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Appearing productive in the workplace
601–610 of 686 posts
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#602> "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…
> Professional formatting, length, and clear prose are no longer indicators of care and work quality (they never were, but in the past, if someone drafts up a twelve page spec, at least you know they care enough to spend a lot of time on it). I feel the loss of this signal acutely. It’s an adjustment to react to 10-30 page “spec” choc-a-block with formatting and ascii figures as if it were a verbal spitball … because…
When I read some written content, before AI, I learned a few different things in order. First, just by its mere existence, I learned that someone had found an idea worth expending some effort to express. Next, I would learn the words of the content. Next, I would usually acquire some kind of knowledge that I was able to synthesize or extract from the content. That last step isn't a given, but it's very likely to happen given the pre-filter implied by the first bit of information I learned.
There's no pre-filter anymore. It's exceedingly hard for me to quickly determine how important a person thinks an idea is or how much thought they've put into it in the age of AI, and so there's no guarantee that if I invest the time to read the content then there will be a proportional amount of meaning available for me to extract. This risk always existed even with works written by humans, but now it's overwhelming and has decreased my overall of exposure to new ideas that I didn't explicitly go looking for because I have a much higher expectation that information placed in front of me unsolicited will just be a waste of my time.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#603Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s entirely on you. You can take the time to understand it before moving on to the next task. I say this with sympathy and understanding.
You missed the point - understanding comes from working through the code, not just reading it. This is nothing new: nobody has learned or done new mathematics or physics or whatever by just reading a textbook.
Sure. But it’s a lot easier to learn nonlinear mathematics or quantum theory with a textbook than without. In this case you’re not learning about “what is a for loop”. You’re learning “why a OnceLock here rather than a RwLock”.
Many of us work on teams so we already have to deal with the majority of code being written by someone else. I’ve got code that’s more than a decade old, written by people I’ve never met.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#604At one particularly reprehensible job for which I was overqualified (job market was kicking my ass), I noticed that the higher in the food chain someone was, the more convincingly busy they appeared.
The middle manager above me was genuinely skilled at this. All day, when you passed his office, he looked like he was absolutely concentrated on something.
Unrelated to AI, but it was pretty interesting.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#605> 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…
>> 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. This phrasing made me think of Baudrillard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation , in particular "Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no original, or that no longer have an origi…
I bought this book a year ago but have not read it. It's one of those books that requires effort from the reader, which these days seems in low supply for me. :)
I'll have to give it another try.
Recently I commented that: Artificial intelligence produces artificial results.
I liked the double-artificial but I wasn't happy with the meaning. Perhaps Simulacra is more accurate? I will see :)
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#606> 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.
“There is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of C.”
https://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/ten-thousand.h...
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#607Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah and for much of the HN crowd, we aspire to have better tastes than the average. So if the supervised learning uses average human trainers it will most likely be seen as having poor taste for much of HN.
Speak for yourself my taste is average and I aspire for it to remain so.
I know very few average people who would say such a thing though.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#608Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think "some people on the team have privileges and others don't based on the manager's discretion" would be healthy in the long run either. Can you imagine interviewing for a team, asking about the PTO policy, and finding out that it varied like that? It would look pretty indistinguishable from "the people who that manager likes have special treatment" to me. You could hide it from prospective employees, but…
Yeah, I understand but on other hand you can't reward everyone with the same thing for different outcome. This is exactly what is happening with they pay, some people earns more, some less. People complain about it too. Do you think it is toxic too? We people being people, and being manager when there is no outcome when everyone is happy, this is why I am not going to be manager. I just wanted to know honest opinion…
A healthy company already needs to have processes for dealing with employees that aren't meeting expectations that don't involve revoking benefits like PTO. Those should be suitable for issues like this rather than crafting punishments specific to the nature of what specifically is going wrong.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#609Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It would, but that is not what is happening here so far, these are less than 5% of our workload.
Re: Appearing productive in the workplace
#610Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
Sure, but these are small departmental apps, 20 users or less in most cases. It’s not like everyone is using every app. The alternatives at this scale are far worse.