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Comment by jon-wood | Hacker News Reader

> So if you’re a manager onboarding a new employee, Workspace saves you the time and effort involved in writing that first welcome email.

If you really can't be bothered to write the welcome email maybe just don't, rather than throwing some ML generated drivel as the first impression a new hire gets of your management. The direction this is going in is so focused on automating away the hassle of email, with the end state surely being that both sides of an email exchange are ML models churning away at each other.

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Can we not pretend people weren't already googling sample emails for this?

It's just more efficient now to grab the same starter email that you then customize. Admittedly, google shouldn't be pretending otherwise, either. But what they also did was make it so you can get the starter email without having to see their ads.

Edited to add: I think a better argument on this could he made about the "draft a thank you note to the team" example they give in the video. That's more the type of thing that should be personal and probably not from a starter template, googled or AI-generated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DaJVZBXETE But even here, the reality is people were googling for these starter emails already.

Some were googling, for sure. But the best ones were not.

Down the rabbit hole with that…

So, the best ones will still write their own and the others will save time.

And by definition, most people aren’t the best.

So, we all agree the automation is welcome?

The best ones know when to put in effort to show they care for another human being, and know when to automate a task where that doesn't matter. Welcoming somebody to a new job is the former.

Does it matter to you the extent to which an original template is then transformed?

And you don’t need only the best to run a business.

The best ones hide it well enough.

Personally never had to Google to help me write the body of an email, if I had to do that, I probably wouldn't have sent the email to begin with.

I don't really want to read (or "write") a bunch of impersonal junk written by AI.

Can we skip this phase of technology?

Edit: Maybe this will inspire the next wave of tech burnouts turned mushroom farmers

Piles of impersonal junk created by humans at work. People lope through life, especially work life, a lot. If you are doing repetitive welcome emails they are almost guaranteed to be impersonal, I don't think anyone could rinse and repeat personalized emails for hundreds of people without burning out.

Just because lots of people do it, doesn't mean it has to continue to be done.

If you're growing so fast you're sending hundreds of emails in a short time span, then maybe you should replace a pseudo-personal ai-written "welcome email" for new hires with something that scales better and feels personal.

"Feels personal" is the problem that AI solves, isn't it? I mean there is a difference between "feels personal" and "is authentically personal". AI can definitely do the "feels".

Besides that, it's not about how rapid you need to send these emails out. It's about how often it's done. If you had to write birthday cards to people you barely know every day, maybe it's only one a day, it's going to get rinse and repeat very quickly. All the ways of saying "have a great day" are going to get exhausted and whoever is writing it is going to feel insincere in a short amount of time. So why not just have the AI write this sort of thing?

Slack bots welcome you to slack channels, when your email is set up there is a default welcome message. No one really cares, they just want to feel welcomed by something to break the ice. I don't think anyone really gives a stuff about how the message is written as long as it's honest. If I joined a company and the welcome email was signed off with "You friendly welcome bot", I'd be happier than some sort of boilerplate cut and paste message signed by a real person pretending they aren't writing the same thing for the 5th year in their job.

Well, they also develop AI to summarize the AI-generated text... So we'll end up with this:

Person A: write a thank you note to the team

AI: [long text]

Person B: summarize the text

AI: Person A says thank you.

A perfect two-sided market!

Aren't most corporate communication already impersonal junk?

Whatever gets us to successive waves "tech burnouts turned mushroom farmers" is fine by me!

Exactly.

I would honestly prefer blunt, straightforward, de-GPTified communication style. I hate the idea of wasting my time on reading substance-free filler, regardless of whether it was written by an AI or not.

That's the thing I hate most about talking to call centres. The useless insincere filler talk.

Simple answer to this: "Hi, I am company X's AI, I'd like to get to know you because we will be working together here and there <welcome message>."

Basically endource the AI and be clear that it is the thing welcoming you. If you hide the fact an AI is pumping out an automated email it just comes across as if the business thinks of you as a drone.

If the major contributor of an e-mail (or code) is an AI then it should be attributed to the AI in the signature/attribution fields. Otherwise the work is plagiarized.

The middle manager thinks, "the time and effort I spend on my job can be automated, yay!", never considering the second order effects.

The middle manager thinks, "the time and effort I spend on my job can be automated, yay!", never considering the second order effects.

This is why when a cashier at the supermarket tells me that instead of waiting in line I can use the self check-out lanes, I tell her "I don't want to help a robot take away your job."

Usually they don't understand. But sometimes you can see them start to think about what's happening.

The cashier would rather you leave them in peace than hit them with the same tiresome self-congratulatory remark they hear day in day out. Please use the self checkouts instead.

Please don't use the checkout, why should corporations worth billions and tens of billions (I guess that's what Walmart is worth) get to outsource some of their work onto their clients?

