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I really don't understand this take. If you're a carpentry shop that just bought power tools for the first time and you're worried that your employees are stic

by SR2Z 4mo ago

I really don't understand this take. If you're a carpentry shop that just bought power tools for the first time and you're worried that your employees are sticking with hand tools because that's what they know, then you look for sawdust. The goal isn't to have people work at converting wood into sawdust, the point is that if you wanna see if the tools are working you wanna see proof they're actually being used. I'm sure there were some people cargo-culting this stuff, but suggesting that the people who run FAANG don't understand the dangers of bad metrics is... interesting.

cyphar 4mo ago
Why would a carpentry shop buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of power tools without consulting with their employees to see what they actually need to get their job done more effectively? The logic of buying the tools then forcing the employees to use them "or else" is completely backwards in any sane world. (Of course, we've all had bosses that went to some marketing seminar and come back having been tricked^Wsold into buying some wizz-bang widget that we need to now integrate because of a sunk-cost fallacy, but I thought everyone was on the same page that this is not how normal procurement was supposed to work.) > the point is that if you wanna see if the tools are working you wanna see proof they're actually being used. That is way too charitable, people were being fired based on these metrics and people were absolutely talking about token burn as being a metric for productivity (do I really need to link the Jensen Huang quote?). That isn't an indication of this hysteria being based on "just trying to see if the tools work". If you want to see if the tools work, why don't you just ask your employees? Like any normal employer would?
- paulddraper 4mo ago
  Because those power tools had just been invented and no one had experience with them. Though in theory power tools are faster than hand tools.
  - JoshTriplett 4mo ago
    So do a workshop on power tools, measure their efficacy and the quality of the result, do some demonstration videos on power tools, get people to compare, seek feedback on their usage. Don't count electricity and sawdust, or you'll find people getting very good at expensively turning blocks of wood into sawdust.
    - no-name-here 4mo ago
      Is the idea that most stubborn employees would adopt AI if their company made videos showing internal metrics that AI is better? > Don’t count electricity and sawdust I agree that it seems wasteful, but is there some better way to accomplish it at the scale of hundreds, or hundreds of thousands, etc? I'm personally doubtful that stubborn employees would switch even if a video provided internal metrics, videos, etc.
      - JoshTriplett 4mo ago
        Perhaps don't start out with the conclusion that it's obviously better and anyone rejecting it is just "stubborn".
        TeMPOraL 4mo ago
        Nobody started out with that conclusions. The tests and experiments and workshops and consulting with select employees you propose, were all done 2-3 years ago. Results are in, but a chunk of population decides to ignore them and obstinately continue believing and claiming that it doesn't work, which is a conclusion they started out with.
        oblio 4mo ago
        > Results are in Awesome, can you please share those results? Surely they would be all over Nature, Science, IEEE, etc.
        TeMPOraL 4mo ago
- dijksterhuis 4mo ago
  > If you want to see if the tools work, why don't you just ask your employees? Like any normal employer would? because that would require actually admitting that employees are the people in an organisation who are responsible for the success of that organisation, rather than the people higher up the org chart.
  - bitwize 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - SR2Z 4mo ago
      Do you actually have a job? Do you talk to your coworkers? This is an insane take. Plenty of people are critical of AI at my job despite a big push to use it. I find the comparison to NK distasteful, coming from someone who presumably is pretty well paid and can quit their job whenever they want. If you're feeling humiliated... well, I don't think it's because your boss wants you to try AI.
      - watwut 4mo ago
        I had seen exact same dynamic as he describes. So yeah, he is speaking to people and coworkers. That is how he knows.
      - oblio 4mo ago
        > Plenty of people are critical of AI at my job despite a big push to use it. Are they critical to you and your 10 people team, aka a small circle or are they critical in the all hands Q&A in front of 500 employees?
        voakbasda 4mo ago
        Having been the guy to speak the uncomfortable truths at such meetings, I can tell you that does not end well for anyone. Expect to look for another job shortly afterwards.
- HDThoreaun 4mo ago
  The logic of trusting employees who are worried that power tools will replace them to utilize power tools effectively is completely backwards in any sane world. People don’t like change, sometimes it needs to be forced on them.
  - dijksterhuis 4mo ago
    > who are worried that power tools will replace them maybe, just maybe, it would have been a better idea to engage with employees first rather than posting on linkedin about how everyone is going to lose their jobs. cos it's the kinds of people trying to force this stuff on employees that are the ones who have been shouting about that from the rooftops.
    - SR2Z 4mo ago
      If you take LinkedIn at face value everyone who uses the Internet is a sociopath who lives for no purpose beyond maximizing shareholder value. Seriously, some of the most deranged things I've ever read were by relatively normal people trying to promote themselves on LinkedIn. What people SAY does not matter nearly as much as what everyone KNOWS and it's pretty damn clear that AI is never going to be able to replace humans in complex domains. Every time a frontier lab announces a breakthrough it's pretty obvious that the setup was more complicated than "hey chat prove the Riemann hypothesis." The world is gonna need skilled human beings to drive LLMs, no matter how desperately some people like to pretend otherwise.
  - agentultra 4mo ago
    Doubt. People brought in all kinds of web applications in the early Web 2.0 era because corporate IT was being too stingy (for a lot of reasons). People will find efficiencies on their job on their own. No need to denigrate them.
    - HDThoreaun 4mo ago
      I don’t know, at my company at least tons of devs were holding out on ai usage until the token maxing stuff really started. It was beyond clear by that point that coding agents were a productivity multiplier.
- woah 4mo ago
  > Why would a carpentry shop buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of power tools without consulting with their employees to see what they actually need to get their job done more effectively? Are you suggesting that changes to new production technologies are always driven bottom up by line workers? I'm guessing that historically that's rare.
  - oblio 4mo ago
    Historically that rarely happens because industrial equipment is/was generally too expensive for the average worker to purchase on their own, plus workers usually have a budget of roughly 0 to buy extra tools, especially expensive ones. But to give you an example, also roughly 0 companies made developers use Linux and still many developers choose it, so bottom up improvements happen in a decent chunk of cases. Nobody paid for PostgreSQL promotion. Or Python, etc.
    - TeMPOraL 4mo ago
