Throughout my career many people have believed such bullshit illuminated their productivity. What has gotten me promoted in the past was doing the opposite, as in trying to not appear busy. If you have to justify your existence then your reason for existing is not well justified.
Appearing productive in the workplace
321–330 of 686 posts
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#322The 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…
There’s no need to defend LLMs. The article is making the point that a colleague who shouldn’t have been anywhere near specifying work for LLMs to do, was able to fake it and get rewarded for it.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#323I think this is exciting. The market will do its job and crush the inefficient companies where management is unable to recognize the slop. People who produce value will produce more of it with AI, people who wasted resources will waste more of it with AI.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#324And the added horror of prs that keep on coming. Correct looking code with no thoughts behind it.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#325Earlier 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),…
I remember learning this lesson. I’d bought some new clothes and worn them to the office. I got more appreciation from my manager than from the entire heroic 6 month death march to ship the last product release.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#326I spent most of yesterday, deleting and replacing a bunch of code that was generated by an LLM. For the most part, the LLM's assistance has been great. For the most part. In this case, it decided to give me a whole bunch of crazy threaded code, and, for the first time, in many years, my app started crashing. My apps don't crash. They may have lots of other problems, but crashing isn't one of them. I'm anal. Sue me. F…
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Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#327What credentials does this author have to cite social science research in their determination of the competency of other people? Their only other article is about eschewing native apps - why am I supposed to take their opinion about measuring competency seriously if they are a software engineer, not a psychologist? They are clearly outside of their domain of expertise and therefore incapable of producing work with an…
How do you know this person isn’t at least somewhat well versed in the related fields? For all we know they have a double major?
oh, believe me, I can just tell from the way they're talking about stuff, just like a webapp/psychology double major is well-versed in evaluating data systems
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#328i have a strong suspicion that the most productive software teams that leverage llms to build quality software will use it for the following: - intelligent autocomplete: the "OG" llm use for most developers where the generated code is just an extension of your active thought process. where you maintain the context of the code being worked on, rather than outsourcing your thinking to the llm - brainstorming: llms can…
the most productive teams will be the ones that treat code as compiler output (which we never read)
legacy manual codebases which require human review will be the new "maintaining a FORTRAN mainframe". they'll stick around for longer than you'd expect (because they still work) , at legacy stagnant engineering companies
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work under the assumption that the primary audience of everything I write at work is an AI. Managers will take what I send and have it summarized and evaluated by some chatbot or agent. (Of course, I cannot send them the summary myself.) So like ATS checkers for resumes, I find myself needing an AI checker for my text. Ultimately, we will have AI write everything for another AI to parse, which will be a massive was…
If that is your manager, do so, sure. But make sure your manager is "such a manager". If I was your manager, and you sent me your seventeen page AI generated thing coz you think I'm just gonna summarize anyway and I expect something long: You misread me. I make a point all the time to everyone that won't listen, to not send me walls of text. I'm not gonna read them. I'm gonna ignore them, close your bug reports until…
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Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#330> "Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. Status updates that were once three sentences are now bulleted summaries of bulleted summaries. Retrospective notes, post-incident reports, design memos, kickoff decks: every artifact that can be elongated is, by people who do not read what they produce, for readers who do not read what they receive." Great article. The "elongation" of workplace artifact…
This paragraph hit home with me as well. I work at a large tech company that's a household name and the practice of using AI to pad out design documents has become totally out of control over the last 4 or 5 months. Writing documentation is arduous and a little painful, which as it turns out is a good thing as it incentivizes the writer to be as succinct as possible. Why the fuck should I -- along with five other eng…
Taking a distance uni class now to maybe swap away from dev work and my submitted works that are to be reviewed and commented on by other students all come back with AI generated feedback and it's making me go insane. If I needed AI feedback I'd go ask an AI but for any communication now it's a cointoss if you're getting a human reply.
/rant