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Appearing productive in the workplace

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Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#581

Post by trustfundbaby »

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.

Or maybe they just didn't have the time (left it to the last minute and ran out of it), and went with the first thing that AI proposed which was said CLI with documentation.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#582

Post by limagnolia »

tappio wrote: post #415
tovej wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quality of work is not the goal? What is the goal, then? Maximizing profit for the corporation? I would not want to work anywhere where that is the only goal, even at the employee level. Maximizing profits is not very popular at the moment, for good reason, look at what it's done to the world.

Maximizing profit for the corporation is the goal of any corporation by law, isn't it? Apparently not in the US, but for example the Finnish law explicitly states that the goal of a corporation is to generate profits for the shareholders. If you for example give away company assets for free, it can be considered breaking the law. This probably is just culturally different understanding of the phrase, because US corpo…

I don't know about Finnish law, but in most US states, when you form an entity, you can put most anything as a purpose. It is quite common to put it as "to engage in any lawful activity".

Beyond that, publicly traded company directors may have (depending on the state) various duties to shareholders to consider profit, but it is generally not considered to be so extreme as to profit above all else.

IRS regulations distinguish between a trade or business and a hobby by looking at the intent to make a profit (as well as the effort). see https://uslawexplained.com/trade_or_business

But it is generally possible to form a legal business under state laws with no intent to profit, the IRS may just treat it as a hobby for tax purposes. (You can't deduct expenses incurred pursuing a hobby, but you can deduct expenses incurred carrying on a trade or business).

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#583

Post by banboosy »

ge96 wrote: post #114
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…

> Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. man I see this on Jira a PM or BA is like "yeah I'll write that AC for you" giant bullet list filled in a bunch of emojis and checkmarks

[dead]

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#584

Post by mike_hearn »

skydhash wrote: post #476
mike_hearn wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's circular though. Why does that content get ranked highly? Because it gets a lot of backlinks, long clicks, etc. So people seem to like it.

> Why does that content get ranked highly? Search engines only show a snippet of the content and that always looks convincing. It's the whole content that is off and, unfortunately, a few seconds/minutes can pass before you realize it (If you ever do).

Search engines track that. It's what a "long click" means. If you click a result, then return fairly fast and keep searching or clicking other links, they infer low quality (for that query at least).

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#585

Post by causal »

aejm wrote: post #573
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…

I agree completely with your sentiment. The word I use to describe it is “quality”! Most people don’t produce quality work or take pride in it, even beyond the tech industry. I believe the tool of AI is exasperating an underlying problem

I find LLMs make me doubt my own ability to produce quality now. I used to jump in and just write code so eagerly, letting it get messy but discovering the shape of the problem in the process.

But AI can produce beautiful, complete, syntactically perfect code on the first pass that makes my code look juvenile.

I mean, it might be wrong for other reasons, but it makes me feel like I'm programming with crayons next to it.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#586

Post by callamdelaney »

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…

Developers have been lacking taste for decades anyway, like all of those kubernetes clusters built out for companies that could run on a 50 euro a month dedicated server at hetzner.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#587

Post by AlotOfReading »

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…

I know you didn't intend this, but a job where your main function is telling a machine how to copy someone else's half-baked CRUD sounds absolutely soul-sucking.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#588

Post by epicide »

jcarrano wrote: post #550
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…

That's honestly a fear of mine, that I might lose the taste for simplicity.

Like healthy food, simplicity doesn't taste good. At least not on the surface.

It is an acquired taste and is easily lost. When your own instinctual heuristics are being weaponized against you for profit, you have to continually fight to maintain a discipline of nourishment. The sugar high is too addictive.

AI is a fast food of the creative mind.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#589

Post by cmrdporcupine »

switchbak wrote: post #28
proofofcontempt wrote: post #19

What is described here closely resembles my experience too. My company is full of managers who haven't written code in years. They hired an architect 18 months ago who used AI to architect everything. To the senior devs it was obvious - everything was massively over engineered, yet because he used all the proper terminology he sounded more competent to upper management than the other senior managers who didn't. When…

I think for a lot of companies, AI is a destabilizing force that their managerial structure is unable to compensate for. When you change the economics to such a degree, you're basically removing a dam - resulting in far more stress on the rest of the system. If the leaders of the org don't see the potential downsides and risks of that, they're in for a world of hurt. I think we're going to see a real surge of compani…

100% agree on this. Big log jam coming, with volume of code piling up behind the requirements and planning and "meaning" of the work aspects.

In particular, I think the agentic tools as written today are particularly corrosive on code review culture. We spent years having mainline companies migrating from free for all commit privileges (everywhere I worked was like this prior to about 2010 or so) to variants of code review / "PR" code reviewing culture, only to have it all disintegrate in the last 6 months as "reviews" have ended up consisting of people tossing agentic code over the fence and then people having other agents review it, and then again agents respond to comments, etc. etc.

It's a bit of code review theatre that pretends there's still eyes on things, when there's not.

Similarly the whole edifice of "agile" planning in SCRUM etc form makes no sense when pumping out code isn't the time blocker. All the backlog refinement meetings and burn down charts and points tracking are pointless ceremony when what people really need is intense clarity on what needs to be done and why and intensive review of what's already been built and where the holes are.

All of this is just going to create a giant logjam in the higher level "executive function" aspects of a company. Getting people talking to each other has always been something most management at most companies I've worked at have failed at. Now they're going to really suffer for it.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#590

Post by notabee »

uncircle wrote: post #447
yard2010 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is literally losing the whole process to a stochastic parrot.

They are so far removed from the process they can claim they are any % more productive and no one is able to contradict them. Call it a ‘productivity theatre’ The economic reality check is going to be devastating. It won’t be a crash of AI as a tech, it will be a crash of every ‘AI native’ company that does not even know what is their product any more.

I really hope that more people become aware of how much of our society is turning into kayfabe. Just think of the rise of all the new types of ____ theatre like this that have been coined over the last decade or more. It's not an accident or fad, it reflects something true that's happening to society at large. Everything authentic and valuable is being turned into something inauthentic, based only on conjured up perceived value and competition to fulfill the perception, and not real or useful purposes. It's all in the service of propping up systems that no longer function for the majority of people, or even for basic needs. And until a lot more people are willing to point out that the emperor is quite naked, even at their own social or financial risk, this will continue to rot everything down to the foundation.
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