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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

#291

Post by sdevonoes »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #163
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…

In big software teams, the bottleneck is team communication. I've run big and small teams. If I want to speed things up, I remove people from the team. Everything gets easier. This has worked amazingly well every time I've done this over the past decades. Removing people doesn't have to mean firing them necessarily. Splitting teams is a good reflex. But of course the people you remove from a team are typically not th…

We can also slow down (or keep old pace) and still ship quality.

A bit sick and tired of arguments like yours

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

#293

Post by whstl »

meindnoch wrote: post #278
swiftcoder wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who pushed ~4x the median PRs on my team before LLMs were a thing, I kind of think the problem here is PRs as a concept. Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans, it definitely can't scale to agents. And the exact same things you would need to safely give up on PRs for human developers (auto-formatters, linters, comprehensive end-to-end tests, continuous deployment pipelines, etc), are also things that…

Well, it's either: 1. Your skills are >2 standard deviations above everyone else's. 2. You're fast at producing a lot of half-baked garbage, and your coworkers are too shy to confront you, so they just try to ignore it. (one of these scenarios is much more likely)

It could also potentially be that GP is making atomic PRs, while everyone else is just making 5000-line PRs with multiple responsibilities that just gets merged with "LGTM".

But of course HN has to with the most uncharitable interpretation.

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

#294

Post by tomaskafka »

I strongly believe any platform that wants to avoid turning into slop pile needs to 1. enforce marking any AI generated content as such

2. allow people to filter out the AI content if they want

3. enforce draconic punishments for violation of 1

We might arrive at the moment where this is regulated by law.

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

#295

Post by bandrami »

nkrisc wrote: post #282
bandrami wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a question I usually ask which is "How would you convert a Julian yyyy-ddd date string to a military yyyy-mm-dd date string?" (I explain how a Julian date works if they aren't familiar with it.) The answer that almost guarantees I'll hire you is "there's got to be a library function for that, so I look in the manual". Almost as good is somebody whiteboarding how they'd convert ddd to mm-dd (and then account fo…

> I get a disturbing number of people who say things like "I would communicate with the person asking for this to see what they're really intending blah blah" Sounds like they know this question is a “gotcha” question but just misinterpreted which direction you were going with it. Some will ask a question like this expecting you to treat it like a puzzle and outline how you’d solve it as-is; others ask it as a way to…

No, it's a pretty good interview question because it tells me if somebody's instinct is to reinvent the wheel or not. What I didn't expect was how many people couldn't say how a wheel even works.

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

#296

Post by sdevonoes »

Aurornis wrote: post #118
vermilingua wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m conflicted after reading this comment, because I think I would be that personality in my workplace, largely because I believe that’s the only sane position to take as a worker with ~0 power over the decisions made that can entirely destabilise your life. On the other hand, my priority isn’t maximising my personal career benefit, but the collective benefit of my team, so I suppose I either see it more as a 2v1 sor…

I think everyone should be looking to balance their work effort against the payout of the job. They should also be changing jobs when the effort to reward ratio starts to become unfavorable compared to other jobs on the market. The problem with the personality above is that the person isn't playing like a team (like you said) but as an individual maximizing their own visibility while loading their coworkers up with t…

> They should also be changing jobs when the effort to reward ratio starts to become unfavorable compared to other jobs on the market.

The problem here is that all tech companies look alike. Take for example the interview process (copied by almost any company out there that thinks they are google). Another example: the under/meets/above expectations BS. And now the most recent example of “token usage as sign of productivity”.

So, it’s getting tremendously difficult to simply switch jobs that offer something different

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

#297

Post by skydhash »

swiftcoder wrote: post #276
meta_gunslinger wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comprehensive end-to-end tests and CI can only attest to correctness , most engineers worth their salt won't review code only in regards to that aspect though.

In the bad old days before auto-formatters and linters, PRs were heavily used to enforce style guidelines. If we can enforce both style and correctness in our CI pipeline, what is actually left?

Code architecture and technical design. You can have a solution that works fine, but are too complex or will impede future changes. Maybe you have code that has already been solved or your variables’ name are too generic. Maybe your modules are messy and your data structures are not modeled well.

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

#298

Post by neogodless »

meindnoch wrote: post #278
swiftcoder wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who pushed ~4x the median PRs on my team before LLMs were a thing, I kind of think the problem here is PRs as a concept. Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans, it definitely can't scale to agents. And the exact same things you would need to safely give up on PRs for human developers (auto-formatters, linters, comprehensive end-to-end tests, continuous deployment pipelines, etc), are also things that…

Well, it's either: 1. Your skills are >2 standard deviations above everyone else's. 2. You're fast at producing a lot of half-baked garbage, and your coworkers are too shy to confront you, so they just try to ignore it. (one of these scenarios is much more likely)

As someone who often submits significantly more PRs (without using AI) than teammates, it's not exactly a skill delta. Yes that helps but it's often only a piece of the puzzle. The other ingredients include motivations and culture. In such cases, something else is the driving force, such as posturing for promotion, stability, etc. My current team is massively low performing. Management pays some lip service to all the problems, but also runs things in a way that discourages high performance. It's not a good fit for me, as I want to tackle challenges head on, improve the environment, be productive, embrace change. I'm also very comfortable with the code base as well as the code review process, but I'm surrounded by "seniors" who do not know how to code review, and who are happy to drag their feet and spin their wheels for months before pushing out small PRs that hurt my brain. How can that little work be shown after months, barely functional at best?

We had better management for a few months, and many on the team were actually quickly closing the skill gap with me, but we had another shuffle and things are stupid once more.

So I'd offer that's option 3. (There's always a third option to any suggested either-or fallacy.)

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

#300

Post by Tade0 »

dust-jacket wrote: post #260
swiftcoder wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who pushed ~4x the median PRs on my team before LLMs were a thing, I kind of think the problem here is PRs as a concept. Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans, it definitely can't scale to agents. And the exact same things you would need to safely give up on PRs for human developers (auto-formatters, linters, comprehensive end-to-end tests, continuous deployment pipelines, etc), are also things that…

> Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans I've worked with people who consider themselves 'prolific humans'. Someone always has to tidy upp later, and its never them

My experience is that it's even worse: they've already produced enough code that the codebase matches their taste and theirs alone.

So in essence you have one guy working at 4x and e.g. four other getting just 0.7x - net effect is still positive, but everyone save for that one person is miserable.

Mind you, the 4x dev doesn't necessarily have to be particularly talented - they only need to get their foot in the door before anyone else.

Back during the ZIRP days you could immediately tell that this is the case in a team by staff rotation alone. Nowadays people understandably cling to their jobs, so you might now know until it's too late.

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