E.g. Boeing crashes - from the management.
Private minecraft servers are illegal? - management
No disc selling from Playstation? - Marketing
Why mentioning here? Because the greedy marketing team again told managers the AI is making people 100x more efficient without any proof, anything, just to sell sell sell. And the greedy managers again got fooled, and that's what we're witnessing here.
According to my experience the LLM assistance gives 0.5x-10x boost unevenly. This is really hard to predict, it's really fast on the first phase but getting lost in deep tasks, and looks like being optimised to win at the Turing test, but slack later
“Managers” are controlled by the C-Suite through institutional politics and incentive structures, the C suite (via the CEO) is held accountable by shareholders, and the board (who are theoretically representing shareholder interests).
A rough picture of shareholder concentration is as follows: 50% of stocks and mutual funds are held by the top 1% richest, 87% by the top 10% richest. Vanguard/Blackrock/State Street cast about a quarter of the votes at S&P500 shareholder meetings, ostensibly in the interest of their shareholders.
So that’s who “controls” management, and whose interests drive most corporate decision making, though obviously there are nuances.
Alright, who bullshitted to the BBC? I know its fun to mess with the normies, but that was just mean.
Since LLMs spit out LOTS of text, a person may waste lots of valuable time simply meandering through responses, and trying to keep it all in their head.
Contrast this to talking to a person who might just say "umm.. no no that's not how it works - because blah".
I had a side (still work) project I wanted to complete that was extremely simple. In my AWS account create an EC2 image builder pipeline that set up a specific component. Just one, very uncomplicated and documented component.
I figured I’d just have Codex do it. I realized after about 3 days of various back and forth in between other work things that we were somehow stuck.
I figured this must be more complicated than I had imagined so I take a look. No, apparently Codex had failed, made an incorrect assumption as to why it failed (again, documents were provided and dead simple) and then continued trying to fix the issue based on the incorrect assumption.
That is called "doing your job correctly". If you aren't actually understanding what the LLM puts out and reviewing it, you are going to get burned sooner or later.
You're speaking from a position of privilege.
Sure, a considerable number of people (If not a majority) here on Hacker News are decent earners and likely have enough savings to ride out a job loss for at least a few months.
But I recall my days while I was working a fast food job. If I lost my job, unless I found a new one within two weeks, I'd be homeless. When your paychecks are just barely covering the cost of living and saving is impossible, then getting fired is a genuine fear. It means losing the roof over your head and the food from the table.
You wouldn't pick someone who ended up a Uber driver, because they dont look to you as someone from your field to model your future on.
Ultimately, getting fired can drastically change your life. Either for the betterment or detriment to their lives.
These days it is much harsher, if you are not socially accepted or liked, you are out of luck, your skill doesn't matter in their eyes, until... it does again
It also means (in the US) you lose access to your healthcare.
Now I’m aware that there are exceptionally energetic people who can probably do Einstein level deep thinking for 80 hours some weeks. I just think the average highly qualified and talented knowledge worker probably maxes out around 30-40, and the rest is fumes and cope really.
I do the same thing, it's always kind of puzzled me how people say they work 10-12 hour days. Realistically, it's probably nowhere close to 12 consecutive hours of deep focus. Sometimes it's easier for me to just take breaks and work whenever I have the motivation. Maybe it stretches into odd hours. Sometimes it's less than expected. Sometimes it's a waste of time because I didn't take the time to step back and gain more perspective. Hours never seemed like a good measurement.
I do think part of it is that when people are in really "high intensity" workplaces, there's social pressure to give the appearance of working hard. That could be part of it. I also think SWE (in SV business culture) tends to be more deliverable oriented as opposed to caring about the hours worked
Also some things just have wall time. Sometimes it may take 3-4 hours to roll things out and test. Babysit some dashboards, cicd.
Working “12” hours may mean you get 3-4 attempts/iterations at something rather than 2-3. Over time that may add up.
It could also mean 6 hours of meetings followed by another 3-5 hours of coding + breaks
These aren’t deep focus, but they still take time.
I guess mostly agreeing you. My experience of working 10-12 hours is you are less efficient but you can get more done.
It’s rarely worth doing for long periods of time. But in some situations it can push things forward.
The age old problem of prioritization doesn’t go away just because the org starts throwing millions at Anthropic.
> So when people tell me they’re doing 90 hour work weeks what that tells me is they’re just harming themselves to be in an office for an unhealthy length of time, hoping it translates into something productive.
This is exactly what my colleagues thought. And then I left and everybody was distributed overtime work, so the leads left too. Projects that took 2 weeks suddenly took 6 months (or so told me the lead who was taking up my work, giggling out of shame). The company, which thought it could match competition with only 1/5th of human resources, started to do a series of bad investments to occupy the market. Eventually the board poured a couple dozen millions to save the company from the human resource dead-end it put itself into (I was managing 4 "microservices") and went bust a couple years later.
I think a lot of it is just people being at the office for long hours, not really productive work happening
The general impression I get is that the real bottleneck isn't needing to write code faster, it's understanding what the technical problems are and having the freedom to do what is needed (which is sometimes risky I guess).
It doesn't seem like we're headed in this direction (from my n=1 perspective on the ground). It seems like we've just dialed up the fake work and fear culture. People are too busy and afraid to actually look around and figure out what the fuck is going on. There's just more bullshit fake work and it just keeps coming. And it's getting done faster, sure, but it was never tied to any specific economic outcome anyway and solely exists to waste people's time and empire build.
And there's not really an incentive to fix the problem either. In corporate cultures which try to be "lean" and are firing people all the time, management is incentivized to intentionally overstaff teams and keep people pushed away from critical initiatives so that they have sacrificial lambs for the next layoff. In cultures which have more fat, there's no real downward pressure anyway.
You can't force organizations to be efficient without cutting out the middlemen and taking the time to figure out what the fuck is actually happening. At large companies, this is already unsustainable anyway. Maybe this is what McKinsey used to do (and what AI is now going to help with): getting an omniscient view of what's happening organizationally. This would require leadership to do stuff that actually makes sense, which is why it won't happen
There will be a mauling - but it won't be because of this intangible technology box alone. It'll be because creative people figure out the rest of the pieces to re-imagine how something is done.
I think AI has to an extent taken away the worst drudgery so the impact of "working another hour" or whatever has gotten a lot higher while the reluctance has decreased.