6 ms·

Management = Bullshit (LLM Edition)

48 points by dxs 1y ago

byoung2 1y ago
My skip manager started asking for weekly status reports so my manager started pulling Jira reports and feeding them to ChatGPT. It turns out that my skip manager was using Copilot to summarize those reports into basically what you could get directly from Jira.
- david38 1y ago
  Wow. Full circle
- hamburga 1y ago
  This is how society collapses and OpenAI wins.
  - hamburga 1y ago
    Also see Commandment 7 - https://muldoon.cloud/2023/10/29/ai-commandments.html https://muldoon.cloud/2023/10/29/ai-commandments.html
  - daxfohl 1y ago
    It's already started, with AI resume spamming on one side and the associated AI assisted screening on the other. "Deep research" generated funding requests on one side and associated AI generated funding request summarization on the other.
    - jacob_rezi 1y ago
      what are the keywords to use to search for ai resume spam tools?
      - MonkeyClub 1y ago
        Unironically, "ai resume spam tools" seems to work well enough. Even more unironically, if you run the search through Google, you'll get a nice AI summary at the top as well. O tempora, o mores.
- Terr_ 1y ago
  Recycling a prediction from a year ago: > Ultimately a lot of this generative tech stuff is just counterfeiting extra signals people were using to try to guess at interest, attentiveness, intelligence, etc. > So yeah, as those indicators become debased, maybe we'll go back to sending something [...] all boiled down to bullet points.
- ctkhn 1y ago
  This is the kind of thing my manager and skip manager are up to. Most of our jira tickets now are written as a random jumble of ideas, fed into internal proprietary LLM and then turned into jira description and acceptance criteria. Totally pointless
- hliyan 1y ago
  I've seen this happen in emails too: "Recent outage was due to a retry loop for the Foo API exceeding rate limits. We're implementing a backoff algo" Sender, via ChatGPT: Hi, I wanted to provide more context regarding the recent outage. The issue was triggered by a retry loop in the Foo API integration. When the API began returning errors, our system initiated repeated retry attempts without sufficient delay, which quickly exceeded the rate limits imposed by the API provider. As a result, requests were throttled, leading to degraded service availability. To address this, we are implementing an exponential backoff algorithm with jitter. This approach will ensure that retries are spaced out appropriately and reduce the likelihood of breaching rate limits in the future. We are also reviewing our monitoring and alerting thresholds to detect similar patterns earlier. We’ll continue to monitor the system closely and share further updates as improvements are rolled out. Best regards, Receiver, via ChatGPT: "The outage was caused by excessive retry attempts to the Foo API, which triggered rate limiting and degraded service. To prevent recurrence, exponential backoff with jitter is being implemented"
  - nullc 1y ago
    Would be a nice fine tuning target: training to close that loop.
- whiplash451 1y ago
  Funny how encoder-decoder architectures have led to decoder-encoder behaviors.
satisfice 1y ago
Or you could just do your fucking job and create a real disaster recovery plan.
- roflyear 1y ago
  People will down vote you, but when I worked for a mega corp and a hurricane knocked out our office, they had a plan, and it worked: they set up in a hotel, and continued operations, people stayed employed, people got the products (which were largely essentials) in their supermarkets, etc. This is not like, super trivial. People needed to figure out power, hardware, networking, vpn, etc.. etc.. etc.. and staffing. A lot of that had absolutely nothing to do with IT, but some of it did.
  - apwell23 1y ago
    was someone keeping this plan up to date from it going obsolete?
    - thedevilslawyer 1y ago
      Given the plan worked at a megacorp scale and complexity, the answer is assuredly a yes.
    - roflyear 1y ago
      yeah, for sure. occasionally it came up and we had to give small feedback.
- apwell23 1y ago
  middle manager spotted ^
- tayo42 1y ago
  The real management failure is taking a problem and assigning it to someone who has no interest in solving it. There's plenty of people interested in working on these kinds of things. Why waste this guy's time.
OutOfHere 1y ago
For new companies, how about "management as a service", featuring AI+MCP? No need for human managers.
- TheNewsIsHere 1y ago
  That’s a clever way to burst both the AI bubble and the startup bubble all in one fell swoop.
- hy4000days 1y ago
  [dead]
tptacek 1y ago
The author jokes, but almost everybody's DR plan (at least, the DR plans motivated by regs like SOC2 --- which I believe are most DR plans) are worse than what you'd get from an LLM. An LLM can at least take some input and craft something ostensibly related to your circumstances. The DR plans the LLM competes with are literally just copy-pasted.
- antonvs 1y ago
  I’ve used LLMs to generate text for a soc2 audit about our processes. For one requirement, it took me 20 minutes to produce 8 pages that otherwise would have taken hours at least. This wasn’t misrepresentation or anything - more like here’s the requirement, here’s a summary of what we do, describe specifically how that meets the requirement. Outside of coding, it’s a perfect application for the tech.
  - Axolu 1y ago
    Agreed, I'm using it as a technical author, if you set your system prompt up well, you get consistent style and accurate output which would take me hours of manual work.
- tbrownaw 1y ago
