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Comment by isk517 | Hacker News Reader

I know some that was told to try and use AI more on the job so they created some agent to just burn tokens and ended up using about 10x what the next highest employee used. Buddy expected to get shit but instead got an accolade and was asked to give a short talk to the other employees about how they could match their success.

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In my first job ever, I used to get my work done on time and leave. There were a few people who’d stay in the office until late and show up on weekends. Same output, but they got the promotions and my bonus got prorated.

This is the same thing.

At least this one doesn't require spending the manhours moving dung from pocket to pocket, now we finally get credit for automating it!

While output may have been part of it. It's possible that by staying later (and working longer), they had better relationships with upper management.

"I used to get my work done on time and leave"

This sounds like you just wanted to get your work done and not foster any work relationships. This is fine, but you will not get promoted this way (as you've seen).

Moving up in a company is 30% work and 70% networking/being likelable/noticed.

I stopped that nonsense years ago. I work for myself now as a consultant. If I work more, I get paid more.

I took a job with the state I live in recently because friends were promoted over competent employees (not even counting myself in that because they were just promoted to my level). New job is fully remote and has a clear path to advancement based on clear work based metrics.

While it may be true that it's pretty standard, I'm convinced that any organization that relies more on face time and friendships than on actual skill is absolutely toxic.

It’s also a workplace whose success is in the past and has started the glide down into lower profits, revenue and wages.

Moving up is 100% being likeable.

Yes, with the caveat that the 30% work allocation counts toward likability. You can be friendly, charming, well-spoken, fun, etc., but if you fail to deliver and make work for other people, cause your coworkers frustration, and make your manager look bad, you're not going to move up. You will be able to coast for a while though, as managers have a hard time firing people they personally like.

It's ultimately a combination. A pretty good software developer who is friendly and pleasant is, in most organizations, going to get promoted over the grumbling angry software developer who is brilliant but everyone hates talking to. A lot of this has to do with most work at more senior levels being communication.

Your last statement is exactly right. Communication matters most when you're dealing with cross-org concerns and those that master it are usually the more friendly and pleasant ones. This is something I wish more people understood. I even sometimes fall into the latter even though I strive for the former.

> Communication matters most when you're dealing with cross-org concerns and those that master it are usually the more friendly and pleasant ones.

I don't agree with the second one, but agree with the first.

Throughout my corporate career so far, I have found plenty of hot air/pretty picture slide decks that exist solely for ladder climbers to climb. Said ladder climbers are usually all smiles in public and "friendly", but you have to watch out for knives behind your back.

At that level it's all Hunger Games isn't it?

Likability helps you move up, competency keeps you there. The role of Likability in moving up is overstated.

Really? Because I've met a lot of incompetent "leaders" that failed upwards because of their likeability.

You just described a bad management - the one that favors butt in seat and rewards lack of outside life over actual benefits to company.

You’re assuming a lot here. Getting your work done on time and leaving doesn’t equate to not being likable. If it was a popularity contest, I would’ve been around the same as the people who were pretend working, if not more. My partner and my director wrote me a recommendation letter before I left, which I wouldn’t attribute to something they’d do if I was a nobody.

There are other reasons why the bad behavior gets rewarded. If the management is incompetent, they genuinely focus on the optics and not on the actual work. And if they are competent, they understand that the people who stay behind unnecessarily or come over the weekends are more exploitable in the long run. And if the people in management are the kind of people who stay behind unnecessarily, having a team full of people who do the same, rewards them as well.

That’s the part I don’t get: Engineers are smart enough to ask an LLM to ask other LLMs to ask other LLMs to load the policy manual then count the R’s in “LLM fork bomb”.

Additional story points completed per week, versus token-dollar spent, or some such combo would seem more sane.

But maybe they aren’t really tracking productivity, so tracking tokens is all they have? … I dunno which part of that is dumber.

We never figured out how to track productivity anyway. Only macro-level success in achieving measurable goals. Any AI metric besides "are similar goals being met more quickly" is people encouraging specific behaviors decided a priori.

We need an Office Space 2 just about AI shenanigans.

office space 2... i need this injected into my veins right now lol

The AI problems are still the same problems.

> We need to talk about your flair

I believe it

i call BS on this story

I call AI on this comment

why?

Imitating your own utter lack of explanation or evidence?

I don’t.

Things that rhyme with this have indeed been happening at the biggest names.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

>This article is about statistics and government policy. For Nazi analogies in internet discussions, see Godwin's law.

I have seen similar at my company so it is highly plausible.

If you've never seen this level of perverse incentive, you have been lucky. The creation of and subsequent exploitation of them aren't new. For pre computer examples: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-cobra-effect-2/

The worse example I know is the time the Belgians forced the Congolese to harvest more rubber by cutting their hands if they haven't reached the correct quota, ensuing a cross-tribe hands trading economy

> cross-tribe hands trading

sounds like they had some cross cutting concerns

</dad>

Belgians had nothing to do with that, nor the then governement

The king had a side biz

Similar to the British in India, it was first controlled by some kind of company that benefitted the host country by extracting resources, and later on the host country took control. Belgium took control of Congo in 1908

It was literally the king that wanted it as personal venture. Belgium took over because he was very/too bad ( you're right that the governement was involved, I stand corrected).

Healthcare and infrastructure was then build too, but the relation was already scarred and well, it's not easy to reset everything.

I can't find the reference right now, but I remember reading literature about studies done at large programming organizations (like IBM, government) who used LOCs as a performance metric. Programmers could earn more money by including more lines of code in their work. This went exactly the way you'd expect.

Edit: I think it may have been from Capers Jones's _Programming Productivity_[1]. Published in 1986, based on research covering the prior 30 years(!) or so. We have known that bad incentives specifically distort the performance of programming teams for a long time.

1 - https://archive.org/details/programmingprodu0000jone/page/n1...

And then there was Bill Atkinson.

https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

While it is good story for illustrating perverse incentives, there is no good historical evidence that the cobra bounty program actually existed.

I call unintended consequences on this KPI culture

They polished the turd more than stating, but the bones are real.

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