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Appearing productive in the workplace

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Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#451

Post by missingdays »

bertylicious wrote: post #341
LinuxAmbulance wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI has made my work about 5-8x quicker, just because I'm able to have it cover a lot of the grunt work (update 42 if statements in 32 different files) that took time, but no particular skill. I think the use cases where AI makes an economic improvement to the status quo for a business are rare, but they do exist, and they can be a significant improvement. It's like the early days of the dotcom boom and bust - people…

Could you please show us an example of the change made to one of these if statements? I'm curious, because it seems absolutely wild to me to end up in such a situation (where that many changes are required and the usual refactoring tools of modern IDEs are insufficient) in the first place.

> the usual refactoring tools of modern IDEs are insufficient

Cursor doesn't have refactorings, so

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#452

Post by globular-toast »

Great article. Hits on many points that resonate with my experience.

The skin in the game one, in particular, is something I've been thinking about. People have been telling me LLMs are "more intelligent" than "average people". But it's easy to sound intelligent when you have no skin in the game. People have to stand by their word and suffer the consequences of their actions. It's not enough just to sound intelligent.

It seems appropriate also to share an anecdote of an incident that recently happened in my job. A colleague submitted some code for review, quite a lot of it. A second colleague reviewed and questioned a piece of code. Rather than answer the question with a justification, the question was taken rhetorically and the code was removed. The code then failed in production because the removed code was, in fact, necessary. The LLM obviously "knew" this, but neither colleague did. It's leading me to introduce a "no rhetorical questions in code review" rule. The submitter must be able to justify every line of code they submit.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#453

Post by DragonStrength »

tidewinner wrote: post #435
TrackerFF wrote: post #414

I watched a video of some (unemployed) programmer lamenting over the current job situation market. He had been coding for a good while, but had recently been laid off. The vid was mainly concerning the searching and interview process, but it also did highlight something I find somewhat true and important: Right now we're in a gold rush. Companies, that be established ones or startups, are in a frenzy to transform or…

I've simply not seen this at all. As someone with 10 YOE who was in the job market from November to early April going for senior software engineer roles, quality and architecture seemed to be the thing every org cared about. The bar not only to secure and interview, but to get hired was unbelievably high. Some of the interviews I were getting were at AI startups and all of them were either doing architectural questio…

15 YOE, here: Well, I just interviewed between October - Decemeber of last year, and since then, the company I joined has gone full vibe-coding and is changing to AI interviews. So...

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#454

Post by globular-toast »

seniorThrowaway wrote: post #173
anthonypasq wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it actually insane that this sort of thing is tolerated. Its a culture thing and frankly just rude. My org is pretty AI-pilled and this type of behavior will just not fly. I need to be assured im talking to a human who is using their brain.

If I paste something from an AI into chat, I always identify it as such by saying something like "my claude instance says this:". I also don't blindly copy paste from it, I always read it first and usually edit it for brevity or tone. Feel like this should be the absolute minimum for sending AI content to a person.

Even that is pretty useless because we have no idea what context "your Claude instance" has. All you're doing is dressing up some bullshit to look authoritative.

When I started my PhD I was already really good at typesetting with LaTeX. I started to bring in fully typeset works in progress for my supervisor to read through. These proofs often had fatal flaws. He asked me to stop typesetting until after the work had been verified because it looked too convincingly correct due to being typeset.

That was about 15 years ago but I've never forgotten it. Drafts should look like drafts. Scrappy work and proofs of concept should look as such. Stop fucking with people by making your bullshit, scrappy ideas look legit. Progress is a cooperative effort. It's not about trying to make people say yes.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#455

Post by wartywhoa23 »

dr_kiszonka wrote: post #176
wcfrobert wrote: post #42

> "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…

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…

I have a hard time trying to find any reasons for the S̶k̶y̶n̶e̶t̶ owners of the Skynet not to get rid of that walking bipedal inefficiency called human.

API or die /s.

Seriously, though, fuck that shit!..

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#456

Post by cindyllm »

wartywhoa23 wrote: post #455
dr_kiszonka wrote: post #176

Earlier 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…

I have a hard time trying to find any reasons for the S̶k̶y̶n̶e̶t̶ owners of the Skynet not to get rid of that walking bipedal inefficiency called human. API or die /s. Seriously, though, fuck that shit!..

[dead]

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#457

Post by zelphirkalt »

wcfrobert wrote: post #42

> "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…

Well, in many layers of overhead in companies people operate at the level of high schoolers, so it is no surprise unfortunately, that the output comes across like that too.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#458

Post by iamflimflam1 »

2001zhaozhao wrote: post #389

Finally someone who nailed this problem. In the age of AI you need smart people who are aligned with the organization more than ever. If people aren't aligned with the organization then bad, BAD things happen when the political people get access to AI and there's basically nothing you can do about it. They can use AI to fake things for a very extended time, then always find the most optimal way to cover up the proble…

I think this has always been the case. Smart, aligned, people will make a success out of pretty much anything.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#459

Post by iamflimflam1 »

northernsausage wrote: post #413
northernsausage wrote: post #412

My line manager using a lazy single line description of a product is generating whole product listings and HTML for our web shop, never checking it. SEO is poor, views and conversion are collapsing. Upper management is responding to my serious issues with ChatGPT bullet point lists that don't address the problem. Video conferences I can see people typing into and reading back GPT instructions, suppliers are sending A…

Also customers have started sending 2 page long tickets copy pasted from GPT (keeping the text formatting, font etc) trying to worm their way around consumer law and using floral language that doesn't go anywhere. Responding in seconds after I respond to them with another 2 pages of fluff. Just a waste of my time.

Just feed their response back into GPT...

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#460

Post by user_7832 »

xoxxala wrote: post #187
chao- wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I write the words that I hear in my head, as though I am speaking. With the exception of timed, in-class essays, I always turned in papers far in excess of any minimum during high school. In college, I took a constructive writing course because I thought "Hey, easy A!" After the second or third week, the professor told me that, while the class had a word minimum, I would also be given a separate word maximum . She sa…

I design boardgames and it's easy to write a lot of rules. It's more difficult to write concise rules. Most of my time is spent editing rules to their absolute minimum. "I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had time to make it shorter." - Blaise Pascal

I ctr-F'd to search for this quote and am happy to see it mentioned.

Brevity is an art, and it is hard.

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