  They're like backups, in that they don't actually exist unless you've tested them. A copy-pasted plan is actually fine, as long as whoever's responsible for following it actually can follow it and it works. A plan that nobody's even looked at much less tried to follow isn't fine. Even if it's word-for-word identical to one that is fine.
- TheNewsIsHere 1y ago
  I would be interested to know more about the authors employment. As a small business owner, my DR plan is oriented to reasonably preventing getting locked out or screwing things up for customers in the event of an emergency. I learned a lot about what to do and what not to do leading SOC 2 Type 2 audits at a large firm. Our auditors handed us a bunch of templates that they had purchased from an even larger firm. They said we could adopt them verbatim, but that we should at least read and probably modify them. Management was… stressed… that we had paid close to $100,000 for that to be their policy “analysis”. I was tasked to read through all their templates and sort out what was and wasn’t necessary, compare to how we actually did business and what we gave two shits about, and produce work that closed the gap. (That’s another story; turns out it’s really hard writing policy for a business where both (active) founders and the CEO are looking for different things.) It helps to plan for abstract scenarios, like “we lost the office but the people are alive”. Or “we lost all facilities and people in this state, but not the next one over”. It also really helps to have management who understands the reality that not everything can be planned for, and that any DR strategy worth its salt has some kind of line in the sand beyond which you can’t do anything.
roenxi 1y ago
Plans are useless but planning is essential ~ Lots of people This guy is quite possibly going to end up looking stupid when something goes wrong and it turns out he lied about having thought about it. I hope he is as clever as he thinks he is at anticipating what will go wrong in the future. Fires and whatnot do happen. Even AWS us-east-1 has experienced outages.
apwell23 1y ago
I've been using chatgpt for career coaching and improving my visibility at work. It has been surprisingly helpful. A million times more helpful than my own manager. I really don't understand what the point of EMs is.
- ctkhn 1y ago
  It's really just monitoring you. A designated technical lead on your team can be very helpful, but once someone moves off the dev team but also isn't able to make any decisions from the product/business side they just become dead weight. I have the same issue with my EM trying to get coaching and visibility and have gone to LLMs just like you because manager is clueless.
- 1123581321 1y ago
  Theoretically the EM is building the department to do what the company needs, using departments or groups of engineers as the Lego pieces. Good ones are able to keep improving capabilities and keep good engineers at the company. But often they’re just surfing success they had little to do with, and it’s usually an inflated title at small companies.
- lovich 1y ago
  Well in the past couple of years all the EM roles I’ve gotten or been offered have come with expectations that not only am I managing 1-2 teams, I used to be a senior engineer right? I should be doing 20-40 hours of technical work and have a deep understanding of every single piece of work every member of my team does to the point that I understand it better than themselves. Needless to say there’s not enough hours in a week for that and I’ve yet to see a company that did more than pay lip service to employee development before immediately asking why the new project hasn’t shipped already
  - apwell23 1y ago
    In my company its pure ppl managment role. No EM writes code. mine trying to give me some technical suggestions but that's about it.
- 1y ago
joshstrange 1y ago
Bold to post this under, what I assume is, their real name? This really reads as "I was asked to do something _I personally_ deemed beneath me or a waste of time so I just didn't do and provided BS instead, aren't I smart?". No, no you aren't. You are incredibly selfish. If and when that DR is needed and the team realizes it's BS will you still be as proud as you are in this post? I can tell you that if I was your coworker I'd probably drop a link to this post in your manager's inbox. I cannot stand people who just don't care and setup landmines for their coworkers because "they know best" and decide to do something different than what was asked for. It's the same as using AI slop in a PR but not/never being on call, it's not your problem so why do you care if the system goes down? If I pulled out a DR plan in the middle of a crisis and found it was AI generated BS I'd be furious and after the head of whoever half-assed (zero-assed?) it. It's just so incredibly disrespectful.
- icedchai 1y ago
  It sounds like a management / supervision issue. Did anyone review the "plan"? Were they competent to do such a review? Trust but verify. If I wrote a DR plan, I'd expect someone else to review it and sign off.
- rurban 1y ago
  Just read Joe's next blob post with much more corp bullshit he torpedoed. He's quite well known amongst Common Lispers and doesn't really care climbing such a bullshit Corp ladder
Joker_vD 1y ago
"More paper — cleaner ass". Something bad happens — it's not your fault, since you've reported (in writing!) several times to your superiors that it could happen, and was told it's fine, so please go and try to find someone else for a scapegoat, thank you very much.
rurban 1y ago
what's more to that than alias desaster='git commit -am desaster && git push'? Works fine without LLM. To overcome desaster artists is best to get them fired earliest. To bomb them with llm is fine, but this is just papering.