      > so bottom up improvements happen in a decent chunk of cases. Nobody paid for PostgreSQL promotion. Or Python, etc. It does, but for better or worse, it's an anomaly. Even now, maybe nobody was paid for PostgreSQL or Python promotion, but modern OSS tools and programming languages usually have a business backing it. Linux, too, wasn't commercially promoted until it was; RedHat isn't exactly a charity after all. Conversely, no one paid for initial AI promotion either - ChatGPT exploded organically after release, and for the first year or two, companies had a problem because a good chunk of their staff, including especially non-engineers, discovered just how useful it was and wanted to use it at work, casually violating every internal policy, bylaw and even regulatory policies about data sharing. The massive spend on promotion - including first-party spend - came later, but at that point it was already obvious ~everyone is going to be buying it. I suppose bottom-up vs. top-down may be in part about how mature a technology and industry is.
      - WhiteOwlLion 3mo ago
        Then those same organizations that "give in" end up providing inferior AI tools, and you face the dilemma of either using poor models and accepting poor results or sharing data with better models that may not be governed correctly.
- TeMPOraL 4mo ago
  > Why would a carpentry shop buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of power tools without consulting with their employees to see what they actually need to get their job done more effectively? The logic of buying the tools then forcing the employees to use them "or else" is completely backwards in any sane world. For one, software tools are cheap, especially with OSS in the mix. You're buying one "tool" and paying for operational expenses that scale with total usage across all company. But secondly, and more importantly, the "consulting" and discussing was done over the period of last 3 years, by ~1 year ago the high-level conclusions were pretty much locked in, the worthiness of the adoption was blindingly obvious at that point, so I can see why tokenmaxxing would be where this ended up, even though (here I disagree with the article a bit) the tools aren't at the "compounding correctness" stage just yet. It's really quite simple: the stick didn't work (telling people in increasingly direct ways to try using AI for stuff), so they tried the carrot. $deity knows a good chunk of engineers will inadvertently fall for any trick that involves a scoreboard. That holds even when they're perfectly aware they're being tricked. > If you want to see if the tools work, why don't you just ask your employees? Like any normal employer would? Again, they did that, they've been doing it continuously over past 3 years. Some people are excited, some people don't care, but some - a population that's definitely overrepresented in HN comments - just stubbornly refuse to try. Now that the answers are in, and they speak in favor of AI, the companies are doing what "any normal employer would": trying to get the stubborn employers to do their job they way their bosses want them to. (In fact, normal employers would be more eager to fire people who keep refusing top-down instructions - but it's also obvious this technology is experimental; the models and harnesses get more powerful faster than people can learn to use them - so carrots make more sense than sticks in this transition period. Stubborn people begrudgingly using those tools offer an entirely unique perspective and explore use cases and approaches that you won't get from excited adopters.)
  - oblio 4mo ago
    > the worthiness of the adoption was blindingly obvious at that point Everything is so "blindingly obvious" yet nobody can point to ANY serious peer reviewed studies that prove it. I'm patient, I'll wait.
- satvikpendem 4mo ago
  Because people don't know what they want until they have and use it. Faster horses, etc. One can only really implement systemic change from the top down, as Moloch indicates.
- jasondigitized 4mo ago
  Because Japanese hand tools are objectively less efficient than power tools in a carpentry shop. The guys that want to use hand tools can go work in a boutique that charges a premium for that level of craftsmanship. If you told them to use power tools, no amount of utility would convince them to use them, with most of their justification being psychological. Also, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
- AussieWog93 4mo ago
  >If you want to see if the tools work, why don't you just ask your employees? Like any normal employer would? I run a small business with two employees. N=2 here, of course, but one of them will experiment with any new process you introduce (as well as plenty more that you don't!) The other will keep doing what he's always been doing, even if it's frustrating and inefficient, unless you monitor him and force him to use the new process. I could imagine most "normal employers" would understand that both type of person exists and, assuming you're getting good first impressions from group A, it's usually better off in the long run to shove the new process down group B's throat. (This isn't to say that the "Group B" employee is less valuable or anything - he is more conscientious and reliable than anyone else we've ever hired - but just that different people need different management styles)
  - sevenseacat 4mo ago
    In my experience, your first dev will have four thousand ideas and experiments on the go, and leave an absolute mess in their wake. And your second will be struggling to clean up that mess while also getting their own work done. Of course, you expect the same level of work from both of them, but because person two has to do a bunch of person one's work as well as their own, person one ends up looking better and gets praised by management. I'm totally not bitter at all.
  - latexr 4mo ago
    That feels backwards. > it's usually better off in the long run to shove the new process down group B's throat. > (…) the "Group B" employee (…) is more conscientious and reliable than anyone else we've ever hired If employee B is proving themselves to be valuable and reliable, then you should trust them to make the best decisions for how they’re going to go about their work and support them. Leave the door open for them to try different things, but no one likes having processes shoved down their throats (your words). All you’re doing is making them unhappy and more likely to leave to go work for someone who’ll value them like they deserve.
    - AussieWog93 4mo ago
      Thank you for taking the time out of your day to explain the best way to manage someone you've never met, working in an organisation you know nothing about.
- SR2Z 4mo ago
  > Why would a carpentry shop buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of power tools without consulting with their employees to see what they actually need to get their job done more effectively? I mean, the difference in the metaphor is that we have pretty fully understood carpentry for many hundreds of years. We still find it difficult to write even simple software to address all our needs, as is evidenced by the insane pay in our industry. Carpenters can suggest tools because they know what's out there. The same was not true about LLMs a year ago. > That is way too charitable, people were being fired based on these metrics People get fired for all kinds of reasons including no reason at all. Oftentimes leadership even lies about the real reasons for firing people because they don't sound good! I'm gonna be blunt: if you're in software and you refuse to use AI for moral reasons, I think you should be fired. There's being principled and there's being obstinate and the difference between the two is how well you can convince people that you _have_ principles. Most LLM-hating people fall short on this point, because > do I really need to link the Jensen Huang quote? Sure! Link it again, we all know it's highly immoral when shovel salesmen try to make you want shovels. > If you want to see if the tools work, why don't you just ask your employees? Like any normal employer would? I do not like this HN take of "let's do this thing that works great in small companies and then just blindly pretend that it'll also work at the largest companies in the world!" No, this doesn't work at "normal companies" because you cannot "just ask" 30k+ employees what they want. Employees, like EVERYONE ELSE, are resistant to change. If I, as CEO of a company, want to get my company to try Claude I have to measure tokens to see if it's getting used. That's it. There's no wave of delusion here.
