I can anecdotally attest to this. My company has built their product in such a way that it is unusable without AI. There are some things it legitimately expedites, but there are more things that used to take me 10 minutes that now take an hour and a half. And then I have to go validate the output anyway.
My work uses MS Teams and Sharepoint, and MS is dumbing down both products as much as is feasible in order to force people to use CoPilot more. It’s moronic, and I hate discovering changes to the UI that appear to be bugs and then finding out it was deliberate. (Like buttons and scroll bars that are invisible until you hover a cursor over them. Stupid.)
But LLM’s were only ever useful if the validation of their output didn’t outweigh the supposed time saved, and that is rarely the case.
Stupid business practices. Can’t wait for a popping of the bubble.
I can too - but at the same time, a lot of the extra time I’m putting in is using the clankers to more quickly address tech debt issues that we have been punting on for literal years (do not get me started on the priorities of my manager and our PM)
I’m probably ignorant, as i left the conventional workforce before AI took off… But how does that exactly make you work longer? If the AI isn’t finished by the time the shift is over, then it’s tomorrows problem, no?
Most people in jobs like this aren’t paid hourly, they are salaried and expected to get the job done. Usually the problem isnt necessarily the runtime of an AI, but the inefficiency of a workflow that brought AI into its center.
It’s like walking a child through how to cook a meal. Maybe it’s technically less “work” since they are doing the chopping, measuring, stirring, etc, but it takes longer since you have to take time to be explicit about all your instructions, and correcting mistakes, etc. The difference is a child will eventually learn how to do it themselves, while in practice, and AI probably won’t since it likely relies on inputs that can’t just be piped in (cause if they could, you’d do the job with regular programming).
Most people in jobs like this aren’t paid hourly, they are salaried and expected to get the job done. Usually the problem isnt necessarily the runtime of an AI, but the inefficiency of a workflow that brought AI into its center.
Sure, but if the tools provided/mandated by the employer are inadequate to do the job more efficiently. That should be the employers problem, not the employee’s.
You can’t as management both claim the need for AI out of efficiency, and blame it at the same time for you not getting your job done in time because of it. But then again, how often do you come across competent leadership these days. The lemon can always be squeezed a bit more I guess.
Why would management even consider that they’re contradicting themselves every 5 minutes? They’re the ones that sign the paychecks, they can be absurd if they want to be. It’s not like there’s every going to be personal consequences anyway, and if the company burns to the ground, they’ve already got their golden parachute worked out.
They don’t have to, just as much as you don’t have to compensate for their shortcomings. Of course that’s easier said then done if you work somewhere with little to no workers protection and fear losing your job. But that still doesn’t make it right.
Of course that’s easier said then done if you work somewhere with little to no workers protection and fear losing your job.
That part. No one said it was right. It’s simply what many of us have to put up with to survive. Building solidarity and unions in the current environment is difficult. Labour power has been set back almost to square one in a lot of places, and if you’ll remember, building it up in the first place, cost a lot of lives and a lot of blood. It’s really hard to be a martyr for the cause, when you know no one is going to step in to support the people who count on you, which is why organizing NGO support networks is so essential. They know that community is what gives us leverage, and that’s why they do everything in their power to make community building seem futile.
We have no churches, because they’ve all been compromised. We have precious few non-corpo social clubs and sports orgs. Unions have been beaten into a bloody mess. We have a handful of charities and volunteer orgs, most of which are dependent on corporate grants donations for survival. I’m not saying it’s hopeless, but we need to be clear where we are to figure out a path forward. We need to build communities of truth and trust beyond their reach if we’re going to push back. Just saying “no” sounds great in principle… but we have to all say “no” together otherwise you’re just lighting yourself on fire, and the machine will not even notice you’re gone.
Not to mention all the tools you use on a daily basis that have also adopted AI development causing them to behave erratically. I have been wrestling with the coderabbitai for the last two hours to get a PR finished.
I can anecdotally attest to this. My company has built their product in such a way that it is unusable without AI. There are some things it legitimately expedites, but there are more things that used to take me 10 minutes that now take an hour and a half. And then I have to go validate the output anyway.
Yup.
My work uses MS Teams and Sharepoint, and MS is dumbing down both products as much as is feasible in order to force people to use CoPilot more. It’s moronic, and I hate discovering changes to the UI that appear to be bugs and then finding out it was deliberate. (Like buttons and scroll bars that are invisible until you hover a cursor over them. Stupid.)
But LLM’s were only ever useful if the validation of their output didn’t outweigh the supposed time saved, and that is rarely the case.
Stupid business practices. Can’t wait for a popping of the bubble.
I can too - but at the same time, a lot of the extra time I’m putting in is using the clankers to more quickly address tech debt issues that we have been punting on for literal years (do not get me started on the priorities of my manager and our PM)
I’m probably ignorant, as i left the conventional workforce before AI took off… But how does that exactly make you work longer? If the AI isn’t finished by the time the shift is over, then it’s tomorrows problem, no?
Most people in jobs like this aren’t paid hourly, they are salaried and expected to get the job done. Usually the problem isnt necessarily the runtime of an AI, but the inefficiency of a workflow that brought AI into its center.
It’s like walking a child through how to cook a meal. Maybe it’s technically less “work” since they are doing the chopping, measuring, stirring, etc, but it takes longer since you have to take time to be explicit about all your instructions, and correcting mistakes, etc. The difference is a child will eventually learn how to do it themselves, while in practice, and AI probably won’t since it likely relies on inputs that can’t just be piped in (cause if they could, you’d do the job with regular programming).
Sure, but if the tools provided/mandated by the employer are inadequate to do the job more efficiently. That should be the employers problem, not the employee’s.
You can’t as management both claim the need for AI out of efficiency, and blame it at the same time for you not getting your job done in time because of it. But then again, how often do you come across competent leadership these days. The lemon can always be squeezed a bit more I guess.
Why would management even consider that they’re contradicting themselves every 5 minutes? They’re the ones that sign the paychecks, they can be absurd if they want to be. It’s not like there’s every going to be personal consequences anyway, and if the company burns to the ground, they’ve already got their golden parachute worked out.
They don’t have to, just as much as you don’t have to compensate for their shortcomings. Of course that’s easier said then done if you work somewhere with little to no workers protection and fear losing your job. But that still doesn’t make it right.
That part. No one said it was right. It’s simply what many of us have to put up with to survive. Building solidarity and unions in the current environment is difficult. Labour power has been set back almost to square one in a lot of places, and if you’ll remember, building it up in the first place, cost a lot of lives and a lot of blood. It’s really hard to be a martyr for the cause, when you know no one is going to step in to support the people who count on you, which is why organizing NGO support networks is so essential. They know that community is what gives us leverage, and that’s why they do everything in their power to make community building seem futile.
We have no churches, because they’ve all been compromised. We have precious few non-corpo social clubs and sports orgs. Unions have been beaten into a bloody mess. We have a handful of charities and volunteer orgs, most of which are dependent on corporate grants donations for survival. I’m not saying it’s hopeless, but we need to be clear where we are to figure out a path forward. We need to build communities of truth and trust beyond their reach if we’re going to push back. Just saying “no” sounds great in principle… but we have to all say “no” together otherwise you’re just lighting yourself on fire, and the machine will not even notice you’re gone.
Not to mention all the tools you use on a daily basis that have also adopted AI development causing them to behave erratically. I have been wrestling with the coderabbitai for the last two hours to get a PR finished.
That’s fair, I look longer to mean either more work, or more time spent on a given problem.
That’s what I get for not reading the article