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418
Shopify CEO says employees' 'slop grenades' are making more work for everyone else (fortune.com)
submitted 19 hours ago by Mustachius_Grumpius@thelemmy.club to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works 23 points 1 hour ago (2 children)

Literally a meeting at work today.

Director: "Why was this requirement missed?"

PM: "Well, my understanding is that AI was used to write the requirements and that AI was also used to generate the code and perform code reviews. ...So there were no actual people who understood the requirements involved in the process. Also, this seems to be becoming more and more of a problem."

Director: "Oh. Uh... Ok. Maybe don't bring up "AI" whenever you discuss this with senior management because I'm not sure how well that will go over. Just say, 'the requirements were missed.'"

PM: ....

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 3 points 33 minutes ago

Is the AI is being used what's the Project Manager for?

[–] BigDiction@lemmy.world 3 points 57 minutes ago* (last edited 55 minutes ago) (1 children)

No one read the PRD in detail! Shocking

Edit: This is what meetings should actually be used for. Going through line by line and reading the document aloud to sanity check and discuss potential misses imo

[–] jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 minutes ago

This is what meetings should actually be used for. Going through line by line and reading the document aloud to sanity check and discuss potential misses imo

That would actually make meetings a valuable use of our time which is exactly why it won't happen.

[–] Kaligalis@lemmy.world 4 points 36 minutes ago (1 children)

Yeah, good employees state their grievance, but if management insists, they just go into bot mode and do what has been commanded until they switch jobs. And bad employees are happy to blame AI.
So if management demands use of AI rather than just offering AI as yet another tool that may or may not be used at the discretion of the employee, output quality will either stay the same or degrade because AI can't do the actually important job - quality assurance.

The moral of the story: if you aren't actually experienced doing the job yourself, do not tell your workers how to do the job. Trust your senior workers to do that.

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 3 points 28 minutes ago* (last edited 27 minutes ago)

This is actually an argument I was having about two hours ago with my managers. They want to replace a bunch of low level workers with AI, and have the remaining low level workers use the AI to do the job of the lost workers. Their justification for this is that the engineers have been using AI for over a year now and performance has improved, (I don't actually know if performance has improved, but they say it has).

And what you said was basically my point, sure performance improves when engineers use AI because the people using the AI, are engineers, they can tell when the AI has given them something worth working with, and they can tell when it hasn't. The low level workers can't do that, I had an argument with one of them this morning because they kept insisting that the computer tower was a CPU, and kept calling it that. How is someone like that going to be able to tell if the AI has given them good output or not?

[–] SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 3 points 20 minutes ago

You asked for it, you got it.

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 17 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Maybe you shouldn't have insisted your employees use it then, in the hopes that you'd be able to fire most of them.

[–] JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 9 points 1 hour ago

The hope is to fire all of them. The plan is to fire most of them.

Then after the company crashes they'll pull their golden parachute and take a position at the next doomed company.

[–] communism@lemmy.ml 32 points 6 hours ago

Dude donated a shit ton of money to slop Linux (omarchy). What did he expect?

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 points 7 hours ago

Well, yeah, the problem with LLMs in a professional context is exactly that the second order effects of using them are so bad that they wipe out the direct effect gains (the time saving in creating the text).

It's fine for entertainment if all you want is to be distracted for a while with some somewhat bland chewing-gum for the brain.

[–] uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 130 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

CEO Tobias Lütke... told employees last year that using AI is "a baseline expectation," and they should first prove they "cannot get what they want done using AI" before asking for more resources.

Isn't this an example of Play stupid games, win stupid prizes?

It looks like an example of Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

[–] Scipitie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

Just playing uhm angels advocate? Not sure how to call it, the naive optimist perhaps!

Not necessarily: the statement (in isolation) is a call to learn and become capable to explain limitations. The criticized effect is basically "people not being able to explain the limits".

I suspect that "finding limits" wasn't incentived though (and I mean things like positive feedback, not money). And then you get shit-in-shit-out factories.

Or to rephrase your statement: If you want to play a game then stick to the rules you've set up - otherwise everyone's allowed to cheat.

[–] Shayeta@feddit.org 3 points 3 hours ago

A hammer makes a poor substitute for a knife & fork.

[–] tehciolo@lemmy.world 7 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Ok, sure

However

In this case everyone that had a connection to reality told him that's not a reasonable baseline.

You can force everyone to use it, but then you are working against that

Not exactly setting up your workforce for a win

[–] Scipitie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 4 hours ago

I would love to find anything that had a more positive outlook .. but alas perhaps I should ask OpenGrok because my creativity is not enough.

Fuck em.

[–] DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 332 points 19 hours ago (15 children)

He said AI is helping workers produce more output, but the quality of it is so bad that their colleagues have to spend more time fixing it

Everyone predicted this. Why the fuck didn't the billionaires? What is their major malfunction?

[–] Zedd_Prophecy@lemmy.world 5 points 2 hours ago

They are still making money hand over foot and they've doubled down on it. I smell bubble getting larger before pop.

