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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

I've seen this, too. There is a workplace personality that sees the job as a 2-player game between themself and the corporation. They think the game is to min-max their effort to personal career benefit, and they don't care how much it inconveniences anyone else.

Before AI they had to actually put in work, or at least play games of trying to steal credit from other people without getting noticed. Now that AI appeared, they see it as the ultimate way to take credit for work they didn't do: Put everything into Claude, let it do the work, copy and past output back to someone else. Minimum effort invested, maximum visibility achieved.

It will continue as long as they think they're getting away with it. If managers aren't willing to intervene, or worse if they encourage this due to the volume of output that seems to be appearing, it's only going to get worse.

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I’m conflicted after reading this comment, because I think I would be that personality in my workplace, largely because I believe that’s the only sane position to take as a worker with ~0 power over the decisions made that can entirely destabilise your life.

On the other hand, my priority isn’t maximising my personal career benefit, but the collective benefit of my team, so I suppose I either see it more as a 2v1 sorta game, or perhaps my “player” is an amalgam of myself and my teammates. Playing this way, outsourcing everything you do to an LLM is the worst move, because you lose the touchpoints that tell you where the friction is in your team.

I think everyone should be looking to balance their work effort against the payout of the job. They should also be changing jobs when the effort to reward ratio starts to become unfavorable compared to other jobs on the market.

The problem with the personality above is that the person isn't playing like a team (like you said) but as an individual maximizing their own visibility while loading their coworkers up with the review effort. They found an asymmetry to abuse (they generate text easily, coworkers get a lot of extra work to review it). They don't care what it costs their coworkers. They just like that it makes them look good.

Whenever I try to articulate this issue to people during more casual AI discussions, I always refer to “study guides” in college.

I don’t know how many of y’all did these, but I’m sure I wasn’t the only person. At my undergrad it was very common for a group of students to all to get together, compare notes from lectures and readings, and basically come up with a group study guide of sorts. People were given specific sections to share, you didn’t just send all of your notes - usually 2 people per section’s take on that portion. You could always tell who just copy and pasted their shorthand (usually indecipherable) and who actually took the time to edit it/clean it up. This was at a time when almost everyone did it on laptops.

The people who took the time to make their portion(s) digestible for others were asked back, the others weren’t.

> They should also be changing jobs when the effort to reward ratio starts to become unfavorable compared to other jobs on the market.

The problem here is that all tech companies look alike. Take for example the interview process (copied by almost any company out there that thinks they are google). Another example: the under/meets/above expectations BS. And now the most recent example of “token usage as sign of productivity”.

So, it’s getting tremendously difficult to simply switch jobs that offer something different

My experience couldn't be more different. The tech companies I've worked for in the past 10 years have been so completely different from each other, from interview process to company culture, that I can't agree that all tech companies are the same.

You can also look to change to different roles (product management, even sales) or jump to a different career completely.

There are options if you look. You're not going to find a dream job that pays $600K for 4 hours of no-pressure work per day and perfect coworkers, but there are a range of job options with tradeoffs along the compensation-effort pareto front.

If you're self aware of this, you're probably already ahead of 95% of others in similar shoes.

That is their job. Their job is whatever gets rewarded, and that's what gets rewarded, apparently.

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