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The Ask

randsinrepose.com

41–50 of 122 posts

Re: The Ask

#41
post #38
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A key job of management is to figure out what's actually going on, as opposed to just what people tell you is going on. LLMs are inherently gullible.

Human managers are inherently gullible; we've got no plausible path to unbias them. LLMs have at least one plausible path which is to train them to be a little bit cynical. We're not going to call it "management" necessarily, but there is no question that LLMs are going to take over decision making from managers eventually. Why choose a monkey guessing what the evidence says you should do when you could have an optim…

> "optimised evidence-weighted statistical model"

Isn't such a model inevitably going to be lagging what is happening?

(Monkeys can see/smell/recognise the scat or track of a large cat very quickly and don't sit around to check the data)

Re: The Ask

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the writing of someone who has been writing articles like this for decades now, instead of your average blogger or journalist. Just enjoy the difference.

Can confirm! I've been reading Rands for 20 years now

I love how he went back and updated some of his older but still relevant writings, like https://randsinrepose.com/archives/nadd/.

Re: The Ask

#44
post #2

This is either very profound or not at all. Can’t figure out which.

Apart from the tone which is not my cup of tea either, I think what these types of articles/advice try to convey is that we (the working population) are still the monkeys we were thousands of years ago.

Sometimes we do stuff well because we like the other monkey we're doing it with. Sometimes we do stuff badly because we are an angry monkey. Sometimes we do the right thing but we cannot really explain why. We can sort of predict what the future will be like but not really well.

Management is pretending to "execute programs" and "align value chains" and "strategize on market trends" because the suits they wear are very expensive. But the reality is that they are also monkeys, who try to manage the emotions and urges and pitfalls of other monkeys by guiding interactions between the monkeys.

This kind of slightly wooly, slightly look-at-me-being-business-y kind of writing feels to me like selling your "I'm a monkey who can sometimes make other monkeys interact more effectively" as some cold hard logical skill.

Re: The Ask

#46
post #2

This is either very profound or not at all. Can’t figure out which.

We never found out who Mark was. Or what the problem with Rachel was. Or what and why behind and ahead of the pressure to meet either were in place. So going with not at all. They've literally described their job as having too much cruft that could have been partially solved by the non-existence of their role.

Well at least it led to you finally creating an account on HN. Welcome!

Re: The Ask

#47
post #18
post #6

Harsh take: AI should replace most middle management. It is the easiest part of an organization to replace. The people making things should mostly communicate about company strategy, cross-team issues, and job requirements with an AI. There should be a handful of high-level strategy on top of the AI. The AI should have access to all the documents for the company. The middle management should be put in a spaceship alo…

Firm, but partial, disagreement. People, especially in remote jobs, benefit from being organized into groups intentionally, with distinct rituals that enable them to operate effectively while they get to know each other better. Another person needs to design and oversee all that. While you can provide templates for that structure that allow oversight to scale so that one person can oversee larger groups, that tends t…

AI Orchestrated Waffle Parties

Re: The Ask

#49

This is extremely difficult to read. Can someone summarize the point?

I had the same instinct. Was about to copy paste it into ChatGPT to summarize. But powered through it. tl;dr: your job as a senior manager is to listen to people
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