48 points by dxs 1y ago

My skip manager started asking for weekly status reports so my manager started pulling Jira reports and feeding them to ChatGPT. It turns out that my skip manager was using Copilot to summarize those reports into basically what you could get directly from Jira.

david38 1y ago
Wow. Full circle
hamburga 1y ago
This is how society collapses and OpenAI wins.
- hamburga 1y ago
  Also see Commandment 7 - https://muldoon.cloud/2023/10/29/ai-commandments.html https://muldoon.cloud/2023/10/29/ai-commandments.html
- daxfohl 1y ago
  It's already started, with AI resume spamming on one side and the associated AI assisted screening on the other. "Deep research" generated funding requests on one side and associated AI generated funding request summarization on the other.
  - jacob_rezi 1y ago
    what are the keywords to use to search for ai resume spam tools?
    - MonkeyClub 1y ago
      Unironically, "ai resume spam tools" seems to work well enough. Even more unironically, if you run the search through Google, you'll get a nice AI summary at the top as well. O tempora, o mores.
Terr_ 1y ago
Recycling a prediction from a year ago: > Ultimately a lot of this generative tech stuff is just counterfeiting extra signals people were using to try to guess at interest, attentiveness, intelligence, etc. > So yeah, as those indicators become debased, maybe we'll go back to sending something [...] all boiled down to bullet points.
ctkhn 1y ago
This is the kind of thing my manager and skip manager are up to. Most of our jira tickets now are written as a random jumble of ideas, fed into internal proprietary LLM and then turned into jira description and acceptance criteria. Totally pointless
hliyan 1y ago
I've seen this happen in emails too: "Recent outage was due to a retry loop for the Foo API exceeding rate limits. We're implementing a backoff algo" Sender, via ChatGPT: Hi, I wanted to provide more context regarding the recent outage. The issue was triggered by a retry loop in the Foo API integration. When the API began returning errors, our system initiated repeated retry attempts without sufficient delay, which quickly exceeded the rate limits imposed by the API provider. As a result, requests were throttled, leading to degraded service availability. To address this, we are implementing an exponential backoff algorithm with jitter. This approach will ensure that retries are spaced out appropriately and reduce the likelihood of breaching rate limits in the future. We are also reviewing our monitoring and alerting thresholds to detect similar patterns earlier. We’ll continue to monitor the system closely and share further updates as improvements are rolled out. Best regards, Receiver, via ChatGPT: "The outage was caused by excessive retry attempts to the Foo API, which triggered rate limiting and degraded service. To prevent recurrence, exponential backoff with jitter is being implemented"
- nullc 1y ago
  Would be a nice fine tuning target: training to close that loop.
whiplash451 1y ago
Funny how encoder-decoder architectures have led to decoder-encoder behaviors.

