6 ms·

“Chat GPT went down and 25% of my team could not work.”

15 points by taytus 4y ago

giardini 4y ago
Something for bored managers to do: Block Chat GPT access on the corporate network and see who is still producing and who isn't!
detaro 4y ago
Seems like a pretty big hiring fail. How do you end up with a team of programmers where 25% ... can't program?
- 988747 4y ago
  Replace "chatgpt" with "stackoverflow" and the share goes to 90% :)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- xg15 4y ago
  Are we sure his team isn't just four people? :)
- hgsgm 4y ago
  It's a lie.
- matwood 4y ago
  It didn't say they were programmers. I'm going to assume its some SEO content spam company.
  - blowski 4y ago
    Could also be a middle manager in any department.
  - ASalazarMX 4y ago
    Still, they didn't have ChatGPT last year, how did they work?
    - matwood 4y ago
      The person tweeting was a VC, so for all we know the company didn't exist last year.
trollied 4y ago
If you read further on in the thread: > "They can still work and the company does not rely on them to generate revenue. It is just from an IC tooling perspective in a short amount of time, they have become dependent on it. They can still go back to less productive ways but just a usage behavior observation"
- taytus 4y ago
  25% drop in productivity... I'd be extremely worried. No matter if it is IC tooling or whatever.
- aldarisbm 4y ago
  I wonder how they defined a 25% loss of productivity. 1 day is entirely not enough to produce any credible metric on the impact of any one tool. Seems just click baity.
silon42 4y ago
Companies probably need to ban direct Chat AI access, and only allow it via proxy... also important to see if any business data is being leaked.
shubhamjain 4y ago
Hard to believe. I don't know any programmer who uses ChatGPT on a regular basis for programming. How can anyone rely on a thing that frequently isn't available because high load, and takes tens of seconds to generate a full answer. Secondly, for most of the programming work, to be useful, it has to be able to understand the query but also the existing codebase—"This is my codebase. What do I need to do to paginate the users table?". Would love to hear real-world programming examples of something that would be faster done with ChatGPT vs Google/Github Search. What are they?
- Clubber 4y ago
  Yes, this is hard to believe for me too. This thing just came out recently didn't it? How can you have a team completely dependent on this already? What did they do before this came out, stand around and stare at the walls?
  - Calavar 4y ago
    It's been less than three months. I too have trouble believing that anyone's pre-Chat GPT skills and knowledge could atrophy to that degree in that amount of time.
- varispeed 4y ago
  It's quicker than search. For instance I have a set of data that I want to make sense of before I can do something with it. I can't remember from top of my head how to do things like calculate standard deviation or how to fit given array to a curve or how to visualise the data in this and that way. I can get these code snippets from ChatGPT in seconds and they 90% of the time work. That's just one of the example, but ChatGPT has reduced my time Googling for something by like 80%.
- kunalgupta 4y ago
  paying for plus solves most of this
- simonw 4y ago
  I use ChatGPT all the time to generate quick example code, purely as a faster version of "Google for this API, then this other one, then figure out how to glue that together in a script". I also use it for things like constructing jq recipes, or zsh for loops (I still can't remember how to do those without looking them up). Recent jq example: https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/109882602515468465 https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/109882602515468465 - see also https://til.simonwillison.net/gpt3/jq https://til.simonwillison.net/gpt3/jq Here's an example where I used it as a search engine and it taught me about an entirely new (to me) tool: https://til.simonwillison.net/macos/sips https://til.simonwillison.net/macos/sips
SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
I don’t believe this story and I’d encourage anyone who thinks it’s plausible to recalibrate. 25% of the team has forgotten how they did their job 2 months ago? Come on. Either the story is exaggerated for clicks or the portfolio company was making excuses for why they didn’t hit some deadline.
ejb999 4y ago
...and then stackoverflow went down and the other 75% couldn't work </sarc>
baobabKoodaa 4y ago
There probably isn't even a tiny shred of truth in that title line. Flagged for misinformation.
j0hnyl 4y ago
This makes no sense, Chat GPT is relatively new, what the hell were they doing before?
fidgewidge 4y ago
I dunno, this makes me feel weird. So far I've tried AI for programming assistance but every time I do, the results are disappointing and I give up. Yet I hear from others that it's made a huge difference and been a massive boost to their productivity. I don't know how to reconcile these two very different experiences. I worry that I might be getting old and will be left behind by not understanding how to master these new tools. Specifically, I have a colleague I respect a lot. He is an excellent programmer. He now routinely asks ChatGPT for things and claims it's a big help. Yesterday I was wondering out loud what the difference was between two very similarly named properties in a config file, and he immediately logged on to ChatGPT and asked it. I read the answer and became suspicious because the explanation was what you'd expect the difference to be given the different names, but it didn't make any sense when you thought about it carefully. I typed a similar query into Google and the first result was a detailed and correct Stack Overflow answer. Now I'm quietly wondering about the other cases where he used ChatGPT to help him write code. When I tried ChatGPT to get library recommendations per tasks, it would often recommend libraries that sounded like they should exist but didn't. Other people say they use Copilot and it's a huge boost. I tried it when it first came out. It kept suggesting huge blocks of code that were just nonsense, in a very irritating over-enthusiastic-girlfriend-meme sort of way. I found it was slower to try and work with Copilot constantly checking its answers than it was to just rely on the IDE autocomplete and type system (which are quite good in the language I'm using). Also I found that carefully reviewing its suggestions was somehow more tiring than just writing the code myself. Finally, when I look at the bugs and things I've had to do lately, it's hard to imagine (current gen) AI helping. Everything is a bunch of small changes all over the codebase, often quite subtle and in response to complicated bug reports. Who are these programmers who are blasting out boilerplate all day where AI never makes mistakes?
- twelve40 4y ago
  it might be more useful to people who are churning out different webapps, prototypes, scripts, fizz-buzzes and code samples from scratch? I can't imagine this thing making sense of a large existing (possibly proprietary) legacy codebase.
  - 4y ago
jsiepkes 4y ago
I love how some tech-early-adapter-visionary-influencers make even bigger claims in this thread: > I think for some it’s already as critical as wifi. Personally I would like to add that for me ChatGPT is as critical as running water and sewage.
tyronehed 4y ago
[dead]
lee101 4y ago
[dead]
sacnoradhq 4y ago
Maybe their work involves posting ChatGPT-generated memes to each other in code review. If that were the case, I would turn off ChatGPT M-Th at 6 pm and every Friday at 4.

