The boss at a place I used to work is all in on AI bullshit. My friend works for the company remotely. He says the boss sends him massively long email, constructed by AI, full of rambling half ideas. He said he used to try to pick through it and reply appropriately and professionally. The boss would feed that into AI and copy/paste the reply back.
Now my friend doesn’t even read the email. He throws it into AI, tells AI to craft a well thought out reply, and just sends that back at the boss. He told me if the boss won’t personally read and reply, he won’t either.
Last time I talked with him he said the email chain has been going over 4 months, it’s still going on, but he has no idea what it’s about anymore.
if a colleague tells me to ask AI or gives me a response from AI again I will fucking kill somebody
I used to be in IT for years. I left around covid period.
I’m SO HAPPY right now. AI drives me insane as it is. I can’t imagine working in an office having people making idiot decisions because it’s what AI recommended.
Sounds like the bosses positions should be cut then. If the default is ai then let the ai. No need for those positions and there I saved you a bunch of money.
One of the reasons I just found a new job. Clear emails completely produced by AI and not proofread.
So, basically shitty bosses are shitty?
The sycophantic LLM behavior phenomenon is very real. LLMs will tell you what you want to hear, so yes, if shitty bosses want to hear how great they are, they’ve got a new friend (maybe their only one…)
I’m so glad I don’t work anymore.
One of the only benefits of this technology is that it will expose the incompetence of management. They can’t hide their stupid now.
Oh, they will continue to hide their stupid as un-successfully as they always have. Some get away with it for a day, some for a quarter, some for many years.
This started over a year and a half ago at my company.
Over half my department was fired, and now they are forcing us to give assessments on AI tools to replace the jobs of the rest of us.
We’re so fucked, guys. This isn’t just where I work, it’s most places from what I’m hearing.
The writing was on the wall when that many layoffs happened. If they’re that willing to take that kind of risk, they’ve been on insecure financial footing for a while. Best move on ASAP.
Last time I job-hopped was when my CEO took a tour of the R&D department, chewing each of us out individually, complaining how we’re too expensive and he can’t afford us… a job offer came through the next day and I was out in 2 weeks. They asked why I was leaving, all too simple: you remember Mr. “I had a bad day in sales, so I took my insecurities out on the R&D guys” tirade? Yeah, that was a big factor.
Honestly, if there are jobs that could best be replaced by AI, it seems that management could be high on that list. I’m sure many of us have had shitty managers and know how disastrous that can be for productivity. In some cases an algorithm would definitely have done better. It could hardly have done worse.
Big organizations are constantly trying to optimize the middle layers. Do you have a 5:1 reporting ratio so the manager really knows what everybody is doing, or do you have a 25:1 reporting ratio and cut out half the layers in the “telephone” miscommunication up the chain game? Seems like AI tools could bump up the optimal ration a little, if they’re used well, but middle managers aren’t the first group I’d pick to use something like an AI agent “well.”
treating an AI as analogous to an algorithm is a giant endorsement to the AI and a massive insult to the algo’s
“I’m sure enough people don’t compliment you for your courage and insight, but this is truly an amazing question. And being able to ask, “I have no idea what I’m doing , how do I not ruin everything and embarrass myself in front of my frat bros that I hired as VPs?” is so brave and it also shows just how humble you are to be open to learning even though you are at the absolute top of your field!”
What the self-absorbed hell. Who said this?
This is as dumb as the caricature of the lazy employee who needs to come into the office so the boss can watch them work.
Every GenAI, when responding to a CEO’s quiet,desperate query.
And the CEO believing the response whole cloth
Thankfully not my management but my SO boss is out of control. He keep feeding meeting notes to chat gpt to get actions and decisions. Like company level stuff. This has been going on For years and keeps using company time to talk about personal AI projects like making music. He even kept my partner late because he was talking about it! This stuff is Not even remotely related to the Department. My SO is losing patience with this bloke. Its no wonder no one in upper management respects him.
Isn’t this enough proof that these chucklefucks are a drain on company resources and time and the FIRST thing to replace AI with is the bosses so workers can organize collectively while the AI helps them stay organized without the AI being in control.
I mean, I guess that would make too much sense.
Genuinely though, if the first thing they do with AI is outsource their own decision making, isn’t it just rock solid evidence that these people are useless at their fucking jobs to begin with? They aren’t even making the decisions anymore, the AI is. Let’s cut out the middleman, which is all a boss is now if AI is running the show. I mean, it’s what they did with all the junior developers, because they had forced the juniors into using AI and then asked themselves “why not cut out the middleman.” And they hadn’t even considered that maybe the cost of AI would outpace the cost of an employee. How the fuck are these short term thinking idiots in fucking charge anyway? A lot of bosses are just fucking charlatans.
