Hacker News Reader

Comment by n4r9 | Hacker News Reader

> Those developers had to be dragged into modern software development when they were certain it was a stupid waste of time.

But why do they have to fill out some paperwork? If the new technology is a genuine productivity boost and any sort of meaningful performance review is undertaken, then it will show up if they're performing sub-par compared to colleagues.

The real problem is that senior management are lazily passing down mandates in lieu of trusting middle management to do effective performance reviews. Just as it was with Return To Office.

View on HN

Social responsibility?

I have a few colleagues who like the way they work and would prefer everything to stay the way it is. Such "skilled artisans" might be on the way out, replaced by "Ai factory" mass production.

Sure, they could just be kicked out and replaced. But they worked with the company, in some case for a decade plus. Giving them a fair picture of what seems to be down the road is the very least I'd expect of a company treating it's workers as more than just replaceable cogwheels.

For sure. It's not inherently bad that a company encourages their staff to use AI. But there are better ways than just announcing you are now AI-first in everything and they must tell you how they're using AI in performance reviews. That just creates resentment and incentivises gaming the system.

Some people are good enough that they'll do well on performance reviews anyway, and if there's a new technology that's acting as a force multiplier those are exactly the people who the company most wants to adopt it.

Perhaps then they should focus on getting their 0.1x developers using it to get competent rather than trying to get their 1x developers to 10x using it.

Interesting point. If eleven 1x developers multiply their productivity by 10, that's roughly the same as one 10x developer doing the same. Assuming of course that such quantities can be meaningfully applied.

Fair point about comparing performance reviews. It's also practically impossible to judge someone's performance on novel tasks, or whether they're caring enough about tech debt. Even as I wrote my first post there was a nagging voice in my head saying "Almost no one does performance reviews well enough for that".

In my (limited) experience, the tasks you want to assign to elite devs are less amenable to AI in the first place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com