As a client, using the self-checkout is (usually) a choice I get to make. I choose to use the self-checkout because it is often faster than waiting in a line. I am thankful for the opportunity to put in my own effort in exchange for faster completion and reduced prices.

it's only faster because they fired half the employees and the other lanes are backed up.

I remember reading a study somewhere that the self-checkout isn't actually faster. It feels faster because you're busy instead of passively standing in line.

That depends on the implementation. E.g. Sam's Club lets you scan items as you put them into your cart and just walk past the registers.

In the local grocery store at rush hour, cashier lines are long and self-checkout tends to be quicker for buying 3 items. Taking a whole cart into self-checkout is slower than a cashier, because the self-checkout has like a 5% chance per item of going into "assistance needed" mode.

What's important to me is my time. I don't care whether it's spent scanning things myself or waiting in line for someone else to scan them. I also don't care about punishing Walmart, so whether they "get to" do something is totally uninteresting to me.

I just want to pay for my items and get out of the store, in whatever way works.

This is nearly getting to the point of "don't use shovel's, think of all the ditch diggers we'll put out of work"

I find places with scan as you shop apps way better than waiting in a checkout line. I get a running total of what I have in the cart, and when I'm done, I just leave without a line.

At least 9 times out of 10, the self-checkout is a better experience for me. I can scan things at my own pace, pack them in my bags the way I like, and listen to my D&D podcast rather than having to interact with a stranger, unless the system acts up.

As pxl97 said, I preferred being able to scan things as I shopped and not have to stop at the checkout except to pay, but the one place around here that had that discontinued it a few months ago.

We need to push back hard against the idea that automation is "stealing" people's jobs; the promise of automation has always been that of more money for less work. We need to remind everyone of that, and reverse the trend of automation simply putting more and more money in the pockets of the already-wealthy at everyone else's expense.

also why benefit large corporations by walking around long aisles comparing and choosing items, carying them around and walk back to the entrance?

get those good old shopkeepers to do it while you stand with your list out front.

I can do self-checkout about 5x faster than the clerk can

I saw on tiktok (yeah I know) where a lawyer says they never use it because you can be liable for stealing for anything you forgot scan. I never use it cause occasionally the cashier will let you know that there is a coupon for something you are purchasing.

You mean to tell me that my joke that I should get the item for free when it doesn't ring up; you mean to tell me I'm not hilarious and that the cashier's heard it before?

I do want a robot to take their job. I also want us to ensure that everyone does have a fulfilling, non-robotic job available to them. I think those cashiers would happier, say, painting a mural on the wall of the grocery store.

Of course, this gets into UBI territory and making sure that as a society we are not just replacing menial jobs to then abandon the people who would have had those jobs.

Fortunately for middle and line managers, the vaunted 1:1 hasn't been automated yet, nor does it scale, so the technology doesn't allow managers to have more than, say, 60 direct report effectively. Meeting with each of them for 1 hour every other week only leaves 20 hours every other week for work that isn't a 1:1. I think middle management will be safe for a little while longer.

Why is meeting with direct reports needed every other week?

Less frequent than that and people start forgetting the gripes and inconveniences they need help with.

Managers are supposed to work on the system, at least in theory. 1on1’s are for the manager like server metrics are for the SRE. An early warning system of future problems. Ideally you can fix issues before the problem blows up into an alarm.

> 1on1’s are for the manager like server metrics are for the SRE.

I'm not sure that is accurate. As a manager, I have a bunch of production metrics on my people. I can tell who's getting work done, who isn't, who has high defect rates in their work, who makes fewer defects, who is positive ROI, and who is not paying their keep. Where the one on ones are useful is when they are informed by the metrics, and those conversations don't take anywhere near one hour every two weeks. They take 10 minutes - 15 minutes, max.

Ok sure but there’s more to people than raw output numbers. Where do you get info on how they’re doing as people? Whether they’re pulling 12 hour days and that’s why the output looks good or they’re happy as a clam living their best life and that’s why output is great?

Sometimes you gotta kick people to go take a vacation lest their mind/body takes an unplanned vacation for them. Even if the raw numbers are looking great. You’d prefer to have a planned outage wouldn’t you?

And hey, if you don’t need a full hour, it’s okay to make 1on1s shorter! Few people will complain about getting more time back in their lives.

But be warned: The good stuff usually comes out 5min before the end of a meeting when an employee says ”Oh yeah one more thing that’s been on my mind …”. It takes time to relax into that area of concern that’s a little scary to bring up.

Longtime manager of technical people here and can confirm the "oh yeah one more thing" is where so much of the really good stuff comes up.