  - ligne 4mo ago
    Have you considered using a more scientific metric, like the number of bugs being closed or the number of typewriter ribbons being used up?
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
  > The logic of buying the tools then forcing the employees to use them "or else" is completely backwards in any sane world People are stubborn. A lot of productivity improvements had to be almost forced upon farmers, for example. Even when early adopters demonstrated the benefits, a decent fraction of them just didn’t want to change.
  - hnarn 4mo ago
    > People are stubborn. This is just a variant of the argument ”people don’t know what’s good for them”. You’re very close to the actual answer, which is that the aforementioned ”manager class” is simply convinced that they understand reality better than those below them, which is quite frankly absurd considering the fact that managers very rarely do any of the ”real work” that these tools supposedly make redundant, and yet they still believe themselves to understand the potential better.
    - anonymars 4mo ago
      Maybe multiple things can be true Like when doctors insisted they didn't need to wash their hands (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis#Conflict_with_established_medical_opinion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis#Conflict_with...) or "science advances one funeral at a time" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle)
  - Lutger 4mo ago
    And not few of those 'productivity improvements' for farmers have had disastrous consequences, even though what I think you are referring to has been implemented with far greater discernment and empirical basis than the current AI revolution. People are stubborn, but sometimes for good reason. Let the stubborn people hold on to their practices, if the innovators are right they will eventually fold anyway.
    - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
      > not few of those 'productivity improvements' for farmers have had disastrous consequences Sure. Many have not. I’m thinking of stuff like ox-drawn and then mechanized ploughs, four- versus three-crop rotation, et cetera. The point is there is pushback regardless of benefit and even after it’s been demonstrated. Plenty of people are fine being comfortable. Which is fine. But it also explains why companies and societies with a nudge feature do better. > if the innovators are right they will eventually fold anyway Again, sure. If it’s their land, it gets acquired. If it’s your land they’re tilling, you get a say. I’m not saying all-nor even most—pushback is unfounded. Just that there are plenty of cases where it is, and the solution there is to push through the change.
- faangguyindia 4mo ago
  >Why would a carpentry shop buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of power tools without consulting with their employees to see what they actually need to get their job done more effectively? T What happens if employees say no power tools are needed and after a few months a competition shows up with power tools and hires a bunch of noobs and beating your production numbers and sales? Your employees simply may leave the company and work for them and learn the new culture at this new competitor. Is there any law which prevents people from moving between companies? No? Then the promoters of that company are going to do what they think is fit to keep them in business and stay competitive. Many times they'll be wrong, sometimes they'll be right.
  - watwut 4mo ago
    > beating your production numbers and sales? That did not happened.
    - HDThoreaun 4mo ago
      Many, many hand tool shops were outcompeted by power tool users.
- TeriyakiBomb 4mo ago
  To use your analogy again, it's kind of like the shop boss buying everyone a table saw and then saying "The best way to use the table saw is just experiment with it, it's the fastest and most accurate straight cut we can get - the future is table saw."
  - TeMPOraL 4mo ago
    Yes, this is, in fact, how adoption of table saws and other such tools looked like, while they were still new tools. The basic form and function was established and its utility proven in both testing and early adopters, but as new kind of general tool on the market, every user from "early majority" was still writing the operating playbook for their specific shop conditions and kind of work they're doing. So yes, it's a great analogy. We're right now well in the stage where bosses say, "evidence is in and conclusively shows this is useful for us, now the job is figuring out exactly how to work it into our particular business".
    - Lutger 4mo ago
      > figuring out exactly how to work it into our particular business This is the most crucial bit. Neither ramming it down developers throats nor rejecting it wholesale is particularly productive. You need the conservative people onboard as well, to discover critical edges and failure modes. Including their criticism in the adoption process instead of bluntly banning it is the smarter move. Of course, there will be a few people who just don't play, they will fold eventually or be let go.
    - TeriyakiBomb 3mo ago
      No, that's not what this analogy is about. At all. See, table saws are dangerous. Famously so. One of, if not the most dangerous tools available to the general public. They spin quickly with lots of torque and pull things in faster than you can react. Pressure can also send loose pieces of wood backwards at high speed. Fast enough to pass through a person sometimes. It's like being hit with an arrow. Tablesaw accidents can remove fingers and hands instantly, puncture organs. They can be used safely but they're circumstantial, the worst thing you can do with a table saw is experiment. Once you realise there's a 12-inch razor sharp blade spinning at 3000rpm with up to 5HP you begin to respect how dangerous it could be and want to warn others. It's intentionally hyperbolic. But you see what I'm saying here?
- jamiecurle 4mo ago
  I see the point but, I'm not really sure the analogy holds up here. If i was in a cabinet shop and had to joint, plane and resaw and cross cut a pile of timber fresh from the saw mill for the next job I'd be very grateful for the jointer, the planer, the bandsaw and the table saw. I'd also be very grateful for the dust extraction. In in total agreement with you though, forcing tools on employees is very dumb and is terrible leadership. Ask your people what they need to be optimally exceptional and go get them it. Then let them get on with it.
  - andsoitis 4mo ago
    > In in total agreement with you though, forcing tools on employees is very dumb and is terrible leadership. Ask your people what they need to be optimally exceptional and go get them it. Then let them get on with it. Some employees want AI tools, others don't. Standardizing SDLC workflows > each person does their own thing. So now you have to choose: do you require AI tool use that fit into a new SDLC? Or don't you?
    - jamiecurle 4mo ago