15 points by taytus 4y ago

Something for bored managers to do: Block Chat GPT access on the corporate network and see who is still producing and who isn't!

detaro 4y ago

Seems like a pretty big hiring fail. How do you end up with a team of programmers where 25% ... can't program?

988747 4y ago
Replace "chatgpt" with "stackoverflow" and the share goes to 90% :)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
xg15 4y ago
Are we sure his team isn't just four people? :)
hgsgm 4y ago
It's a lie.
matwood 4y ago
It didn't say they were programmers. I'm going to assume its some SEO content spam company.
- blowski 4y ago
  Could also be a middle manager in any department.
- ASalazarMX 4y ago
  Still, they didn't have ChatGPT last year, how did they work?
  - matwood 4y ago
    The person tweeting was a VC, so for all we know the company didn't exist last year.

trollied 4y ago

If you read further on in the thread: > "They can still work and the company does not rely on them to generate revenue. It is just from an IC tooling perspective in a short amount of time, they have become dependent on it. They can still go back to less productive ways but just a usage behavior observation"

taytus 4y ago
25% drop in productivity... I'd be extremely worried. No matter if it is IC tooling or whatever.
aldarisbm 4y ago
I wonder how they defined a 25% loss of productivity. 1 day is entirely not enough to produce any credible metric on the impact of any one tool. Seems just click baity.

silon42 4y ago

Companies probably need to ban direct Chat AI access, and only allow it via proxy... also important to see if any business data is being leaked.

shubhamjain 4y ago

Hard to believe. I don't know any programmer who uses ChatGPT on a regular basis for programming. How can anyone rely on a thing that frequently isn't available because high load, and takes tens of seconds to generate a full answer. Secondly, for most of the programming work, to be useful, it has to be able to understand the query but also the existing codebase—"This is my codebase. What do I need to do to paginate the users table?". Would love to hear real-world programming examples of something that would be faster done with ChatGPT vs Google/Github Search. What are they?

