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Appearing productive in the workplace

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Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#621

Post by marshray »

jurgenburgen wrote: post #515
stavros wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the experts have decided that, for this specific instance, the thing we need to do is ad-hoc and throwaway, and is simply not worth paying the extra cost to make it tasteful.

How can a bash one-liner be more expensive to build than a full-blown CLI tool with the maintenance burden that comes with it?

Bash is one of the most complicated languages in common use and is horribly error-prone. It's almost never useful alone, but as an interface to call other CLI tools. I don't think this is a particularly useful comparison.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#622

Post by danaw »

tardedmeme wrote: post #480
danaw wrote: post #129

i have a strong suspicion that the most productive software teams that leverage llms to build quality software will use it for the following: - intelligent autocomplete: the "OG" llm use for most developers where the generated code is just an extension of your active thought process. where you maintain the context of the code being worked on, rather than outsourcing your thinking to the llm - brainstorming: llms can…

I'd add rapid mockups/prototyping as well. Not suitable for production use but very suitable for iterating until it looks right, and then you go and make it for real.

yeah i tried to cover that in my POC bulletin :)

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#623

Post by QuercusMax »

rng-concern wrote: post #605
pjc50 wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 :)

Results are results, though. By "artificial results" do you mean those that merely appear to be results, or do you mean results achieved via nonhuman means?

If I write the exact same code as the AI, our results will be indistinguishable.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#624

Post by Merad »

jappgar wrote: post #537
jeremyjh wrote: post #243

Earlier 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…

I've been in a similar situation as the GP. 15 years ago my first job after college was at a large Fortune 500 building LOB apps. The company was full of departments that were run entirely out of a massive Excel spreadsheet (hundreds of MB or more), or better yet a totally custom thing built on Access97 and VB made by a guy who retired 10 years ago. More than a few of the people in these departments had been in the same job for 20+ years and literally done the job the same way the whole time. Our mandate was not to modernize their business processes or make them friendly to automation, it was literally to indulge their stupid whims. But at least at the end they would be on an app where IT had access to the source code, could ensure databases were backed up, etc.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#625

Post by grvdrm »

vannucci wrote: post #449
grvdrm wrote: post #199

> The cost of producing a document has fallen to nearly zero; the cost of reading one has not, and is in fact rising, because the reader must now sift the synthetic context for whatever the document was originally about. Each individual decision to elongate seems rational, and each is independently rewarded — readers are more confident in longer AI-generated explanations whether or not the explanations are correct [5…

Our team is assessing some new tools and one of our VPs produced a document just like this and none of us read it because it was obvious that it was generated slop and way too long. I don't get what value such tomes are actually providing when you're comparing three SaaS tools against each other.

tool comparisons -> table.

Business justification and other qualitative things -> narrative.

Concise direct communication skills are underrated in the corporate world.

I worked in sales at one point. A favorite tip was this: ask a question, somewhat open-ended, and then go silent. People on the other side can't help babble on about what they're doing, why, etc. Made it clear that many folks struggled to articulate their roles and core responsibilities.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#626

Post by npodbielski »

saghm wrote: post #608
npodbielski wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What that would be for example?

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#627

Post by marshray »

oxag3n wrote: post #50

Software Engineering seems to be quite unique to enable this due to few factors: * Many software engineers didn't do real engineering work during their entire careers. In large companies it's even harder - you arrive as a small gear and are inserted into a large mechanism. You learn some configuration language some smart-ass invented to get a promo, "learn" the product by cleaning tons of those configs, refactoring t…

That's a really good point: now is about when we would expect to see the effects of third-round layoffs and vibes-oriented programming make it to critical production systems.

I'm reluctant to form conclusions from early returns but, wow, there have been some prominent outages recently.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#628

Post by topaz0 »

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…

GP is talking about what they [the companies in question] accept/expect as work product. That has always differed from what they look for in a job candidate. Not surprising that AI psychosis amplifies the discrepancy.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#629

Post by pessimizer »

beachy wrote: post #230
Animats wrote: post #215

The OP has an amusing side point - LLMs have automated sucking up to management. There is a large market for that. His main point, though, is this: I have a colleague ... who spent two months earlier this year building a system that should have been designed by someone with formal training in data architecture. He used the tools well, by the standards by which use of the tools is currently measured. He produced a gre…

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…

> I think however that all that is needed to bridge the gap is some very simple feedback from an expert at the right time.

This could be a viable business idea. LLMs have allowed people to code who have very little understanding of how computers work but maybe a lot of specific domain knowledge and a good idea for a tool that could solve a problem. Maybe they need to rent a manager/advisor to review what they're doing and provide sanity checks.

Maybe pay for an hour a day of somebody reviewing your day's work and sending you a bit of prose explaining the parts that are wrong-headed about it?

I guess the problem with this might be that the review may just end up virtually identical to a prompt in the end; and if you can't completely remove the programmer when you have the domain knowledge, it might be easier to use the LLM for the domain knowledge you lack as a programmer. The work product is on a computer, computing might be the most relevant thing to know.

But independent writers hire editors, seems like the same sort of thing.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#630

Post by jakubmazanec »

localhoster wrote: post #564
shermantanktop wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m watching out for that in my own work. I’m a pragmatic person but I have sweated over details that Claude will just blast out a solution to, and the temptation to say “tests pass, move on” is strong. It’s a little like riding a horse that knows the route.

Almost accurate It's not "the route" But "a route"

Almost accurate, but it's »Almost accurate. It's not "the route", but "a route".«.
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