satisfice 1y ago

Or you could just do your fucking job and create a real disaster recovery plan.

roflyear 1y ago
People will down vote you, but when I worked for a mega corp and a hurricane knocked out our office, they had a plan, and it worked: they set up in a hotel, and continued operations, people stayed employed, people got the products (which were largely essentials) in their supermarkets, etc. This is not like, super trivial. People needed to figure out power, hardware, networking, vpn, etc.. etc.. etc.. and staffing. A lot of that had absolutely nothing to do with IT, but some of it did.
- apwell23 1y ago
  was someone keeping this plan up to date from it going obsolete?
  - thedevilslawyer 1y ago
    Given the plan worked at a megacorp scale and complexity, the answer is assuredly a yes.
  - roflyear 1y ago
    yeah, for sure. occasionally it came up and we had to give small feedback.
apwell23 1y ago
middle manager spotted ^
tayo42 1y ago
The real management failure is taking a problem and assigning it to someone who has no interest in solving it. There's plenty of people interested in working on these kinds of things. Why waste this guy's time.

OutOfHere 1y ago

For new companies, how about "management as a service", featuring AI+MCP? No need for human managers.

TheNewsIsHere 1y ago
That’s a clever way to burst both the AI bubble and the startup bubble all in one fell swoop.
hy4000days 1y ago
[dead]

tptacek 1y ago

The author jokes, but almost everybody's DR plan (at least, the DR plans motivated by regs like SOC2 --- which I believe are most DR plans) are worse than what you'd get from an LLM. An LLM can at least take some input and craft something ostensibly related to your circumstances. The DR plans the LLM competes with are literally just copy-pasted.

antonvs 1y ago
I’ve used LLMs to generate text for a soc2 audit about our processes. For one requirement, it took me 20 minutes to produce 8 pages that otherwise would have taken hours at least. This wasn’t misrepresentation or anything - more like here’s the requirement, here’s a summary of what we do, describe specifically how that meets the requirement. Outside of coding, it’s a perfect application for the tech.
- Axolu 1y ago
  Agreed, I'm using it as a technical author, if you set your system prompt up well, you get consistent style and accurate output which would take me hours of manual work.
tbrownaw 1y ago
They're like backups, in that they don't actually exist unless you've tested them. A copy-pasted plan is actually fine, as long as whoever's responsible for following it actually can follow it and it works. A plan that nobody's even looked at much less tried to follow isn't fine. Even if it's word-for-word identical to one that is fine.
TheNewsIsHere 1y ago
I would be interested to know more about the authors employment. As a small business owner, my DR plan is oriented to reasonably preventing getting locked out or screwing things up for customers in the event of an emergency. I learned a lot about what to do and what not to do leading SOC 2 Type 2 audits at a large firm. Our auditors handed us a bunch of templates that they had purchased from an even larger firm. They said we could adopt them verbatim, but that we should at least read and probably modify them. Management was… stressed… that we had paid close to $100,000 for that to be their policy “analysis”. I was tasked to read through all their templates and sort out what was and wasn’t necessary, compare to how we actually did business and what we gave two shits about, and produce work that closed the gap. (That’s another story; turns out it’s really hard writing policy for a business where both (active) founders and the CEO are looking for different things.) It helps to plan for abstract scenarios, like “we lost the office but the people are alive”. Or “we lost all facilities and people in this state, but not the next one over”. It also really helps to have management who understands the reality that not everything can be planned for, and that any DR strategy worth its salt has some kind of line in the sand beyond which you can’t do anything.

