I know some that was told to try and use AI more on the job so they created some agent to just burn tokens and ended up using about 10x what the next highest employee used. Buddy expected to get shit but instead got an accolade and was asked to give a short talk to the other employees about how they could match their success.
In my first job ever, I used to get my work done on time and leave. There were a few people who’d stay in the office until late and show up on weekends. Same output, but they got the promotions and my bonus got prorated.
While output may have been part of it. It's possible that by staying later (and working longer), they had better relationships with upper management.
"I used to get my work done on time and leave"
This sounds like you just wanted to get your work done and not foster any work relationships. This is fine, but you will not get promoted this way (as you've seen).
Moving up in a company is 30% work and 70% networking/being likelable/noticed.
I stopped that nonsense years ago. I work for myself now as a consultant. If I work more, I get paid more.
I took a job with the state I live in recently because friends were promoted over competent employees (not even counting myself in that because they were just promoted to my level). New job is fully remote and has a clear path to advancement based on clear work based metrics.
While it may be true that it's pretty standard, I'm convinced that any organization that relies more on face time and friendships than on actual skill is absolutely toxic.
You’re assuming a lot here. Getting your work done on time and leaving doesn’t equate to not being likable. If it was a popularity contest, I would’ve been around the same as the people who were pretend working, if not more. My partner and my director wrote me a recommendation letter before I left, which I wouldn’t attribute to something they’d do if I was a nobody.
There are other reasons why the bad behavior gets rewarded. If the management is incompetent, they genuinely focus on the optics and not on the actual work. And if they are competent, they understand that the people who stay behind unnecessarily or come over the weekends are more exploitable in the long run. And if the people in management are the kind of people who stay behind unnecessarily, having a team full of people who do the same, rewards them as well.
Yes, with the caveat that the 30% work allocation counts toward likability. You can be friendly, charming, well-spoken, fun, etc., but if you fail to deliver and make work for other people, cause your coworkers frustration, and make your manager look bad, you're not going to move up. You will be able to coast for a while though, as managers have a hard time firing people they personally like.
It's ultimately a combination. A pretty good software developer who is friendly and pleasant is, in most organizations, going to get promoted over the grumbling angry software developer who is brilliant but everyone hates talking to. A lot of this has to do with most work at more senior levels being communication.
Your last statement is exactly right. Communication matters most when you're dealing with cross-org concerns and those that master it are usually the more friendly and pleasant ones. This is something I wish more people understood. I even sometimes fall into the latter even though I strive for the former.
> Communication matters most when you're dealing with cross-org concerns and those that master it are usually the more friendly and pleasant ones.
I don't agree with the second one, but agree with the first.
Throughout my corporate career so far, I have found plenty of hot air/pretty picture slide decks that exist solely for ladder climbers to climb. Said ladder climbers are usually all smiles in public and "friendly", but you have to watch out for knives behind your back.
That’s the part I don’t get: Engineers are smart enough to ask an LLM to ask other LLMs to ask other LLMs to load the policy manual then count the R’s in “LLM fork bomb”.
Additional story points completed per week, versus token-dollar spent, or some such combo would seem more sane.
But maybe they aren’t really tracking productivity, so tracking tokens is all they have? … I dunno which part of that is dumber.
We never figured out how to track productivity anyway. Only macro-level success in achieving measurable goals. Any AI metric besides "are similar goals being met more quickly" is people encouraging specific behaviors decided a priori.
If you've never seen this level of perverse incentive, you have been lucky. The creation of and subsequent exploitation of them aren't new. For pre computer examples: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-cobra-effect-2/
I can't find the reference right now, but I remember reading literature about studies done at large programming organizations (like IBM, government) who used LOCs as a performance metric. Programmers could earn more money by including more lines of code in their work. This went exactly the way you'd expect.
Edit: I think it may have been from Capers Jones's _Programming Productivity_[1]. Published in 1986, based on research covering the prior 30 years(!) or so. We have known that bad incentives specifically distort the performance of programming teams for a long time.
The worse example I know is the time the Belgians forced the Congolese to harvest more rubber by cutting their hands if they haven't reached the correct quota, ensuing a cross-tribe hands trading economy
Similar to the British in India, it was first controlled by some kind of company that benefitted the host country by extracting resources, and later on the host country took control. Belgium took control of Congo in 1908
I feel so lucky to have an arsenal of power tools purchased by my father and grandfather. My 65 year old Black&Decker circular saw still works flawlessly.
I gave up on my first play through of Chrono Trigger because I couldn't figure out how to progress in the future world. Didn't realize that the clouds in the dome were supposed to be transparent and not something that I need to trigger a different event to clear up.
The workaround for this was to assign all the buttons to the same key before chasing the rat (I had this exact problem with zsnes, though my first few playthroughs were on the original cartridge)
Yeah I'm not sure how I figured that trick out, probably just monkey mashing buttons at some point, then I figured out SNES graphics were layers and it was a lot of fun switching the various layers on+off. And hey that turned out to be useful!
