“…Employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to do so,” the researchers wrote.
How is “faster” measured? What is faster?
Pace doesn’t say much about completion, total, quality, or repeated or thrown away work.
It definitely is upping the demands from management.
“but at least they’re causing more fossil fuels to be burnt and that’s why we all exist in the first place” /s
It could also mean that 9 till 5 people don’t like change and people who are willing to go the extra mile are willing to explore AI.
Cleaning up the mess for a lesser final product.
Hahaha
thats because 90 mins is spent re-reviewing the AI-generated tasks/codes.
My colleague: I created an AI skill for the review.
Me: that explains why I’ve rejected it three times for failure to meet our coding standards
Meanwhile I’m having a great time doing the actual fun part — the programming.
And all that time goes to babysitting a text machine… What a life they’re living
this is what my company owners don’t seem to understand.
productive employees don’t enjoy that. if that becomes our job, will either do it poorly or leave, and then you’ll just have shitty people doing it, with shitty results.
they’ve backed off a little bit, but they’re still trying to push AI tools to do parts of our job that we are still 100% responsible for the outcome of. fuck that.
actually now that I’m thinking about it, fuck, it fucking pisses me off. like I told them that an application with major value (which also would be one of the easiest things to implement) is just a chatbot that reads the customer spec and you can ask questions, so instead of sorting through hundreds of pages across multiple different files and file types, the chatbot can find anything relevant and then you can look closer at it. do we have that tool? no. are they trying to push other tools on us that are half complete, can’t possibly do a good job, and only have marginal time savings? yes. like yeah sure let’s fucking let AI do an engineering drawing of a part, I’m sure it’ll make it a very nice easy to read drawing that the machine shop will love, and all the senior people who are already reviewing everybody else’s work will love to review constant junior level quality work. that’s probably their favorite part of the job, reviewing shit quality work. and they love it even more when they know that the feedback they give won’t result in somebody getting better at it, they’ll just see it again tomorrow.
The goal is to get to the point where, quite literally, every single job is replaced. The drawings being generated suck now but without organized labor it’s going to be hard to argue when they stop sucking.
Just look at what happened to SWEs
honestly, the more we hire more people, the more I get it
we used to only hire quality people. we were picky. small company, so everybody there needed to be a contributor. now we just hire to have bodies in chairs and they’re noticeably less capable, and half of them sound like AI themselves.
fuck, I worked with one guy that would actually say “yes, you’re right, I was wrong about xyz, it should actually be abc” when you prodded three levels deep to find out how a dumb fuck up happened
my point is, some of these people absolutely could be replaced by AI and it would have less if an impact than my original estimations
I worked with one guy that would actually say “yes, you’re right, I was wrong about xyz, it should actually be abc”
I think this is what I hate most about rampant LLMs unleashed on the general populace. That kinda phrasing used to just be “effective communication when owning a mistake.” But now, like the emdash — (lol), it’s abused into a cliche as telltale clanker-speak.
It erodes trust that, whether right or wrong, you’re speaking to an authentic human being.
My biggest peeve is their constant use of “That’s not (anything here), that’s positive thing.” Lol
SWE saw the same arc and now were at Andy Yen saying that a humans job isn’t to use LLMs to write good code. It’s to help LLMs so they can write good code.
That’s what’s coming down the pipeline for, quite literally, every single knowledge worker unless something is done.
they’ll just see it again tomorrow
This is sort of the implied contract of teaching somebody something or reviewing for them. They have to get better over time. If they do not, then I have zero interest spending my time on them. Irrelevant of whether they are a human or an AI.
You can make that tool in minutes with any agent, just have it tag based off your criteria and run it through a vision model
I know, that’s what pisses me off - they could have had a great return in investment in something simple like that, but nope, that hasn’t happened
and fuck if I’m gonna do it, I have other shit to do. I’ve got other tools specific to my team’s workflow that I don’t have time to make.
Specific workflow tailored tools seem like the future for the time being. Be the one who makes them rather than having one pushed on you. Even if that means you just make one for yourself.