Clubber 4y ago
Yes, this is hard to believe for me too. This thing just came out recently didn't it? How can you have a team completely dependent on this already? What did they do before this came out, stand around and stare at the walls?
- Calavar 4y ago
  It's been less than three months. I too have trouble believing that anyone's pre-Chat GPT skills and knowledge could atrophy to that degree in that amount of time.
varispeed 4y ago
It's quicker than search. For instance I have a set of data that I want to make sense of before I can do something with it. I can't remember from top of my head how to do things like calculate standard deviation or how to fit given array to a curve or how to visualise the data in this and that way. I can get these code snippets from ChatGPT in seconds and they 90% of the time work. That's just one of the example, but ChatGPT has reduced my time Googling for something by like 80%.
kunalgupta 4y ago
paying for plus solves most of this
simonw 4y ago
I use ChatGPT all the time to generate quick example code, purely as a faster version of "Google for this API, then this other one, then figure out how to glue that together in a script". I also use it for things like constructing jq recipes, or zsh for loops (I still can't remember how to do those without looking them up). Recent jq example: https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/109882602515468465 https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/109882602515468465 - see also https://til.simonwillison.net/gpt3/jq https://til.simonwillison.net/gpt3/jq Here's an example where I used it as a search engine and it taught me about an entirely new (to me) tool: https://til.simonwillison.net/macos/sips https://til.simonwillison.net/macos/sips

SpicyLemonZest 4y ago

I don’t believe this story and I’d encourage anyone who thinks it’s plausible to recalibrate. 25% of the team has forgotten how they did their job 2 months ago? Come on. Either the story is exaggerated for clicks or the portfolio company was making excuses for why they didn’t hit some deadline.

ejb999 4y ago

...and then stackoverflow went down and the other 75% couldn't work </sarc>

baobabKoodaa 4y ago

There probably isn't even a tiny shred of truth in that title line. Flagged for misinformation.

j0hnyl 4y ago

This makes no sense, Chat GPT is relatively new, what the hell were they doing before?

fidgewidge 4y ago

I dunno, this makes me feel weird. So far I've tried AI for programming assistance but every time I do, the results are disappointing and I give up. Yet I hear from others that it's made a huge difference and been a massive boost to their productivity. I don't know how to reconcile these two very different experiences. I worry that I might be getting old and will be left behind by not understanding how to master these new tools. Specifically, I have a colleague I respect a lot. He is an excellent programmer. He now routinely asks ChatGPT for things and claims it's a big help. Yesterday I was wondering out loud what the difference was between two very similarly named properties in a config file, and he immediately logged on to ChatGPT and asked it. I read the answer and became suspicious because the explanation was what you'd expect the difference to be given the different names, but it didn't make any sense when you thought about it carefully. I typed a similar query into Google and the first result was a detailed and correct Stack Overflow answer. Now I'm quietly wondering about the other cases where he used ChatGPT to help him write code. When I tried ChatGPT to get library recommendations per tasks, it would often recommend libraries that sounded like they should exist but didn't. Other people say they use Copilot and it's a huge boost. I tried it when it first came out. It kept suggesting huge blocks of code that were just nonsense, in a very irritating over-enthusiastic-girlfriend-meme sort of way. I found it was slower to try and work with Copilot constantly checking its answers than it was to just rely on the IDE autocomplete and type system (which are quite good in the language I'm using). Also I found that carefully reviewing its suggestions was somehow more tiring than just writing the code myself. Finally, when I look at the bugs and things I've had to do lately, it's hard to imagine (current gen) AI helping. Everything is a bunch of small changes all over the codebase, often quite subtle and in response to complicated bug reports. Who are these programmers who are blasting out boilerplate all day where AI never makes mistakes?

twelve40 4y ago
it might be more useful to people who are churning out different webapps, prototypes, scripts, fizz-buzzes and code samples from scratch? I can't imagine this thing making sense of a large existing (possibly proprietary) legacy codebase.
- 4y ago

jsiepkes 4y ago

I love how some tech-early-adapter-visionary-influencers make even bigger claims in this thread: > I think for some it’s already as critical as wifi. Personally I would like to add that for me ChatGPT is as critical as running water and sewage.

tyronehed 4y ago

[dead]

lee101 4y ago

[dead]

sacnoradhq 4y ago

Maybe their work involves posting ChatGPT-generated memes to each other in code review. If that were the case, I would turn off ChatGPT M-Th at 6 pm and every Friday at 4.