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Comment by aaronbrethorst | Hacker News Reader

I have an alternative explanation: for the areas where AI is giving employees serious productivity gains, they're working for 20 minutes, playing wordle/resting/relaxing for 7 hours, 40 minutes, and delivering exactly as much as they were before.

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Its partly this, but hardly any developers I know were writing code for 8 hours a day. 4 on a good day and the rest was meetings or other auxiliary activities. From what I have gathered, companies have no idea how to measure the productivity gains yet.

When you look into the edge cases developer productivity is really tough to understand. It's easy as the engineer yourself to see your own productivity as easy to understand, but if you are ever in the position of trying to assess someone's productivity that you don't work with day to day, its really difficult. There are people who are able to achieve millions in yearly savings with like 10 lines of code updated per year, perf debugging types. I'd never believe that up front if I hadn't seen it after the fact.

Its interesting to me that over the last 10 years of working in agile teams, not one team has analyzed burn rates to see if we are doing better/worse over time. Its like every sprint is a clean slate and no one actually gets better at their job...

This would check out at companies where you could “coast” without any oversight and were just randomly estimating some “points” on your “stories” or whatever BS process is in place.

On real projects and real teams you can’t do this. If you did what you did in your example you’d say log 8hrs of work, right? Your team lead will ask a simple question: “did you write this code or was it AI-assisted? and what exactly here took 8hrs?” so you could do this once and 2nd time you’d be changing the status on linkedin to looking for work

This is something people always claim, but this explanation assumes that everyone is "colluding". The guy who wants to get a promotion and get paid 50% more cause he has 3 kids isn't going to play along, he is going to at least put in 4 hours a day of real work, and then everyone else is going to look 20x less productive. There are teams where people are mailing it in so hard that they will find ways to kick out the hard workers, but this doesn't exist across entire orgs/companies/industries.

I've heard another version of this is that AI can speed up some tasks, but then employees still need to wait for meetings, approvals, other users to chime in, etc. that the net effect isn't as pronounced

Incentives matter

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