roenxi 1y ago

Plans are useless but planning is essential ~ Lots of people This guy is quite possibly going to end up looking stupid when something goes wrong and it turns out he lied about having thought about it. I hope he is as clever as he thinks he is at anticipating what will go wrong in the future. Fires and whatnot do happen. Even AWS us-east-1 has experienced outages.

apwell23 1y ago

I've been using chatgpt for career coaching and improving my visibility at work. It has been surprisingly helpful. A million times more helpful than my own manager. I really don't understand what the point of EMs is.

ctkhn 1y ago
It's really just monitoring you. A designated technical lead on your team can be very helpful, but once someone moves off the dev team but also isn't able to make any decisions from the product/business side they just become dead weight. I have the same issue with my EM trying to get coaching and visibility and have gone to LLMs just like you because manager is clueless.
1123581321 1y ago
Theoretically the EM is building the department to do what the company needs, using departments or groups of engineers as the Lego pieces. Good ones are able to keep improving capabilities and keep good engineers at the company. But often they’re just surfing success they had little to do with, and it’s usually an inflated title at small companies.
lovich 1y ago
Well in the past couple of years all the EM roles I’ve gotten or been offered have come with expectations that not only am I managing 1-2 teams, I used to be a senior engineer right? I should be doing 20-40 hours of technical work and have a deep understanding of every single piece of work every member of my team does to the point that I understand it better than themselves. Needless to say there’s not enough hours in a week for that and I’ve yet to see a company that did more than pay lip service to employee development before immediately asking why the new project hasn’t shipped already
- apwell23 1y ago
  In my company its pure ppl managment role. No EM writes code. mine trying to give me some technical suggestions but that's about it.
1y ago

joshstrange 1y ago

Bold to post this under, what I assume is, their real name? This really reads as "I was asked to do something _I personally_ deemed beneath me or a waste of time so I just didn't do and provided BS instead, aren't I smart?". No, no you aren't. You are incredibly selfish. If and when that DR is needed and the team realizes it's BS will you still be as proud as you are in this post? I can tell you that if I was your coworker I'd probably drop a link to this post in your manager's inbox. I cannot stand people who just don't care and setup landmines for their coworkers because "they know best" and decide to do something different than what was asked for. It's the same as using AI slop in a PR but not/never being on call, it's not your problem so why do you care if the system goes down? If I pulled out a DR plan in the middle of a crisis and found it was AI generated BS I'd be furious and after the head of whoever half-assed (zero-assed?) it. It's just so incredibly disrespectful.

icedchai 1y ago
It sounds like a management / supervision issue. Did anyone review the "plan"? Were they competent to do such a review? Trust but verify. If I wrote a DR plan, I'd expect someone else to review it and sign off.
rurban 1y ago
Just read Joe's next blob post with much more corp bullshit he torpedoed. He's quite well known amongst Common Lispers and doesn't really care climbing such a bullshit Corp ladder

Joker_vD 1y ago

"More paper — cleaner ass". Something bad happens — it's not your fault, since you've reported (in writing!) several times to your superiors that it could happen, and was told it's fine, so please go and try to find someone else for a scapegoat, thank you very much.

rurban 1y ago

what's more to that than alias desaster='git commit -am desaster && git push'? Works fine without LLM. To overcome desaster artists is best to get them fired earliest. To bomb them with llm is fine, but this is just papering.