alt Hacker NewsI agree with everything you've said, but don't you think quite a lot of things have also been like this before, just to a lesser degree?
I've often had the sense that most of what is done inside companies is a kind of performance of work rather than work itself. Mostly all a big status game between various different factions. All actual value provided by just a few engineers here and there who are able to shut out the noise and build things.
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I often think that executive level work is about changing the executive team and writing memos about changing the executive team. Then there’s a different team with different members and they begin the cycle again. Repeat over and over again.
The number of times I’ve seen a HTML memo sent from the assistant of the executive that says “from the desk of…” with babble about new leadership.
Things have probably always been like that, agree. I often try to see AI as a catalyst, that accelerates what already is.
In a good culture, with high competence and trust this can yield increased output (to some degree at least) and in a bad culture it will accelerate and expedite the dominating traits instead.
> I agree with everything you've said, but don't you think quite a lot of things have also been like this before, just to a lesser degree?
That’s exactly the reason LLMs and friends are so dangerous to companies, and it’s so hard for them to resist using them in useless/counter-productive ways. They’re excellent at faking signs of effort and work that companies can hardly help but reward, absent any actual way to measure manager effectiveness (and approximately nobody knows how to measure that, in the wild). This takes the form of gilding and padding on a lot of communication, none of which adds actual value but it does cost money directly and indirectly (time wasted sorting out which parts of a document are intentional and meaningful, and which are plausible but irrelevant LLM inventions, for instance)