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Appearing productive in the workplace

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Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#531

Post by futureproofd »

itemize123 wrote: post #302
futureproofd wrote: post #124

I've noticed early into AI adoption in the workplace that some colleagues took advantage of the technology by appearing to be hyper-proactive; New TODs weekly, fresh new refactoring ideas, novel ways to solve age-old problems with shiny new algorithms. Fast-forward to today, and this is occurring two-fold. Not only are they trying to appear more proactive, combining this with the fear of AI layoffs, they're creating…

is it a net-win for the company? Are the AI-TOD any good?

Sometimes, yes. Other times, no. It depends who's leveraging the technology to write these things. Though even in the positive outcome cases, the volume alone is suffocating. My brain doesn't have time to commit all of it.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#533

Post by buran77 »

stavros wrote: post #522
adamtulinius wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the expert has forgotten. Skills that we don't use are forgotten, and there's nothing new in that. Except for the proverbial bicycle.

Ok, if you think the expert has forgotten that a problem can be solved by a bash one-liner and instead think they need a whole extensive CLI with documentation, our viewpoints are too far apart for fruitful discussion.

The bash one-liner might be hyperbolic but with the advent of AI everything is artificially longer, stuffier, more complex and convoluted for no reason other than because the AI allows this increase in volume with little to no extra effort.

It used to be the proverbial one-liner with zero documentation because that was the best ratio of effort to results. Now the effort is on the AI and the results look more impressive. Today that will still impress a lot of people, bosses, colleagues. Very soon everyone will see through it and anything overly stuffy will have the opposite effect of looking low-effort.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#534

Post by stavros »

buran77 wrote: post #533
stavros wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, if you think the expert has forgotten that a problem can be solved by a bash one-liner and instead think they need a whole extensive CLI with documentation, our viewpoints are too far apart for fruitful discussion.

The bash one-liner might be hyperbolic but with the advent of AI everything is artificially longer, stuffier, more complex and convoluted for no reason other than because the AI allows this increase in volume with little to no extra effort. It used to be the proverbial one-liner with zero documentation because that was the best ratio of effort to results. Now the effort is on the AI and the results look more impressi…

Sure, I agree, but now longer/stuffier things cost half as much as shorter things. In most cases, that cost isn't worth it.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#535

Post by cess11 »

Pannoniae wrote: post #278
zbentley wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally fair, but 42 if-statements across 32 files isn't something you need to fix with like ... a grand refactor or hexagonal architecture or event sourcing or whatever the overengineering pattern du jour is. You can fix that with a utility function or three, and a file/class/module/whatever that owns the code relating to some of those conditions. I'm not some DRY zealot, but I've been in the "this system needs real…

Sure but even wiring that utility function in is work :D If you have even just a 2-3-million LoC codebase, not even something truly enormous - making global changes does require typing, and a whole lot of it...

Such repetitions can regularly be deterministically automated, like find -exec sed and similar medium level tools.

If you spend a lot of time performing monotonic tasks, then your organisation needs to delete and refactor for a while until change in 'hot' areas of the code base are easy to make. Reaching for some code synthesis SaaS to paper it over will worsen the problem and should result in excommunication from the guild.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#536

Post by whazor »

Octoth0rpe wrote: post #513
lqet wrote: post #501

> The first is when novices in a field are able to produce work that resembles what their seniors produce [...]. > The second is when people generate artifacts in disciplines they were never trained in. There is a third shape. Experts who have become so reliant / accustomed to AI that it dilutes their previously sharp judgment and, importantly, taste . I am seeing more and more work produced by experts which seems st…

> An over-engineered solution (complete with CLI, storage backend, documentation, unit tests) for a trivial problem which that person would've solved by an elegant bash one-liner only 3 years ago. Importantly, I think AI companies are motivated towards the overengineered solutions as they increase the buyer's token spend. I'm not sure how we can create incentives that optimize for finding the 'right' solution, which…

I think the model space is too competitive. People will switch if another model is significantly better.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#537

Post by jappgar »

jeremyjh wrote: post #243
beachy wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 problem is that everyone has a different opinion. If you let a single user drive the design then that single user might love it, but everyone else will hate it.

Bespoke designs are often really terrible. Have you ever shopped for a house?

You know immediately when the previous owner had their stupid whims indulged by contractors with dollar-signs in their eyes. The house is ugly, non-functional and is not going to get the sellers price.

The next owner will undo nearly all of the work, and the contractor will cash in on both ends.

As engineers, we like to think we're the contractor in this scenario. But it's actually just an LLM.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#538

Post by maxsilver »

Octoth0rpe wrote: post #513
lqet wrote: post #501

> The first is when novices in a field are able to produce work that resembles what their seniors produce [...]. > The second is when people generate artifacts in disciplines they were never trained in. There is a third shape. Experts who have become so reliant / accustomed to AI that it dilutes their previously sharp judgment and, importantly, taste . I am seeing more and more work produced by experts which seems st…

> An over-engineered solution (complete with CLI, storage backend, documentation, unit tests) for a trivial problem which that person would've solved by an elegant bash one-liner only 3 years ago. Importantly, I think AI companies are motivated towards the overengineered solutions as they increase the buyer's token spend. I'm not sure how we can create incentives that optimize for finding the 'right' solution, which…

> Importantly, I think AI companies are motivated towards the overengineered solutions as they increase the buyer's token spend.

Yes that, and also, the more complicated the solution, the more likely no one reads or reviews it too carefully, and will instead depend on an LLM to ‘read’ and ‘review it’

Even ignoring token costs, there’s a high incentive for LLMs to generate complex solutions, because those solutions generate demand for further LLM use. (You don’t really want to review that 30,000 line pull request by hand, do you?)

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#539

Post by zkmon »

sesm wrote: post #466
zkmon wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

External success for any business is defined as dominating the peers in selling. People call it as "wins". This percolates into internal context as well. Business units compete with other, teams compete, and peers within a team compete or performance ratings. If you say you never think of competing with your peers, you are probably not being honest.

But it's a team sport. For example, in Dota 2 you should be trying to dominate your opponents. If you are trying to dominate your teammates instead (by prioritizing better KDA) you are most likely ruining the game.

If you are a manager, you desire that your team should work like it is a team-sport, but at your peer level you would compete with your peers. The same happens at every level.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#540

Post by finnthehuman »

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.

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