No matter how explicitly you state it, ask for it, overcommunicate that you're approachable even if seemingly busy... people are averse to the impression that they're interrupting their management even when they have something important to discuss. When you create the space and have even that quick 10 to 15 minute chat every couple of weeks, you're creating space for your people to have your attention without worrying about getting your attention. And people often take advantage of that path of least resistance.

So many of the most important conversations to have with the team are less about their output and more about things they've got going on or need to know _despite_ their output. All the standard sprint metrics are just one piece of the puzzle.

I agree with you that there's more to people than numbers. But it's a lot easier to surface that when you have a frame of reference and some consistency in how you measure:

"so, last week you had a -23.5% contribution... You usually are on the positive side, so what's up?" and the employee tells me that their lead stuck them on a project where they hand no experience, and didn't have time to learn how to do x or y before getting thrown at a ticket... or, "I'm having some issues with <personal>..."

Stuff as a manager you can sometimes help a lot with... and other times, well, you can be supportive. Just because numbers are involved does not mean we have to be cold and heartless... At the same time, I've found managing without numbers to just lead to cliqe-y political culture where people's ability to schmooze is rewarded more than their contribution to the team and that drives away the most effective contributors.

> And hey, if you don’t need a full hour, it’s okay to make 1on1s shorter!

Agree... I think I just realized that the exception should be a long 1 on 1. Just because I schedule 15 minutes doesn't preclude taking more time if there's something in the 1 on 1 that should take longer.

This is an interesting take, and one that directly contradicts most leadership books. Are you aware of that, and how did you come upon this management style?

If you’re only talking to your directs for 10-15 minutes every two weeks you are neglecting your duties as a manager. The standard is 30 minutes 1x week with every direct report.

Maybe the idealised standard but certainly not what is going on at most companies

Perhaps. That’s my standard for my team and the managers that report to me.

> I can tell who's getting work done, who isn't, who has high defect rates in their work, who makes fewer defects, who is positive ROI, and who is not paying their keep

I've been doing engineering management for ten years and I've never seen a set of metrics that can tell you these things.

What software engineering metrics tell you who has positive ROI?

A professional midwestern 1-on-1 starts with the assumption that no work was performed since the last one and it falls on the underling to prove otherwise during this time.

In manager speak, because the meeting was created by someone higher on the org chart, it doesn't stand to reason that we can find fault with it.

Just wait until employees are told to do their 1:1 with a chatbot...

Pshht, don't feed them with more such ideas.

Heh that might even be a better experience

And the good middle manager (yes, they exist ! and yes, they are useful !) thinks "the not very useful part of my job can be automated, yay more time for the actually interesting/useful thing !"

Realistically, the middle manager thinks, "the part of my job where it looks like I'm doing something can be automated, yay more time for 3-4 day weekends!"

I would be ecstatic if I could automate my entire job!

Seriously!

If the content of your email could have been generated using an AI trained on publicly available information, it necessarily must not include anything private.

Which means you are spam messaging your new hires with messages that contain zero actual information!

Noise is a word that does not even properly capture the uselessness of such communications. I swear, many humans seem to just want filler text to put places, and they just keep shoving it there.

Anyone read blindsight by Peter Watts? Spoiler alert: an entire science fiction book written around the fact that sending useless information to hyperintelligent beings could be interpreted as an intentional distraction and therefore a threat.

I recommend trying out GPT3 and now the new released GPT4. Using them to collaboratly write correspondence is eye opening.

You use ai as a tool, you prompt it, change its results and feed it back.

A little work gives you impressive results way faster than if you wrote the whole thing yourself

But... you didn't write it yourself. And it's not anything you would write yourself.

This is fine if you never want to ever write something yourself, ever again.

I'd much rather retain that skill.

Consider the relationship between a writer and an editor in a newspaper setting. The writer creates the content, while the editor reviews and refines it to ensure it aligns with the publication's standards and style. The editor's input can help improve the overall quality of the piece without taking away the writer's original ideas and skills.

In a similar manner, using AI tools like GPT-3 or GPT-4 can be likened to having an AI editor that assists you in the writing process. By working together with the AI, you can maintain your writing skills while also benefiting from the AI's ability to generate content quickly and suggest new ideas.

Just as a writer doesn't lose their skill by working with a human editor, collaborating with an AI editor can enhance your writing without diminishing your abilities. The key is to find the right balance between using AI for assistance and retaining your personal writing skills, just as a writer and editor strike a balance in their collaboration at a newspaper.

This comment was written in collaboration with ChatGPT.

That example is so bad, I'm not entirely sure some writer having a bad day didn't put it in as a cynical joke.

Or are they working in an environment so steeped in insincerity that they don't even know what being genuine is, or that one of the most important things for a manager to do with things like a "welcome" is to be setting the tone.