      I don't see why they have to be mutually exclusive. Assuming the vendor risk profile is acceptable to the infosec people and procurement are happy with the AI tools vendor relationship, then it's a tool inside the information security perimeter. As long as there's evidence that work meets quality gates for any required customer audits, and your customers are happy and in the loop that AI is a thing that may or may not be used to produce the service, then those engineers that want it can have it and those that don't, don't. Feels like a revision to an SDLC rather than a new one. Without seeing the SDLC it's hard to find common ground though. It really depends on how it's written and implemented and of course: culture. In the example we're working from sounds like the tools are being forced on people, and that's less infosec, SDLC and more unbearably bad leadership.
      - andsoitis 4mo ago
        Not sure why you bring in "vendors" and "infosec". I'm simply talking about the situation of a software engineering team building something together needing to have similar workflows (supported by tooling/software) in order to work together effectively.
- oooyay 4mo ago
  > Why would a carpentry shop buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of power tools without consulting with their employees to see what they actually need to get their job done more effectively? The logic of buying the tools then forcing the employees to use them "or else" is completely backwards in any sane world. This is how it's gone down throughout history. It's why we remember the Luddites, textile workers who started smashing stocking frames and power looms because the machinery was introduced over their objections. The whole goal was to undercut the craftsmen's wages and bargaining power. So, no, your expectation to be consulted was never going to happen and has not happened throughout history as industrialization has advanced.
apsurd 4mo ago
> but suggesting that the people who run FAANG don't understand the dangers of bad metrics is... interesting You're far too charitable. Understanding has nothing to do with it. Big companies are too far insulated from bad metrics. Middle managers get away with anything and everything because their decisions are too far removed from reality. And they're nowhere to be seen when the other shoe drops. And they'll just leave to a promotion elsewhere if they stay and results are bad. Everything is far removed from reality in bigco. So you get a bunch of theater and house-playing with "data-driven" posters up on the wall. It's a show that everyone is aware of and seemingly we all still attend.
trescenzi 4mo ago
The level of trust in leadership is remarkable. There’s reasonable ways to have people try power tools. Have one team use power tools and another hand tools and see the outcome. The mandate was literally “the more sawdust you create the more money you’ll make”. Nothing of value is learned by that mandate. Sure it’ll make people use power tools but it won’t cause anyone to learn how to use them to make furniture. They might understand the danger of bad metric but that doesn’t mean they aren’t victims of them. If there was intentionality here it was lazy as hell at best.
mh2266 4mo ago
> suggesting that the people who run FAANG don't understand the dangers of bad metrics is... interesting. from my time in FAANG... that seems about correct. Probably the people at the absolute top don't want to just pointlessly burn tokens, but pass that down the chain and eventually the rumor mill turns that into "tokens are an input for your performance review" and people start running Wiggum loops to fix minor typos or linters or something—especially if you do it at a time when every company seems to be doing layoffs.
hcs 4mo ago
> If you're a carpentry shop that just bought power tools for the first time and you're worried that your employees are sticking with hand tools because that's what they know, then you look for sawdust. Or count the fingers, I guess. It's all fun and games until someone looses AI.
geophile 4mo ago
Bad managers, in general, grab a metric and then unthinkingly optimize it. I’ve never worked for FAANG, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t have bad managers too.
Arainach 4mo ago
> the people who run FAANG don't understand the dangers of bad metrics is... interesting They don't. They want some metric to support what they want to do and don't care about good metrics at all. I've spent the vast majority of my career in FAANGs and it's been the pattern everywhere. Right now my org has a senior director who is constantly battering managers to tell their reports to fill out the weekly surveys. Why are the employees not filling out the surveys? Because instead of the old once a year large survey with questions about various levels (including local teams where management cared about the numbers and I could see the actions they took) we now get a survey every week with questions that are meaningless and I have no answer for. "How does team X deliver on its priorities"? Team X has O(10K) peoples and a barely countable infinity of projects. Most of which I don't know about and most of which I'm not supposed to know about since things are compartmentalized. So I don't know what team X's priorities are, I don't know how they deliver on them, and I never will know. Asking me and my colleagues is a waste of time and money. ...but none of that matters because the directors want "data" and they want a dashboard showing that we're all giving them "data".
- deleted 4mo ago
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hansmayer 4mo ago
[dead]
wlesieutre 4mo ago
Looking for sawdust is a far cry from having a leaderboard of who turned the most wood and electricity into dumpsters full of sawdust
bee_rider 4mo ago
The switch away from hand to power tools was a while ago but not, like, ancient history. In the era with fairly widespread literacy and records. Did this sort of check for sawdust thing actually happen?
lazide 4mo ago
I worked at FAANG. If anything, people are not nearly skeptical enough about how dumb it is with all this going on. People are (in this analogy) building sawdust farms there.
eloisius 4mo ago
They didn’t measure sawdust accumulation. They measured the electricity bill.
surgical_fire 4mo ago
Or... If you are a carpentry shop owner, you should understand what exactly the power tools you acquired are good for, how and if they can actually be used by your employees for them to do their job. This, obviously, presumes that the person managing this hypothetical carpentry shop knows what they are doing. It's almost laughable. In truth the carpentry shop owner manages on vibes, has no idea what employees do and also doen't trust them, and tells employees he wants to see a lot of sawdust in the workshop floor.
marcta 4mo ago
Why would you look for sawdust? That's a waste product. You would motivate everyone to stop producing actual furniture, and just buy the biggest bits of wood to turn entirely into sawdust. Which is textbook Godhart's law. This is what's happening here, you have people setting up two chatbots to churn useless tokens at each other, making only sawdust. I contend that tokens per se are actually a waste product, or at least non-value add. The end user doesn't actually care how many tokens were used to make a thing. If you could get the same result with fewer tokens, that would be an improvement.
philipallstar 4mo ago
> If you're a carpentry shop that just bought power tools for the first time and you're worried that your employees are sticking with hand tools because that's what they know, then you look for sawdust. But to make this work, you cannot tell your workers that you are looking for sawdust, because you just gave them tools that make sawdust very easily.