I used to be that person. that time came and went. shame for the company, since there’s only one other person in the department that can do that kind of thing. oh well, that was the company’s choice.
yes, I’ll make stuff for myself, but only if I really want to, otherwise I’m happy to let things take longer because I wasn’t given time to make a tool for the team. not worth the stress, I’d rather go outside.
Programming a project I know well feels Godlike; sitting in the cuck chair watching the computer do it feels doglike
“It’s a fuckin tamagotchi.!”
Probably because they fired 10% of rhe workforce based on promised AI usage returns on investment.
“Working”
Sure. What allows workers to be more productive means… more work.
pre colour film announcer voice
The worker of the [year] 2000 will work just 20 hours per week
Oops, we forgot to account for employers existing.
LMAO….
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.
Teams implementation of copilot was done poorly. I’ll use it sometimes by clicking copilot in the upper right corner. Its 50/50 after I use copilot in teams that a window will cover up the left side where all my chats are and it won’t go away. I have to actually right click and quit teams to get the chats with people back up.
Clearly there was minimal testing by Microsoft before they rolled out copilot in teams.
Clearly there was minimal testing by Microsoft before they rolled out copilot in teams.
Oh yeah. They rolled out an update a month or two ago that turned notifications for project tasks I had that I had flagged for higher importance, inexplicably. Absolutely infuriating stuff happening with their vibe coders.
if the validation of their output didn’t outweigh the supposed time saved
This is the key. LLMs are (somewhat, there are style and maintenance issues)) useful where things are easy to prove correct, like mathematics (there are theorem validity provers) or programming (does it compile, pass tests).
Most of the rest of the world is not like that and tasks require judgement, so people need to validate that the LLM didn’t ‘hallucinate’ (bullshit anthropomorphic word for ‘get it wrong’) again.
In subtle domains finding if an error exists can take longer than doing it yourself, with a worse failure rate, especially as skills atrophy. Same thing happened on production lines with the introduction of robots.
My company recently shifted to a new time clock system, which uses AI for basic search functions. Search is also intended to be the primary way users navigate the site. The salesperson’s marketing was “oh it’s so easy, you just describe what you want to do, and the AI takes you there!”
I need to approve my time card each week. The page is literally titled “Time Approval”. But searching for “Time Approval” usually doesn’t yield any results. Sometimes I’ll get lucky if I search for something like “I need to approve my time card for last week” but even that isn’t foolproof. Like it literally can’t find the page I need every week, even when I search for the exact title of the page. And who the fuck wants to type out an entire sentence just for a basic site directory search?
The way to get to the approval page through the UI (by clicking through, without using the AI-powered search function) is like four obscure menus deep. This is something that every employee is expected to do every week, and they buried it like they were planning on making a treasure map. They intentionally made the UI unintuitive, so users would feel compelled to use the AI search. But then the AI search doesn’t fucking work, so I end up having to navigate the unintuitive menus anyways. I ended up just bookmarking the approval page directly in my browser, so I can log in and then use the bookmark to jump straight to that page.
this is the kind of shit that gives me small comfort
they want to make me use a shitty stupid terrible slow system? ok, fine. but I’m gonna take my sweet time with it. oh, something else isn’t getting done? damn, probably should’ve thought of that before you implemented a system that you were warned was going to slow down 99% of the company employees and cost tons of quantifiable time
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.
Management is not known for being rational in many workplaces.
should
sorry, we live in capitalism, hbu?
In a social democracy with workers rights, where if you got unjustifiably fired you can sue them for it. you?
Funny enough some folks use AI agents to do the sueing. It’s one of the aspects companies really don’t like in the use of AI.
you speak in logical thought, but in my experience the boss does not care about that. you are expected to do the job in the time allotted and any failure is your responsibility even (and especially) if they pulled you off of that to deal with “more important” priorities in the middle of your work. you will be dinged for failing to complete it by deadline.
this was eventually used to justify laying me off at my last job even though i usually pulled it off.
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.
