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Comment by edukite | Hacker News Reader

With LLM and current economic situation my job is doing 5 things at once and after 7:30h my brain is just in panic mode. On remote this isn't a huge issue but in the office (which I'm obligated to be twice a week) I just don't know what to do so I eat 3 meal 5min each pretending this is normal.

Then the next day after this brain haemorrhage inducing experience I just waste 2h remotely on gathering mental capacity to simply know what next I need to do and next 2 says I repeat until weekend.

Simply because my boss is developer in love with LLM and machine gunning 20 PR daily.

Not to mentioned PR with more code than I can reasonable can understand and say anything about it in a project I didn't touch.

So, currently I can only say I hate my life. I'm looking for an idea which pays similar but is as mindless as humanly possible

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I don't know your full situation, but as someone who has gone through full-blown real burnout: it's not worth it. In this economic situation, we do need to grind to keep our jobs but if you're getting close to burn-out I would *strongly* advise prioritizing avoiding burnout.

I went from being a passionate programmer spending all my free time working on code, to be unable to write a single line for even my most loved personal projects for 6 months. Fully awake, in the middle of the day, I would boot up my computer and within 10 minutes my body would put itself to sleep. I'd wake up hours later with my laptop barely past the login screen. It took me 6 months before I could do personal projects again. 1 year before I could do professional work again. 2 years before I could juggle both. I've fully recovered (or at least I did right before LLMs hit the scene), but it takes a lot of time and I lost a lot of money not working for that year. If I could go back in time, I would have quit that job earlier because it is far easier finding jobs as a passionate developer rather than a recovering burnout.

"Gathering mental capacity to simply know what next I need to do" is not a waste. That is work. In fact it is the most important work with LLMs. If you spend all day in a hammock dreaming up what next needs to be done (and it's the right stuff), and then type a few sentences into the LLM to generate it overnight, that is better time spent working than spending all day cranking out 20 PRs that are of mid-low value.

Yeah, if you're wandering in random directions all day long (20 PRs a day is rarely working towards a clear goal) then you're not going to get far. Taking some time to figure out where you're headed is probably way more beneficial in the long term. And it's also something LLMs suck at, they interpolate extremely well but haven't got a clue what's next.

That sucks.

Do they know they are, essentially, expending you?

It seems like your boss is doing work that doesn’t actually add value without you to review the code. But maybe the company isn’t set up to fairly evaluate the fact that review provides more value than creating code, with a workflow like your boss’s?

> Do they know they are, essentially, expending you?

I don't about the OP's specific situation, but there are definitely managers and management consultants that consciously try "expend" their employees.

Jeff Bezos is a famous example. IIRC, to avoid "complacency," he wants constant turnover of employees. Hire new people, burn them out while they're new and enthusiastic, then replace them. That's why it's occasionally leaked that Amazon consider such-and-such employment market mined out (e.g. everyone's either worked for them or is wise to their ways), so they have recruit further afield.

You're making me extremely glad that I didn't accept a job with Amazon. Life is way too short to live like that

My boss is young, passionate guy overhyped with LLM claiming at least once a weak my and my colleague days are counted and LLM will fully replace as and we are cost.

When I joined I thought this is peaceful place, after a month this changed tremendously.

And this is third job like this in a row so I have no hope to find anything even slightly as peaceful as 5y ago

Your boss is a dick, not a passionate guy

This was implied between lines

> claiming at least once a weak my and my colleague days are counted and LLM will fully replace as and we are cost.

This is just what bad managers everywhere have always done: try to make their employees scared for their jobs. They usually believe it's motivating, or some such nonsense.

Watch some of the youtube videos about how to stop giving a fuck. And look for another job. There are plenty of jobs, even in software now, that have better management.

So he's basically signing up to do your jobs once you're gone? Or he thinks he's also expendable? Either one doesn't sound too good.

Get resumes out.

> claiming at least once a weak my and my colleague days are counted and LLM will fully replace as and we are cost.

If my boss talked to me this way I would leave as soon as possible. Update your resume and get searching, I wish you the best of luck.

Since your boss thinks the LLM knows what it's doing, letting your boss approve his own PRs would be a win-win.

I think the fun part of stuff you could do is setting up dev environments that are augmented. Not only the code creation part. But also the reviewing, testing , quality benchmarking and more. Arranging this is not easy and definitely an engineering challenge.

Maybe this will provide some historical context. Capitalist automation is an anti-worker, anti-union ideology even though in theory automation is a good thing. When automation is used to reclaim time for workers or to increase pay, it is a good thing. When it is used to dispossess people or enforce work speedups, it is anti-worker.

https://jacobin.com/2023/03/automation-union-busting-product...

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