by SR2Z 4mo ago

cyphar 4mo ago

Why would a carpentry shop buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of power tools without consulting with their employees to see what they actually need to get their job done more effectively? The logic of buying the tools then forcing the employees to use them "or else" is completely backwards in any sane world. (Of course, we've all had bosses that went to some marketing seminar and come back having been tricked^Wsold into buying some wizz-bang widget that we need to now integrate because of a sunk-cost fallacy, but I thought everyone was on the same page that this is not how normal procurement was supposed to work.) > the point is that if you wanna see if the tools are working you wanna see proof they're actually being used. That is way too charitable, people were being fired based on these metrics and people were absolutely talking about token burn as being a metric for productivity (do I really need to link the Jensen Huang quote?). That isn't an indication of this hysteria being based on "just trying to see if the tools work". If you want to see if the tools work, why don't you just ask your employees? Like any normal employer would?

paulddraper 4mo ago
Because those power tools had just been invented and no one had experience with them. Though in theory power tools are faster than hand tools.
- JoshTriplett 4mo ago
  So do a workshop on power tools, measure their efficacy and the quality of the result, do some demonstration videos on power tools, get people to compare, seek feedback on their usage. Don't count electricity and sawdust, or you'll find people getting very good at expensively turning blocks of wood into sawdust.
  - no-name-here 4mo ago
    Is the idea that most stubborn employees would adopt AI if their company made videos showing internal metrics that AI is better? > Don’t count electricity and sawdust I agree that it seems wasteful, but is there some better way to accomplish it at the scale of hundreds, or hundreds of thousands, etc? I'm personally doubtful that stubborn employees would switch even if a video provided internal metrics, videos, etc.
    - JoshTriplett 4mo ago
      Perhaps don't start out with the conclusion that it's obviously better and anyone rejecting it is just "stubborn".
      - TeMPOraL 4mo ago
        Nobody started out with that conclusions. The tests and experiments and workshops and consulting with select employees you propose, were all done 2-3 years ago. Results are in, but a chunk of population decides to ignore them and obstinately continue believing and claiming that it doesn't work, which is a conclusion they started out with.
        oblio 4mo ago
        > Results are in Awesome, can you please share those results? Surely they would be all over Nature, Science, IEEE, etc.
        TeMPOraL 4mo ago
dijksterhuis 4mo ago
> If you want to see if the tools work, why don't you just ask your employees? Like any normal employer would? because that would require actually admitting that employees are the people in an organisation who are responsible for the success of that organisation, rather than the people higher up the org chart.
- bitwize 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - SR2Z 4mo ago
    Do you actually have a job? Do you talk to your coworkers? This is an insane take. Plenty of people are critical of AI at my job despite a big push to use it. I find the comparison to NK distasteful, coming from someone who presumably is pretty well paid and can quit their job whenever they want. If you're feeling humiliated... well, I don't think it's because your boss wants you to try AI.
    - watwut 4mo ago
      I had seen exact same dynamic as he describes. So yeah, he is speaking to people and coworkers. That is how he knows.
    - oblio 4mo ago
      > Plenty of people are critical of AI at my job despite a big push to use it. Are they critical to you and your 10 people team, aka a small circle or are they critical in the all hands Q&A in front of 500 employees?
      - voakbasda 4mo ago
        Having been the guy to speak the uncomfortable truths at such meetings, I can tell you that does not end well for anyone. Expect to look for another job shortly afterwards.
HDThoreaun 4mo ago
The logic of trusting employees who are worried that power tools will replace them to utilize power tools effectively is completely backwards in any sane world. People don’t like change, sometimes it needs to be forced on them.
- dijksterhuis 4mo ago
  > who are worried that power tools will replace them maybe, just maybe, it would have been a better idea to engage with employees first rather than posting on linkedin about how everyone is going to lose their jobs. cos it's the kinds of people trying to force this stuff on employees that are the ones who have been shouting about that from the rooftops.
  - SR2Z 4mo ago
    If you take LinkedIn at face value everyone who uses the Internet is a sociopath who lives for no purpose beyond maximizing shareholder value. Seriously, some of the most deranged things I've ever read were by relatively normal people trying to promote themselves on LinkedIn. What people SAY does not matter nearly as much as what everyone KNOWS and it's pretty damn clear that AI is never going to be able to replace humans in complex domains. Every time a frontier lab announces a breakthrough it's pretty obvious that the setup was more complicated than "hey chat prove the Riemann hypothesis." The world is gonna need skilled human beings to drive LLMs, no matter how desperately some people like to pretend otherwise.
- agentultra 4mo ago
  Doubt. People brought in all kinds of web applications in the early Web 2.0 era because corporate IT was being too stingy (for a lot of reasons). People will find efficiencies on their job on their own. No need to denigrate them.
  - HDThoreaun 4mo ago
    I don’t know, at my company at least tons of devs were holding out on ai usage until the token maxing stuff really started. It was beyond clear by that point that coding agents were a productivity multiplier.
woah 4mo ago
> Why would a carpentry shop buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of power tools without consulting with their employees to see what they actually need to get their job done more effectively? Are you suggesting that changes to new production technologies are always driven bottom up by line workers? I'm guessing that historically that's rare.
- oblio 4mo ago
  Historically that rarely happens because industrial equipment is/was generally too expensive for the average worker to purchase on their own, plus workers usually have a budget of roughly 0 to buy extra tools, especially expensive ones. But to give you an example, also roughly 0 companies made developers use Linux and still many developers choose it, so bottom up improvements happen in a decent chunk of cases. Nobody paid for PostgreSQL promotion. Or Python, etc.
  - TeMPOraL 4mo ago
    > so bottom up improvements happen in a decent chunk of cases. Nobody paid for PostgreSQL promotion. Or Python, etc. It does, but for better or worse, it's an anomaly. Even now, maybe nobody was paid for PostgreSQL or Python promotion, but modern OSS tools and programming languages usually have a business backing it. Linux, too, wasn't commercially promoted until it was; RedHat isn't exactly a charity after all. Conversely, no one paid for initial AI promotion either - ChatGPT exploded organically after release, and for the first year or two, companies had a problem because a good chunk of their staff, including especially non-engineers, discovered just how useful it was and wanted to use it at work, casually violating every internal policy, bylaw and even regulatory policies about data sharing. The massive spend on promotion - including first-party spend - came later, but at that point it was already obvious ~everyone is going to be buying it. I suppose bottom-up vs. top-down may be in part about how mature a technology and industry is.
    - WhiteOwlLion 3mo ago
      Then those same organizations that "give in" end up providing inferior AI tools, and you face the dilemma of either using poor models and accepting poor results or sharing data with better models that may not be governed correctly.
