I'd say the worst 80% of the evil in the world comes from the management and the marketing.

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

The other day I was thinking about Sam Atlantan claim the economy would be booming due to AI and the productivity gains…not seeing that yet.

Almost there. Who controls management?

Good question. The issue is probably more subtle: are the intended management controls working and doing their job?

> A "sprint" is term for a common period in technology companies in which people work long hours in the weeks leading up to a release of a new feature or product.

Alright, who bullshitted to the BBC? I know its fun to mess with the normies, but that was just mean.

I guess they conflated "sprint" with "crunch".

Or "death march".

Makes one think about the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect

Most companies I've been in carefully plan each sprint so as not to include work beyond the teams capacity, not sure where they got this definition of sprint from

They didn’t get a definition. Probably looked at the word „sprint“. Went: „Yep, sounds fast but only for a short period. Gotta be these 90 hour weeks once in a while. Definitely can’t be the thing these folks are doing continuously.“. Crunch would be a better fit for that.

There's a subtlety about using AI that can make folks less efficient if they aren't careful.

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".

My personally anecdote on poor LLM usage making things take longer:

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.

> 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.

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.

But what if all your coworkers are doing it, so by taking the time to understand and review LLM output you’re painting a target on your back? Anyway I’m not getting burned- the company is.

I find it funny how businesses can induce fear in people who think they are losing their jobs to ai. Then they lay people off anyway and make the remaining ones do the work of multiple roles. It is a kind of deadlock coming from stagnation, like how can you be motivated to use AI and make up for its mistakes by working overtime?

I think you are focusing on the survivorship bias in role models, as those successful people in your life who you view as role models are more visible to you (the younger person) because they succeeded.

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.

This is just a random pet peeve of mine, but I simply don’t believe knowledge workers who claim to work 90 hour work weeks; this includes bankers and lawyers. I say this because I spend a lot of energy and time thinking about how to increase my effective hours worked, and I time myself. When I’m not severely depressed I’m able to do two four hours blocks separated by a break in a day, and maybe squeeze out an extra hour or two on a fantastic day. (But this only includes real work hours, not just being present at the office or sitting unproductively in a meeting.) And this is extremely tiring, and certainly not doable 7 days a week. 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. There’s a perverse incentive here to make the hours and pain go up, without tracking productive output.

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 used to worke 70h/w, did that for a couple years, sometimes going up to 80 or 90h/w. 90h/w isn't tenable for more than a few weeks. 100h/w is bullshit unless you never buy groceries, shower, etc.

> 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.

40h is already too much for me, 90h sounds insane

Spending 90 hours at work doesn't mean you're spending 90 hours doing useful work. Just ask the Japanese.

I think this is undoubtedly true, but I also think not all knowledge work is created equally. A lawyer spending 80 hours reading case files is not really performing a comparable task to a programmer designing and implementing a program

Even 30 is quite enviable. I can only do focused deep work for 2-3 hours per day at most, the rest is simulating work to get paid - meetings, emails, etc, something you barely need to pay attention to.

> When I’m not severely depressed I’m able to do two four hours blocks separated by a break in a day, and maybe squeeze out an extra hour or two on a fantastic day.

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

I mean people don’t usually even do 8 hours of deep focus.

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.

I think those people use drugs

> 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 think a lot of it is just people being at the office for long hours, not really productive work happening

The issue is so many god damn meetings. There can be days in a row where I won't see 15 minutes of uninterrupted time during core work hours. Early, late... that ends up being quiet time to do the things I have in my queue. I'll agree that most of the meetings would be a real struggle to call it something productive.

A lot of it is just fake work. There was already a bunch of fake work before AI. Now there's even more fake work. Organizations tend to produce more and more of it.

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

I think the rude awakening is going to come when someone figures out how to build something better that wipes out 10+ firms who were delivering the same kind of thing.

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 guess it depends on how you use it and what the expectations are. I'm definitely in the camp of working way more, but it's just because I enjoy using AI to build.

I have a much more ai enabled job compared to earlier - and I enjoy it more and spend more time on it

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.

"It appears you've misunderstood. We meant less work _per person for the number of people we have right now_."