I know unions and workers rights are basically none existent across the pond. And I can only hope that changes for you guys. But I sure hope if I would get fired for doing as I’m told by management, that I can go to the union and/or judge to get compensation for being unjustly fired.
This shouldn’t really be a discussion imho, but alas here we are.
Also, anecdotally, if it’s anything like my workplace then management is trying to nickel and dime the process so much that they refuse to invest in the people building the tools. They think because they build AI tools that they don’t need actual humans on the team and can just “10x” everything so they’re forced to try to make vast one-size-fits-all tools that are a mile wide and an inch deep
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
Yes!
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)
And some troll was arguing with me a month or so ago about how technology supposedly reduces workloads.
I kept explaining to them how any increases in efficiency only lead their employers to give them more work to do. The laborers are still milked for the value of their labor, in some cases for even longer hours. The only difference is the employer benefits from the increased production.
They seriously tried arguing that the industrial revolution was somehow good for textile workers. Like no, traditional craftspeople got run out of business because they couldn’t keep up with the sweatshops that employed children in dangerous conditions for absurdly long hours for very little pay with no days off, and all just to create a soulless product that could be sold in larger quantities.
AI is no different, except that it doesn’t even increase profits for the employers.
Harris Tweed must, by law, be made by home weavers on non-electric looms, in the weavers’ own homes on the Outer Hebrides Islands:
Harris Tweed® is a tweed which must, by law, be produced from yarn which is made from 100% pure new wool which has been dyed and spun in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland and woven by hand at homes of local islanders. It is the only fabric in the world to have its own Act of Parliament.
They saw the value of keeping the traditions alive, and even wrote it into law.
I’m in one of those rare jobs that AI helps immensely. That said, JESUS FUCKING CHRIST make it stop. I’m working WAY more than I used to and it’s all fucking nailbiting levels of risk.
Just let the job market come back enough I can slide into something not so AI friendly
Could you tell which field that job is in?
What I’ve seen so far is a lot of people basically getting good starts with something AI but mostly still having to correct too much so that either the prompt takes more work than the actual task or the work thereafter is more.
And I have seen some situations where llm also really made sense and was helping in general, but that was far and in between.
Anthropic enterprise models are very strong at following runbooks and managing infrastructure. To frame this properly, I spent about a month documenting the environment and creating runbooks. I can currently do things like the following:
Follow the steps below to roll over this cluster. {
Choose a server in this cluster by ID in numeric order (this server)
Use Ansible+vault to create a backup AMI of (this server)
Use Ansible+vault to collect health data on (this server) according to the server health runbook
Use Ansible+vault to disable notification for this server
Use Ansible+vault to preform a full kernel update and reboot the vm according to the update runbook.
Use Ansible+vault to collect health data on this server according to the server health runbook post update
Compare the pre and post health and server alarms for (this server), if there is an issue, pause, SOS notify oncall
Use Ansible+vault to enable notification for this server
}
Each runbook contains exact steps required, how to verify success, each one of them is able to pull the E-stop, freeze on that step and SOS notify.
Ah, thank you for elaborating!
Though I have to say, this seems to be a thing I also created tooling for in the past.
So what I did for clusters was create an optional script where servers could drop a healthcheck if they’re member of a cluster.
The idea was that they are able to check their cluster status, do actions and check if they’re OK again.
So basically a simple framework for what you’ve described and that also was long before llm.
I’m not saying this to discredit, but to add more perspectives.
LLM help at my job too but only if the employee has the knowledge to correct the issues.
Today I needed to send an email with a few details, the most important being the customers email needed to be included in the body of the email.
I tell copilot that. What does it provide… Everything except the customers email. I was able to prompt it again to include that information but 90% of my team would’ve just sent the original copilot response instead of rereading it.
LLM help at my job too but only if the employee has the knowledge to correct the issues.
My problem colleague is the major beneficiary of our AI. I’m sure it makes them even worse, quality and quantity.
Worst part is we employed them as a supposedly already experienced dev. He’s way worse than all juniors I onboarded, guided, and who improved.