TeMPOraL 4mo ago
> Why would a carpentry shop buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of power tools without consulting with their employees to see what they actually need to get their job done more effectively? The logic of buying the tools then forcing the employees to use them "or else" is completely backwards in any sane world. For one, software tools are cheap, especially with OSS in the mix. You're buying one "tool" and paying for operational expenses that scale with total usage across all company. But secondly, and more importantly, the "consulting" and discussing was done over the period of last 3 years, by ~1 year ago the high-level conclusions were pretty much locked in, the worthiness of the adoption was blindingly obvious at that point, so I can see why tokenmaxxing would be where this ended up, even though (here I disagree with the article a bit) the tools aren't at the "compounding correctness" stage just yet. It's really quite simple: the stick didn't work (telling people in increasingly direct ways to try using AI for stuff), so they tried the carrot. $deity knows a good chunk of engineers will inadvertently fall for any trick that involves a scoreboard. That holds even when they're perfectly aware they're being tricked. > If you want to see if the tools work, why don't you just ask your employees? Like any normal employer would? Again, they did that, they've been doing it continuously over past 3 years. Some people are excited, some people don't care, but some - a population that's definitely overrepresented in HN comments - just stubbornly refuse to try. Now that the answers are in, and they speak in favor of AI, the companies are doing what "any normal employer would": trying to get the stubborn employers to do their job they way their bosses want them to. (In fact, normal employers would be more eager to fire people who keep refusing top-down instructions - but it's also obvious this technology is experimental; the models and harnesses get more powerful faster than people can learn to use them - so carrots make more sense than sticks in this transition period. Stubborn people begrudgingly using those tools offer an entirely unique perspective and explore use cases and approaches that you won't get from excited adopters.)
- oblio 4mo ago
  > the worthiness of the adoption was blindingly obvious at that point Everything is so "blindingly obvious" yet nobody can point to ANY serious peer reviewed studies that prove it. I'm patient, I'll wait.
satvikpendem 4mo ago
Because people don't know what they want until they have and use it. Faster horses, etc. One can only really implement systemic change from the top down, as Moloch indicates.
jasondigitized 4mo ago
Because Japanese hand tools are objectively less efficient than power tools in a carpentry shop. The guys that want to use hand tools can go work in a boutique that charges a premium for that level of craftsmanship. If you told them to use power tools, no amount of utility would convince them to use them, with most of their justification being psychological. Also, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
AussieWog93 4mo ago
>If you want to see if the tools work, why don't you just ask your employees? Like any normal employer would? I run a small business with two employees. N=2 here, of course, but one of them will experiment with any new process you introduce (as well as plenty more that you don't!) The other will keep doing what he's always been doing, even if it's frustrating and inefficient, unless you monitor him and force him to use the new process. I could imagine most "normal employers" would understand that both type of person exists and, assuming you're getting good first impressions from group A, it's usually better off in the long run to shove the new process down group B's throat. (This isn't to say that the "Group B" employee is less valuable or anything - he is more conscientious and reliable than anyone else we've ever hired - but just that different people need different management styles)
- sevenseacat 4mo ago
  In my experience, your first dev will have four thousand ideas and experiments on the go, and leave an absolute mess in their wake. And your second will be struggling to clean up that mess while also getting their own work done. Of course, you expect the same level of work from both of them, but because person two has to do a bunch of person one's work as well as their own, person one ends up looking better and gets praised by management. I'm totally not bitter at all.
- latexr 4mo ago
  That feels backwards. > it's usually better off in the long run to shove the new process down group B's throat. > (…) the "Group B" employee (…) is more conscientious and reliable than anyone else we've ever hired If employee B is proving themselves to be valuable and reliable, then you should trust them to make the best decisions for how they’re going to go about their work and support them. Leave the door open for them to try different things, but no one likes having processes shoved down their throats (your words). All you’re doing is making them unhappy and more likely to leave to go work for someone who’ll value them like they deserve.
  - AussieWog93 4mo ago
    Thank you for taking the time out of your day to explain the best way to manage someone you've never met, working in an organisation you know nothing about.
SR2Z 4mo ago
> Why would a carpentry shop buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of power tools without consulting with their employees to see what they actually need to get their job done more effectively? I mean, the difference in the metaphor is that we have pretty fully understood carpentry for many hundreds of years. We still find it difficult to write even simple software to address all our needs, as is evidenced by the insane pay in our industry. Carpenters can suggest tools because they know what's out there. The same was not true about LLMs a year ago. > That is way too charitable, people were being fired based on these metrics People get fired for all kinds of reasons including no reason at all. Oftentimes leadership even lies about the real reasons for firing people because they don't sound good! I'm gonna be blunt: if you're in software and you refuse to use AI for moral reasons, I think you should be fired. There's being principled and there's being obstinate and the difference between the two is how well you can convince people that you _have_ principles. Most LLM-hating people fall short on this point, because > do I really need to link the Jensen Huang quote? Sure! Link it again, we all know it's highly immoral when shovel salesmen try to make you want shovels. > If you want to see if the tools work, why don't you just ask your employees? Like any normal employer would? I do not like this HN take of "let's do this thing that works great in small companies and then just blindly pretend that it'll also work at the largest companies in the world!" No, this doesn't work at "normal companies" because you cannot "just ask" 30k+ employees what they want. Employees, like EVERYONE ELSE, are resistant to change. If I, as CEO of a company, want to get my company to try Claude I have to measure tokens to see if it's getting used. That's it. There's no wave of delusion here.
- ligne 4mo ago
  Have you considered using a more scientific metric, like the number of bugs being closed or the number of typewriter ribbons being used up?
JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
> The logic of buying the tools then forcing the employees to use them "or else" is completely backwards in any sane world People are stubborn. A lot of productivity improvements had to be almost forced upon farmers, for example. Even when early adopters demonstrated the benefits, a decent fraction of them just didn’t want to change.
- hnarn 4mo ago
