Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdesol | Hacker News Reader

Was there at least performance gains to be measured?

AFAIK nobody was collecting analytics. The one team I was working on had put out a goal of "30% more efficient" using AI tools. Its about as subject as you can get. We never got around to what exactly that meant before everything got shut down.

Myself and several other devs were laughing about the whole thing. The company was so amped about what AI could do they never even bothered collecting any analytics that would affirm or deny any of this had a positive impact. Even some of my team members were talking about the placebo effect AI has had on a lot of C-Suite folks.

> Even some of my team members were talking about the placebo effect AI has had on a lot of C-Suite folks.

What do you mean placebo effect? They thought things were created with AI while they actually weren’t?

Probably meaning C-Suite thought productivity was up because of AI, either because A) metrics showed high AI usage or more commits/LOC or B) we're mandating AI usage, why wouldn't it increase?

For a lot of C-suite there has been more of a fast-follow approach to AI. CEO hears 3rd hand what competitors are doing, tells his CTO to "do AI" and "hire a head of AI".

So a lot of motion (do AI) was created without a destination (product outcome). The motion was what was being measured (we are doing AI).

Headlines is what matters at the executive and board level. Start measuring things and they might not be able to spin a story to sell.

For a large part of society we have management in leadership positions.

30% is my new favourite stat. It seems to come up a lot, like the old "this work will take 6 months" that I was equally suspicious of back in the day.

Bender: "I'm 30% [XYZ]"

http://theinfosphere.org/Bender_Bending_Rodriguez#Compositio...

This is all still going on at my company but they’ve been trying to create dashboards to measure us as good or bad with our output unsuccessfully but they keep shoving it through anyways. It’s demoralized a lot of people.

> It’s demoralized a lot of people

Isn't this a good thing? Doesn't it mean your company doesn't want employees to treat LLMs like a slot machines?

But they are, so it’s demoralizing to be punished for not hitting the jackpot

I saw incredible productivity gain call-outs from non-technical teams like "it saves me 15 minutes per day summarizing my email".

Trillions of CapEx for good Clippy/Siri, nice.

The only thing the people in charge care about is this: is their equity going up? Nothing else matters like results or revenue. Quaint concept those.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com