alt Hacker NewsI have an alternative explanation: for the areas where AI is giving employees serious productivity gains, they're working for 20 minutes, playing wordle/resting/relaxing for 7 hours, 40 minutes, and delivering exactly as much as they were before.
Replies
I've heard another version of this is that AI can speed up some tasks, but then employees still need to wait for meetings, approvals, other users to chime in, etc. that the net effect isn't as pronounced
This would check out at companies where you could “coast” without any oversight and were just randomly estimating some “points” on your “stories” or whatever BS process is in place.
On real projects and real teams you can’t do this. If you did what you did in your example you’d say log 8hrs of work, right? Your team lead will ask a simple question: “did you write this code or was it AI-assisted? and what exactly here took 8hrs?” so you could do this once and 2nd time you’d be changing the status on linkedin to looking for work
Incentives matter
Its partly this, but hardly any developers I know were writing code for 8 hours a day. 4 on a good day and the rest was meetings or other auxiliary activities. From what I have gathered, companies have no idea how to measure the productivity gains yet.