  > People are stubborn. This is just a variant of the argument ”people don’t know what’s good for them”. You’re very close to the actual answer, which is that the aforementioned ”manager class” is simply convinced that they understand reality better than those below them, which is quite frankly absurd considering the fact that managers very rarely do any of the ”real work” that these tools supposedly make redundant, and yet they still believe themselves to understand the potential better.
  - anonymars 4mo ago
    Maybe multiple things can be true Like when doctors insisted they didn't need to wash their hands (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis#Conflict_with_established_medical_opinion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis#Conflict_with...) or "science advances one funeral at a time" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle)
- Lutger 4mo ago
  And not few of those 'productivity improvements' for farmers have had disastrous consequences, even though what I think you are referring to has been implemented with far greater discernment and empirical basis than the current AI revolution. People are stubborn, but sometimes for good reason. Let the stubborn people hold on to their practices, if the innovators are right they will eventually fold anyway.
  - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
    > not few of those 'productivity improvements' for farmers have had disastrous consequences Sure. Many have not. I’m thinking of stuff like ox-drawn and then mechanized ploughs, four- versus three-crop rotation, et cetera. The point is there is pushback regardless of benefit and even after it’s been demonstrated. Plenty of people are fine being comfortable. Which is fine. But it also explains why companies and societies with a nudge feature do better. > if the innovators are right they will eventually fold anyway Again, sure. If it’s their land, it gets acquired. If it’s your land they’re tilling, you get a say. I’m not saying all-nor even most—pushback is unfounded. Just that there are plenty of cases where it is, and the solution there is to push through the change.
faangguyindia 4mo ago
>Why would a carpentry shop buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of power tools without consulting with their employees to see what they actually need to get their job done more effectively? T What happens if employees say no power tools are needed and after a few months a competition shows up with power tools and hires a bunch of noobs and beating your production numbers and sales? Your employees simply may leave the company and work for them and learn the new culture at this new competitor. Is there any law which prevents people from moving between companies? No? Then the promoters of that company are going to do what they think is fit to keep them in business and stay competitive. Many times they'll be wrong, sometimes they'll be right.
- watwut 4mo ago
  > beating your production numbers and sales? That did not happened.
  - HDThoreaun 4mo ago
    Many, many hand tool shops were outcompeted by power tool users.
TeriyakiBomb 4mo ago
To use your analogy again, it's kind of like the shop boss buying everyone a table saw and then saying "The best way to use the table saw is just experiment with it, it's the fastest and most accurate straight cut we can get - the future is table saw."
- TeMPOraL 4mo ago
  Yes, this is, in fact, how adoption of table saws and other such tools looked like, while they were still new tools. The basic form and function was established and its utility proven in both testing and early adopters, but as new kind of general tool on the market, every user from "early majority" was still writing the operating playbook for their specific shop conditions and kind of work they're doing. So yes, it's a great analogy. We're right now well in the stage where bosses say, "evidence is in and conclusively shows this is useful for us, now the job is figuring out exactly how to work it into our particular business".
  - Lutger 4mo ago
    > figuring out exactly how to work it into our particular business This is the most crucial bit. Neither ramming it down developers throats nor rejecting it wholesale is particularly productive. You need the conservative people onboard as well, to discover critical edges and failure modes. Including their criticism in the adoption process instead of bluntly banning it is the smarter move. Of course, there will be a few people who just don't play, they will fold eventually or be let go.
  - TeriyakiBomb 3mo ago
    No, that's not what this analogy is about. At all. See, table saws are dangerous. Famously so. One of, if not the most dangerous tools available to the general public. They spin quickly with lots of torque and pull things in faster than you can react. Pressure can also send loose pieces of wood backwards at high speed. Fast enough to pass through a person sometimes. It's like being hit with an arrow. Tablesaw accidents can remove fingers and hands instantly, puncture organs. They can be used safely but they're circumstantial, the worst thing you can do with a table saw is experiment. Once you realise there's a 12-inch razor sharp blade spinning at 3000rpm with up to 5HP you begin to respect how dangerous it could be and want to warn others. It's intentionally hyperbolic. But you see what I'm saying here?
jamiecurle 4mo ago
I see the point but, I'm not really sure the analogy holds up here. If i was in a cabinet shop and had to joint, plane and resaw and cross cut a pile of timber fresh from the saw mill for the next job I'd be very grateful for the jointer, the planer, the bandsaw and the table saw. I'd also be very grateful for the dust extraction. In in total agreement with you though, forcing tools on employees is very dumb and is terrible leadership. Ask your people what they need to be optimally exceptional and go get them it. Then let them get on with it.
- andsoitis 4mo ago
  > In in total agreement with you though, forcing tools on employees is very dumb and is terrible leadership. Ask your people what they need to be optimally exceptional and go get them it. Then let them get on with it. Some employees want AI tools, others don't. Standardizing SDLC workflows > each person does their own thing. So now you have to choose: do you require AI tool use that fit into a new SDLC? Or don't you?
  - jamiecurle 4mo ago
    I don't see why they have to be mutually exclusive. Assuming the vendor risk profile is acceptable to the infosec people and procurement are happy with the AI tools vendor relationship, then it's a tool inside the information security perimeter. As long as there's evidence that work meets quality gates for any required customer audits, and your customers are happy and in the loop that AI is a thing that may or may not be used to produce the service, then those engineers that want it can have it and those that don't, don't. Feels like a revision to an SDLC rather than a new one. Without seeing the SDLC it's hard to find common ground though. It really depends on how it's written and implemented and of course: culture. In the example we're working from sounds like the tools are being forced on people, and that's less infosec, SDLC and more unbearably bad leadership.
    - andsoitis 4mo ago
      Not sure why you bring in "vendors" and "infosec". I'm simply talking about the situation of a software engineering team building something together needing to have similar workflows (supported by tooling/software) in order to work together effectively.
oooyay 4mo ago
> Why would a carpentry shop buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of power tools without consulting with their employees to see what they actually need to get their job done more effectively? The logic of buying the tools then forcing the employees to use them "or else" is completely backwards in any sane world. This is how it's gone down throughout history. It's why we remember the Luddites, textile workers who started smashing stocking frames and power looms because the machinery was introduced over their objections. The whole goal was to undercut the craftsmen's wages and bargaining power. So, no, your expectation to be consulted was never going to happen and has not happened throughout history as industrialization has advanced.

