> Productivity Is About (Much) More than Finishing Tasks Quickly
You can be highly productive and yet produce nothing of value.
as an aside: two books that made it almost impossible for me to deal with management "goals" at large corporations anymore:
1. the goal - by goldratt
2. out of the crisis - by deming
highly recommended!
I'm sorry, but this is nonsense.
Yes, you can produce nothing of 'traditional' value whilst still being productive in some way , but you 100% can not be 'highly productive' when you don't produce anything of value.
Sitting around and jacking off all day is not as productive as working on some unmonetizable project. The value can be in many aspects of that project.
The blog post is literally about various measures that seem "productive" but don't seem to be creating any value.
The adopted solution to this, to meet internal targets, is to accept reduced quality. Flood the ticketing system with bogus reports, each with 5 paragraphs of technobabble. In response, you get similarly faulty AI-driven triage tools to deal with the slop. But the triage tools have the same problem: they just don't work that well. Plenty of garbage gets through, and plenty of actual issues get filtered out.
The first movers get some eye-popping numbers to show management, but the aggregate productivity of the corporation is unchanged at best.
So is the productivity increase an illusion? Depends how you look at it. Is the productivity boost for the corporation an illusion? Yes. But, most ICs are measured by tickets closed, commits pushed, lines of code written, and tokens used. Like it or not, that is the definition of "productivity" that has been given to ICs. They're just doing what they're told.
When everyone first uses AI they are swayed by its intelligent sounding sentence construction. It took time to be able to look past that and understand basic assuptions still needed to be questioned.
“After compiling all these, it still seems neutral to net negative. Maybe a net positive on the customer service side.“
Tokens used? That's a cost. One might as well include coffees drunk.
Seems unlikely, especially before the investment money runs out.
Enterprise controls make what could be a simple cron job into a nearly impossible scheduled task.
So AI has to be one shot for me where I use it.
So productivity is dramatically lower if I have to manually track and execute tasks as some kind of human scheduler system.
so even if you 10x your coding, you aren't gonna have an appreciable effect on total output
I can also do nothing at scale just with a hammock :)
It doesn't. It just lets them work less.
The fact that that is exactly what is happening (everyone passing off slop to everyone else and pretending either they didn't use AI or it isn't slop actually) is telling.
The mistake was giving it to everyone too early too fast. "If everyone is super, no one will be"
Too much hype in the process of AI development.
If analyzing the basic theory of LLM or AI (second hand data, data conversion, cognitive bias, etc.), this will make it more persuasive.