EDIT: Clarified first sentence.
Yes. The managers are the most replaceable.
They’re too dumb to realize this, though… And they’re in charge…
They’re also probably the only employees who can be replaced by AI at a cost savings because of their hugely inflated compensation.
HR is there to manage benefits mostly. if the US went to medicare for all, and done away with employer sponsored health care, then a ton of HR could go away. Company culture might actually improve for once.
My partner works in HR, and from what I’ve heard about her stories from her job, this is nowhere near true. Anecdotal evidence, though.
There is a lot of paperwork that needs to be done. If everyone could follow simple, written and documented directions that have actual pictures about how to fill the form you have to fill, you could have a lot less HR people.
But majority of employees are not able to. They have to remind them dozens of times and chase people who didn’t do it unless personally threatened. They have to constantly answer questions that are very well documented. They have to parse out information that finances should be able to access, but they need it directly copied from the systems.
It sounds like hell of a job, that would’ve been so much easier if people were able to follow simple instructions. And the kind of people that can’t follow a step-by-step guide that had 5 notifications about needing to be done in a Slack channel won’t do it if some AI is telling them to.
From what I’ve heard, she is just managing disasters that could be a legal problem, always chasing people who don’t care about their annoying beraucracy that could cause a lot of trouble.
I have a lot more respect for HR after seeing it from the other side.
I think you might be pleasantly surprised to find that if we all just collectively agreed not to do a lot of that paperwork, absolutely nothing bad would happen.
I have worked for more than one company that had paperwork requirements that, once traced down, had their causes and effects commingled and were a self-perpetuating problem that was causing itself.
Surely some paperwork and documentation is important and serves a purpose that justifies the nuisance, but a good deal of it does not, and it could simply disappear if we could dispense with our collective obsession to document irrelevant information simply because it exists.
That sounds like a self-created problem. Other than joining and leaving, I have had to fill out very little HR paperwork in my career.
Fair enough. I suppose I’m showing my bias. The only time I ever deal with HR is for open enrollment.
True, but I still think there would be plenty for HR to be mediating in terms of employee-to-employee relationships. However, it’s a big ask for HR to stop being a “cover your ass” department that is otherwise dedicated to making sure things like sexual harassment and hostile workplace environments don’t impact the company itself despite existing in the company all the same. Because that too is a large function of HR.
It’s okay, they will need all the devs they can get when they realise how much AI has messed up their codebases lol
Like how Ford just had to hire back all their old greybeard engineers after the AI was not actually up to snuff (shocker).
Not all. Just a select few. To help the AI.
Indeed, but lets see how this story develops. I’ve done my share of messing up repos with genAI, plus have some background in ML… these gives me the intuition that hiring back seniors to “fix the AI” is not going to cut it.
Well capitalism is darwinistic. They’ll probably disappear.
Darwinism involves a lot of cruelty and suffering via starvation and predation.
When you’re so obsessed with getting LLMs to replace your employees that you end up using it to replace you.
Last company I worked for was about 85% of phasing out HR for AI. It was a nightmare for new hires, checking benefits, changing benefits, and so on… Also it was zero tolerant in firing decisions and the humans they had left never strayed from AI’s recommendations.
They started trying w/ IT but was such a disaster the put it on the back burner.
the humans they had left never strayed from AI’s recommendations.
That’s a very real problem in all fields that take instructions from faceless machines. All the way back to Milgram.
I’m all for pushing hr out first. I mean how hard is that job anyway? Every question has the same answer: “well you should check the internal hr site.” Thanks for nothing, i did that first because it would have saved me the trouble of dealing with your useless ass. I need to understand how I can buy a new hire in india out of the waiting period from their current employer. If you would put useful things on the site, that might help, but you don’t. And then you don’t know the answer and punt to legal AGAIN. I could save us both a lot of time and talk to them directly. If your only value is being a proxy to legal, bring on the fucking ai.
If your only value is being a proxy to legal, bring on the fucking ai
Bingo
Legal would benefit 2000% by being replaced, not with LLMs, but with deterministic algorithms.
Cool fire the bosses then. The AI is doing their work anyway.
I had a boss once who was going down this path! She wanted to make a side-business selling AI slop videos with financial advice. I don’t know if it ever actually went anywhere. I found out she pled guilty to fraud a couple years before I started and made a hasty exit.
