4 ms·
In my professional career, my employers give me a lot more assignments than exams.
by jimmar 1mo ago
In my professional career, my employers give me a lot more assignments than exams.
- alpha_squared 1mo agoYour career is a continual exam and the assignments are just parts of it.
- oreally 1mo agoDisagree. School exams test for academia-readiness too. And sometimes the schools and lecturers are filled with ideology irrelevant to real work. Career exams tend to be a mix but a lot less ideology.
- phoghed 1mo agoFortune cookie ass statement. Your career is more akin to the totality of school than it is to any specific facet of it imo. The social aspects are more important than the exam sitting most of the time.
- alpha_squared 1mo ago> Fortune cookie ass statement. > The social aspects are more important than the exam sitting most of the time. To spell it out more clearly: every single aspect of your career is an exam. The interview is an exam, quite literally. The day-to-day responsibilities (meetings, planning, problem-solving, collaborating) are parts of the exam. If you're failing at those or automating them away, then what is your role? The assignments (solve X bug or add Y feature) are parts of the exam too. Failing to do these things will mean that, yes, you are failing the exam.
- phoghed 1mo agoAnd yet if nobody likes you your career is going to stall. If you’re annoying, if you smell bad, if you dress poorly, if you’re fat and ugly, just like in school you’re going to have worse career outcomes. And I could also call most of those things assignments instead of exams and nobody would bat an eye. Your analogy was both thoughtless and stands up to no scrutiny
- contravariant 1mo agoOne of the main reasons safety standards are written in blood.
- tikhonj 1mo agoThe exams aren't the thing that matter, they're an experiment to measure the thing that matters. Which, presumably, still matters at work!
- cube00 1mo agoMeetings are still like exams, if you can't craft a line of thinking on the spot it doesn't come off well. You don't need a final answer but you can't just answer "I don't know" otherwise you risk being slimed (shout out to anyone who still remembers "You Can't Do That on Television")
- vorticalbox 1mo ago“I don’t know but after this meeting I will find out and get back to you” Is an acceptable answer.
- alpha_squared 1mo agoIt's only an acceptable answer when used sparingly. The more often it's used, the more questions arise about your role in that meeting.
- gritspants 1mo agoI can see that. Personally, I use that for people who like to go down tedious rabbit holes and want to free up the rest of the attendees to go back to work.
- alberto467 1mo agoExactly, maybe there was no need to waste his time with the meeting, he could have been doing productive work instead
- MrToadMan 1mo agoPeople can also ask questions that it is unreasonable to expect people to know on the spot too and after a while the role of the questioner in the meeting can be questioned. :)
- shahhsuusi 1mo agoI find people’s on the spot reasoning abilities considerable worse than even cheap LLMs. This “fast” mentality is what causes stupid decisions because we need to “keep moving” (To where? Wrong meeting!) Answers, answers, decisions, decisions, quick, quick! next quarter In hindsight we need to do things differently. Answers, answer, quick quick! Time is of the essence! If you don’t start producing sound within 5 seconds we will all spontaneously combust!
- blitzar 1mo agoYour employer gave you your job based on your exam results.
- throwyawayyyy 1mo agoExactly. And what is a job interview but an exam?
- nerevarthelame 1mo agoEvery conversation you have with a person is an "exam." Not being able to extemporaneously express yourself or reason analytically without running to Claude seems undesirable.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- swatcoder 1mo agoIn my professional career, my clients value the depth of ready knowledge that helps me use my tools with particular insight and finesse -- a kind of knowledge that exams demonstrated far more effectively than homework when I was back in school.
- rtikulit 1mo agoStand-alone bottom-up observations (even if valid) obscure the fundamental problem that AI (or "AI" if you like) is inducing systemic change across human civilization. If cohorts are graduating into the workforce with decreasing stand-alone skills, that implies the economic value-add of labour is shifting to AI, which implies broadly falling standards of living, falling political power, and an ongoing transfer of power and wealth to capital. If students are taking shortcuts with AI when their brains have the highest capacity for learning they may be permanently weakening their prospects. It doesn't seem likely that whatever "AI management skills" they incidentally learn will make up for, over their lifetime, the economic value loss they suffer due to reduced cognitive skills. On an individual basis, in the next few years, this might not matter. Across decades, economies and polities, it will.
- theevilsharpie 1mo ago> Stand-alone bottom-up observations (even if valid) obscure the fundamental problem that AI (or "AI" if you like) is inducing systemic change across human civilization. Students have been cheating and taking shortcuts on their work long before the current generation of AI tools existed (and probably for as long as graded exams have existed). Somehow, civilization has managed to survive.
- snazz 1mo agoWhen you lower the barrier to taking the shortcut, you get more people to take it who wouldn’t otherwise have done so. If cheating becomes incredibly easy, lots of students who would have otherwise been honest take the easy way out. Moral conviction gets harder to keep as doing the right thing becomes less rational.
- salawat 1mo agoDoing the right thing never becomes less rational. It may suck compared to the temptation towards the alternative, but part of growing up and being responsible is realizing there is a reason the shortcut isn't supposed to be normalized.
- 1mo ago
- insane_dreamer 1mo agoevaluating/reviewing your LLM's output/code/reasoning is an exam unless you're just blindly passing it on for someone else to deal with
- kzz102 1mo agoEven if we grant that education is to prepare for employment, which a lot of people disagree with, it does not follow education should do the same thing as what's done in employment.
- kgwgk 1mo agoYour employers want those assignments done. That’s why they pay you. School assignments belong in the trash can and you pay for someone to look at them before throwing them away.
- throwyawayyyy 1mo agoAs an example: my employer doesn't require that I learn how to communicate well. It requires that I already learned to do so.