Nothing says welcome, and bring your genuine self, and trust colleagues, and feel intellectual safety, and invest in being a part of the team that's investing in you... than a new hire's manager can't even be bothered to say welcome themselves, and offloads it to a chatbot button instead.

OTOH, this fits the sociopathic culture you'd expect, when you look at their hazing rituals, compensation levels, and promotion criteria. It just doesn't fit the culture some of us techies envisioned when that company was started.

Are you a new employee? Not sure how to reply to your welcome email your Manager sent?

Workspace saves you the time and effort involved in writing that first welcome reply email.

Well, since you never have to go into the office, you and the HR person can just hang out on your couches and let the AI assistants talk to each other. It's like the Jetsons, except hopeless and stoned.

For just $3.99 per month, we can reply also to all the subsequent emails from your manager within 30 minutes! Just give us access to your private inbox and the emails will include your own personal style.

Are you a manager whose new hire just sent a reply to your AI generated welcome email? Don’t have time to read it? Workspace auto-hides the text and just shows you a simple three-word summary.

premium version will show the manager just the prompt without the blurb.

You're joking but we all know here too well that exactly this will happen.

This is hilarious. The point of a task like a welcome email is that they _take effort_.

I can’t help but think that an example like this shows how far Google has become like Microsoft in the 2000s. A bunch of rich, middle aged managers that have spent too long in the alphabet soup.

At the end of the day, you're still responsible for reading the email before you send it. I don't think it matters how the email was written. I think the final content matters more. There's many ways to prompt an AI, both carelessly and with extreme attention to detail.

For example, I typed this message. But I'm sure with careful massaging, I could get an AI to write the same thing, word-for-word. The laziness you're referring to probably happens even if the manager is typing the email out themselves.

Maybe the manager AI and Employee AI can generate each other responses and the actual humans can have a 1:1 free of the formalities?

Humans are amazing in breaking the system for convenience and profit.

>with the end state surely being that both sides of an email exchange are ML models churning away at each other

One can just hope that the ML entities won't start insulting each other. :)

They'll just start getting progressively more passive aggressive. "Per my last e-mail"

Until they escalate to ML Manager.

What was the sci-fi book with "silvers" that were basically AIs that would handle administrata, set appointments and negotiate with each other for their humans?

True. I thought the same for the other example, writing a job description. I thought "WTF" now job postings are going to be even more useless.

Not exactly. These are your feelings because you know of A.I. and would rather not receive a canned message BUT not all people are the same. There are many who would appreciate that email and welcome it. Ignorance is not bliss.

> If you really can't be bothered to write the welcome email maybe just don't

not everyone has good english and corporate writing skills.

It's not a problem as long as the sender reads the email and agrees with it before it is sent.

Imagine someone made a slight mistake and receive: “Welcome to Google [Employee name] it’s nice to meet you

I've gotten templated recruiting emails with this bug. I wonder if an AI would spit this out, or something weirder as the name.

You don't need to imagine. It's enough to have a LinkedIn to receive unprocessed templates like this where I would guess their scraper failed or something. On the contrary I don't think an AI would make the same mistake as easily.

It sounds like gmail should have a filter to detect this kind of problem (just like they have the detection for missing attachments).

Use AI to solve problems caused by AI.

It will probably save you time too with layoff emails trained using Google's internal data.

> with the end state surely being that both sides of an email exchange are ML models churning away at each other.

The end-state is an ML model running on a client device in isolation. Why bother using SMTP?

Onboarding email should be just a template. Or, even better, a small template with a link to bigger template. As a manager, you should demonstrate your empathy in a welcome 1:1 meeting.

Google FacePaLM :D

Is this really that different than traditionally delegating tasks to other humans?

Except they likely think it isn’t generated, like a lot of plagiarism

Well I wrote onboarding message, guidelines and policies all in ChatGpt

I ask all new hires to ghost write a short intro.

They would essentially tell me some facts that I would then re-write for them, so why not just use their own words.

If they want to use generative AI, that’s on them.

This. One million times this.

Upvote instead of posting noise like this.

but you don't earn karma from upvoting. People coming from reddit, do it all the time :)

In an ideal world, it would be lovely if managers wrote copperplate welcome notes on the finest perfumed paper, but they don't. They copy and paste a template or use a tool like Text Expander. This just makes the process slightly more convenient.

We are going to hear a lot more of this kind of behavior from super talented and experienced people.

But for the less experienced, AI is a starting point. And depending on the kind of person you are, the kind of upbringing you have, and the kind of education you got, you will be motivated to edit and improve what the AI gives you.

The other thing I think this will help improve upon are those idiots and scumbags who give commands that are not very well thought out and then yell at talented people for not following instruction because they filled in the blanks with their own ideas. Giving it to an AI will show ridiculous their commands were. (sorry, end rant)

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