that this is exactly what is needed, and nearly nothing more.

We have LOB prototypes vibe coded by enthusiastic domain experts that we are supporting in a “port and release” fashion. A senior engineer takes the prototype and uses Claude code to generate a reasonable design, do an initial rough port (~80% functional, 100% auth & audit logging) and (hopefully) all the guidance necessary to keep the agent between the lines. Coupled with review bots and evolving architecture guidance etc. Then the business partner develops and supports it from there.

For low stakes CRUD, I think it’s a reasonable middle ground. There truly is a lot of value in letting an expert user fine tune UX; and we’re only doing this with people who are already good at defining requirements and have the kind of “systems” thinking that makes them valuable analyst resources to the tech team already. Early results are encouraging but it’s way too early to draw conclusions.

Personally I hate how badly internal users are served by the majority of their systems and am willing to take some calculated long-term governance risks.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#244

Post by a34729t »

nlawalker wrote: post #11

>People who cannot write code are building software. People who have never designed a data system are designing data systems. Most of it is not shipped; it is built, often for many hours, possibly shown internally with great vigor, used quietly, and occasionally surfaced to a client without much fanfare. This made me think of How I ship projects at big tech companies [1], specifically "Shipping is a social construct…

It goes even further: The existence and availability and feature set of a technology/service is a social construct within a company.

At my employer (major public company), when someone says we have X, this then politically turns into X exists, and you have to use it with the assumed feature set. Even when this feature set doesn't exist!

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#245

Post by cindyllm »

funimpoded wrote: post #196
pmg101 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with everything you've said, but don't you think quite a lot of things have also been like this before, just to a lesser degree? I've often had the sense that most of what is done inside companies is a kind of performance of work rather than work itself. Mostly all a big status game between various different factions. All actual value provided by just a few engineers here and there who are able to shut out th…

> I agree with everything you've said, but don't you think quite a lot of things have also been like this before, just to a lesser degree? That’s exactly the reason LLMs and friends are so dangerous to companies, and it’s so hard for them to resist using them in useless/counter-productive ways. They’re excellent at faking signs of effort and work that companies can hardly help but reward, absent any actual way to mea…

[dead]

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#246

Post by MoonWalk »

The article presents a pretty good rundown on the state of affairs.

"A growing body of work calls this output-competence decoupling"

Given that I don't think he meant that there's a thing called "output competence," I think he meant "output/competence decoupling."

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#247

Post by a34729t »

roncesvalles wrote: post #59
ryandrake wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I remember that one. Great article. Also spawned a decent discussion about how optics and "keeping up appearances" always matters, often a lot more than we think they do.

One of the bitter lessons I learned in my SWE career is that looking the part is almost everything. The meme boomer advice of "dress for the job you want, not the one you have" is remarkably true if you broaden the definition of "dress". Race, gender, lookism, age, everything matters in your career. Career progression gets easier just by being the right age, or being the right race (whatever that is at your company),…

Interestingly enough, a coworker recently told me that I likely don't have much room for advancement at my employer, given my race. He said look at the race of the people on the ladder above you (it's mostly one race), and then look at yourself.

Also, being tall. Easiest way to identify management is height.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#248

Post by sedatk »

reenorap wrote: post #241
sedatk wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't matter if it's slop as long as it works I agree with most of what you said, but that statement doesn't take the time dimension into account. Slop accumulates, and eventually becomes unmanagable. We need to teach AI to become lean engineers too.

I have only seen AI make codebases better, and I'm talking about it making some pretty nuanced changes. I think mass-rewriting of projects is possible these days with AI.

I disagree on both fronts. Unguided AI can be a very efficient tech debt generator.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#249

Post by dspillett »

InexSquirrel wrote: post #132
ge96 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. man I see this on Jira a PM or BA is like "yeah I'll write that AC for you" giant bullet list filled in a bunch of emojis and checkmarks

God I hate the emoji and checkmark usage so much. It feels so try-hard cutesy. Just give me normal bulleted items, I can read.

Checkmarks as bullets on progress/comparison lists I really like, assuming you mean //. The emoji properly put me off looking deeper into whatever it is that I am looking at unless I was really interested to start with.

Both predate common use of LLMs, unless my memory is even more shaky than usual on this, but must have been over-represented in the training data (or something in the tokenising/training/other processes magnifies the effective presence of punctuation) because LLMs seem to love spewing them out.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#250

Post by Ancalagon »

spaniard89277 wrote: post #204
towers wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The forcing of competent engineers to vibe code is something I’ll never understand. Also, I’ve heard rewriting people’s vibe coded efforts being a substantial issue, everything that engineers do nowadays seems to be code review.

Guys just go and ride it. It's their money. They decided to do this. They think you guys are stupid. Suck. Them. Dry. Or say goodbay, which is what I did on my previous role when the BS started to get obvious. Now I do LLM-assisted coding on my own terms. I decide what to do, review output and push back agains overengineered BS. But I'm a lucky one, as far as I can see. --- NO-ONE is going to be able to understand th…

totally agree. let them eat their own cake.
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