apsurd 4mo ago

> but suggesting that the people who run FAANG don't understand the dangers of bad metrics is... interesting You're far too charitable. Understanding has nothing to do with it. Big companies are too far insulated from bad metrics. Middle managers get away with anything and everything because their decisions are too far removed from reality. And they're nowhere to be seen when the other shoe drops. And they'll just leave to a promotion elsewhere if they stay and results are bad. Everything is far removed from reality in bigco. So you get a bunch of theater and house-playing with "data-driven" posters up on the wall. It's a show that everyone is aware of and seemingly we all still attend.

trescenzi 4mo ago

The level of trust in leadership is remarkable. There’s reasonable ways to have people try power tools. Have one team use power tools and another hand tools and see the outcome. The mandate was literally “the more sawdust you create the more money you’ll make”. Nothing of value is learned by that mandate. Sure it’ll make people use power tools but it won’t cause anyone to learn how to use them to make furniture. They might understand the danger of bad metric but that doesn’t mean they aren’t victims of them. If there was intentionality here it was lazy as hell at best.

mh2266 4mo ago

> suggesting that the people who run FAANG don't understand the dangers of bad metrics is... interesting. from my time in FAANG... that seems about correct. Probably the people at the absolute top don't want to just pointlessly burn tokens, but pass that down the chain and eventually the rumor mill turns that into "tokens are an input for your performance review" and people start running Wiggum loops to fix minor typos or linters or something—especially if you do it at a time when every company seems to be doing layoffs.

hcs 4mo ago

> If you're a carpentry shop that just bought power tools for the first time and you're worried that your employees are sticking with hand tools because that's what they know, then you look for sawdust. Or count the fingers, I guess. It's all fun and games until someone looses AI.

geophile 4mo ago

Bad managers, in general, grab a metric and then unthinkingly optimize it. I’ve never worked for FAANG, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t have bad managers too.

Arainach 4mo ago

> the people who run FAANG don't understand the dangers of bad metrics is... interesting They don't. They want some metric to support what they want to do and don't care about good metrics at all. I've spent the vast majority of my career in FAANGs and it's been the pattern everywhere. Right now my org has a senior director who is constantly battering managers to tell their reports to fill out the weekly surveys. Why are the employees not filling out the surveys? Because instead of the old once a year large survey with questions about various levels (including local teams where management cared about the numbers and I could see the actions they took) we now get a survey every week with questions that are meaningless and I have no answer for. "How does team X deliver on its priorities"? Team X has O(10K) peoples and a barely countable infinity of projects. Most of which I don't know about and most of which I'm not supposed to know about since things are compartmentalized. So I don't know what team X's priorities are, I don't know how they deliver on them, and I never will know. Asking me and my colleagues is a waste of time and money. ...but none of that matters because the directors want "data" and they want a dashboard showing that we're all giving them "data".

deleted 4mo ago
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hansmayer 4mo ago

[dead]

wlesieutre 4mo ago

Looking for sawdust is a far cry from having a leaderboard of who turned the most wood and electricity into dumpsters full of sawdust

bee_rider 4mo ago

The switch away from hand to power tools was a while ago but not, like, ancient history. In the era with fairly widespread literacy and records. Did this sort of check for sawdust thing actually happen?

lazide 4mo ago

I worked at FAANG. If anything, people are not nearly skeptical enough about how dumb it is with all this going on. People are (in this analogy) building sawdust farms there.

eloisius 4mo ago

They didn’t measure sawdust accumulation. They measured the electricity bill.

surgical_fire 4mo ago

Or... If you are a carpentry shop owner, you should understand what exactly the power tools you acquired are good for, how and if they can actually be used by your employees for them to do their job. This, obviously, presumes that the person managing this hypothetical carpentry shop knows what they are doing. It's almost laughable. In truth the carpentry shop owner manages on vibes, has no idea what employees do and also doen't trust them, and tells employees he wants to see a lot of sawdust in the workshop floor.

marcta 4mo ago

Why would you look for sawdust? That's a waste product. You would motivate everyone to stop producing actual furniture, and just buy the biggest bits of wood to turn entirely into sawdust. Which is textbook Godhart's law. This is what's happening here, you have people setting up two chatbots to churn useless tokens at each other, making only sawdust. I contend that tokens per se are actually a waste product, or at least non-value add. The end user doesn't actually care how many tokens were used to make a thing. If you could get the same result with fewer tokens, that would be an improvement.

philipallstar 4mo ago

> If you're a carpentry shop that just bought power tools for the first time and you're worried that your employees are sticking with hand tools because that's what they know, then you look for sawdust. But to make this work, you cannot tell your workers that you are looking for sawdust, because you just gave them tools that make sawdust very easily.