Part of my performance review is indirectly using bloat to seem sophisticated and thorough.
Documentation is an interesting use case. There are various kinds of documentation (reference, tutorial, architecture, etc.) and LLMs might be useful for things like
- repetitive formatting and summarization of APIs for reference
- tutorials which repeat the same information verbosely in an additive, logical sequence (though probably a human would be better)
- sample code (though human-written would probably be better)
The tasks that I expect might work well involve repetitive reformatting, repetitive expansion, and reduction.
I think they also might be useful for systems analysis, boiling down a large code base into various kinds of summaries and diagrams to describe data flow, computational structure, signaling, etc.
Still, there is probably no substitute for a Caroline Rose[1] type tech writer who carefully thinks about each API call and uses that understanding to identify design flaws.
Any documentation they write at best re-states what is immediately obvious from the surrounding code (Useless: I need to explain why), or is some hallucination trying to pretend it's a React app.
To their credit they've slowly gotten better now that a lot of documentation already exists, but that was me doing the work for them. What I needed them to do was understand the project from existing code, then write documentation for me.
Though I guess once we're at the point AI is that good, we don't need to write any documentation anymore, since every dev can just generate it for themselves with their favorite AI and in the way they prefer to consume it.
* They'll pretend they understand by re-stating what is written in the README, then proceed to produce nonsense.
Without that effort it's a useless sycophant and is functionally extremely lazy (ie takes short cuts all the time).
Don't suppose you've tried that particular model, after getting it to be thorough?
You don't have to play the game the same way to work there. But it helps to accept that others will play it, and manage your own expectations accordingly.
Feel for you or anyone surrounded by such others but it is most definitely not everywhere - that is used to justify your presence in a place of work you should not be
I don't have tons of examples, but in my experience:
* This worked in toxic environments. They deserve it.
* This doesn't work in a functional environment, because they don't have those bullshit metrics.
If you have to rely on those tricks, it's time to look for another job.
I will take 60k at this point. I've been living ono half of that for almost 2 years now.
I have no idea how anyone is navigating this job market. Maybe it's just 10x worse and most people here are in the Bay area that's a tiny bit more shielded from this.
>Their number is absolutely miniscule compared to the number of big-tech jobs.
give it another year of layoffs. We'll get there.
> Depends on what you are looking for. I’ve turned half baked ideas into white papers for plenty of praise. I’ve used them to make my Jira tickets seem complicated and complete. I’ve used them to get praised for writing comprehensive documentation.
This is about giving people a good impression of you so they'll write strong peer feedback.
Over-fitting proxy measures is one of the scourges of modernity.
The only silver lining is if it becomes so wide spread and easy it loses the value of seeming sophisticated and thorough.
Maybe we should let/encourage this to happen. Maybe letting bloated zombie-like organisations bloat themselves to death would thin the herd somewhat, to make space for organisations that are less “broken”.
At the same time, I strive really hard to influence the environment I am in so it does not value content bloat as a unit of productivity, so hopefully there are at least some places where people can have their sanity back!
If your organisation is functional and you are abusing it by doing that, then you deserve to get fired.