Their engineers have been working tirelessly to make Sharepoint/Office/Active Directory as terrible as it possibly could be while still technically being functional, while continuing to raise prices on them. I've seen many small business start to chose Google Workspace over them, the cracks have formed and are large enough that they are no longer in a position were every business just go with Office because that's what everyone uses.
It is the one thing that makes me wonder about Microsoft's future. It had seemed like they were willing to throw Windows and Xbox under the bus so long as the server cash cow continued. But it that starts to fade, they could be in some real trouble a decade from now.
I've let tech pass me by many times, then the tech that passed me which I was never in a position to use got replaced by the next big tech innovation. I've found that you can climb aboard the train at anytime since everything new is a lot easier to get started on than learning C and having to manually allocate memory.
Back in the day the feature I liked most about my TI-82 was the amount of information that could fit on the display, the formatting options available, the ease of entering and editing what you entered, and the amount of past entered formulas that would be saved and how easy they were to retrieve. It made doing large blocks of basic BEDMAS math very quick and less suspectable to errors caused by accidentally hitting the wrong key entering in large formulas, and very easy to go back and find out where I messed up and quickly retabulate everything.
All of that mostly comes up in physics and chemistry were its about knowing what long formulas you need to plug the numbers you have available to you to find out what you need to know. Oddly enough their seems to be very little benefit to using a graphing calculator in a actual math class.
If there was any increase of reported incidents of ED over the 30 years I would hazard to guess that it would have to do with the fact that various medications have been released over the last 30 years to address it. Fewer people will report an embarrassing issue when there is a narrow chance it can even be fixed.
A person is also more in control of what's going on around them personally, the larger that scope increases the less any normal individual has any effect. The ant can be optimistic about it's chances of surviving the winter while still pessimistic about what the fate of all of the grasshoppers.
There was no chance that everyone would be running their own email server, but if it wasn't for the lack of IPv6 adaptation a plug and go home email server solution would probably see a decent amount of use. I'd bet we'd already be seeing it as a feature in most mid-ranged home routers by now.
The mail server in a router is easy to host, the problem is:
1) Uptime (though this could be partially alleviated by retries)
and most of all:
2) "Trust"/"Spam score"
It's the main reason to use Sendgrid, AWS, Google, etc. Their "value" is not the email service, it's that their SMTP servers are trusted.
If tomorrow I can just send from localhost instead of going through Google it's fine for me, but in reality, my emails won't arrive due to these filters.
I use a small local provider (posteo) and have 0 problems with spam.
So a 20 pound monkey can also throw around some weight. To be fair I only use it for personal stuff its probably different if you need enterprise scale l.
I've seen plenty of Gmail accounts over the years and they pretty much look the same.
The only Gmail accounts that are "overrun by spam" are those of people subscribing to lots of spammy newsletters and then not knowing how to unsubscribe from them (or figuring they'd stay subscribed in case the next newsletter is the Magical One™). But that's 100% self inflicted and you can't save those people with any technical solution.
Email spam isn't a day to day problem for Gmail (at least) since Bayesian email filtering was first implemented.
The specific concern around uptime & reliability was baked into email systems from almost the start - undeliverable notifications (for the sender) and retries.
But yes, the “trust / spam score” is a legit challenge. If only device manufacturers were held liable for security flaws, but we sadly don’t live in that timeline.
Its not a device/MTA issue, SMTP just is not a secure protocol and there is not much you can do in order to 'secure' human communication. Things like spoofing or social engineering are near impossible to address within SMTP without external systems doing some sort of analysis on the messages or in combination with other protocols like DNS.
SMTP isn't at fault, the social ecosystem is at fault. Every system where identities are cheap has a spam problem. If you think a system has cheap identities and no spam, it probably doesn't have cheap identities — examples are HN or Reddit.
Trust / spam score is the largest one I think, second to consumer ISPs blocking the necessary ports for receiving mail.
Even if your "self hosting" is renting a $5/month VPS, some spam lists (e.g. UCEPROTECT) proactively mark any IP ranges owned by consumer ISPs and VPS hosting as potential spam. I figured paying fastmail $30/yr was worth never having to worry about it.
For "Trust", I believe patio11 described this system as the "Taxi Medallion of Email".
e.g. you spend a lot of money to show that you are a legitimate entity or you pay less money to rent something that shows you are connected to said entity.
Without some kind of federation or centralization, it seems hard to distinguish a hobbyist from a spammer if both of them are using a plug-and-go. Forcing that responsibility into the hands of Google, Zoho, and Microsoft seems like the best compromise, unfortunately.
For one, if my power goes out for an extended period of time I'd still like to be able to access my email. Communications really can't be hosted locally.
Another one for the pile. You can choose to open office documents in Teams directly, the browser, or in the native desktop app, but you can only set it to open by default in either Teams or browser. Why?
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