[–] group_hug@sh.itjust.works 7 points 3 hours ago

If a billionaire bought a ticket to the Powerball lottery and won they would attribute that win to their superior "genius", "work ethic" and deep strategy.

[–] TeaWithDani@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Not even predicted. This is what everyone realized the second they started having to use Ai tools at work. This has been wide knowledge for a year or two, and likely known by those doing early tests with it prior.

[–] gankouskhan@bookwyr.me 8 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

I got let go from a job about a year ago because I said this and showed the data to support my claim in reaponse to why it was taking me a while to complete some work. I was "not a good culture fit"

[–] Burn_The_Right@lemmy.today 8 points 6 hours ago

They're all conservatives. Conservatives are profoundly unintelligent by nature. Just the dumbest cockroaches to ever infest a planet.

[–] Doomsider@lemmy.world 26 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Oh it is simple, they are fucking dumb. Always have been. If they do have some brain cells to rub together they will get stuck on short term gains for themselves which in the long run is fucking dumb.

Either way you slice it dumb, just fucking dumb.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

We don't live in a meritocratic society, especially at the higher levels.

Right mommy, right daddy, right school, knowing the right people, right way of talking - that's far more important to end up a CEO than competence.

[–] benjirenji@slrpnk.net 12 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I'm surprised it's not more obvious. Tons of CEOs tank their companies and fail upwards into boards and other CEO positions of multi-billion dollar companies because they completely mismanaged the company but somehow rich people are geniuses?

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

We're all supposed to believe that the rich are rich because of their own merit and the poor are poor because of their own lack of merit, so that we don't force the rich contribute more to the public pot so that the poor aren't poor.

So the relentless propaganda we're bombarded with in the media is that the rich are great and amazing people who got to were they are due to their hard work and intelligence (notice how Bill Gate's mother who was a member of the board of IBM was never mentioned in the press when talking about "his" success with Microsoft) whom we should all look up to whilst in the last couple of decades we've been seeing more and more in the rightwing press stories about how the poor are lazy and dependent on benefits (aka social security if in America).

The poor aren't the ones who own TV Channels, Newspapers and (in countries that have that) end up in the boards of publicly owned TV Channels and Newspapers.

[–] village604@adultswim.fan 36 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Because they always think they're the exception and everyone else is doing it wrong.

It's not uncommon with narcissists.

[–] uszo165@futurology.today 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Because they always think they’re the exception and everyone else is doing it wrong.

They are wrong in this belief because being idiots they don't have the capacity to be aware that they are idiots. But generally this belief is true. It is more positively expressed in these words: “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” When I look at the dismal state of software, I see crap everywhere. With the rise of slop generators this is bound to become worse.

[–] village604@adultswim.fan 2 points 3 hours ago

It's about their personality disorder, not their intelligence.

[–] fyzzlefry@retrolemmy.com 9 points 13 hours ago

No one tells them no

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[–] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 44 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Lmao I am living this right now at work 🥲

[–] PattyMcB@lemmy.world 32 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Yep. We have a guy on the team who generates document after document for us to review and it's all slop that he has no understanding of (not that anyone could understand the mostly nonsense)

[–] Kissaki@feddit.org 6 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

Did you not get to reject all of that yet?

[–] PattyMcB@lemmy.world 3 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

I wish. Our company is still at the "you must adopt and use AI" phase. I'm looking forward to the "Holy fuck that's expensive! Be careful of your usage" phase

[–] jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 hour ago

We passed the "Holy fuck that's expensive!" phase a few months ago and have moved on to the "Use AI for everything but don't actually do that just use it for some things why [didn't/did] you use AI for that we can't afford the [additional time/Azure bill] hahahahahahahaha." phase. Swap the values in brackets at random on any given day.

[–] Monument@piefed.world 6 points 3 hours ago

My org saw AI as a threat and immediately banned it (blocking websites and restricting features in apps) until our IT folks could evaluate it and implement safeguards. Incidentally, they missed the window when vendors were more or less offering it for free. Now any AI solution doesn’t just have to be vetted against our security and privacy needs, but most likely requires a darn good business case, RFP’s, quotes, and contracts.

It never became a part of the culture here, much to our benefit.

[–] benjirenji@slrpnk.net 2 points 5 hours ago

This is also what I don't get. At worst people start ignoring the documents or requests for review (or code changes) because they have better things to do than review generated text.

At best you push back.

[–] DarkCloud@lemmy.world 77 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

With CEOs - we need to switch to REAL grenades.

Tobias Lütke's net worth is over 12 billion, like all billionaires he won't have an income. He'll be buying assets at an inflated price then taking out bank loans against them - a process that inflates prices on things like realestate and land (because the more they pay the more they can borrow from the bank).

Billionaires do this to avoid income taxes. They want to be paid in stocks, assets, and live tax free off never ending bank loans. He'll they'll buy media companies just to borrow against them, they'll buy lobbying companies... And they'll use them to make society worse (on top of the inflation they create).

....and the increased roads, infrastructure, costs to the community? Who covers their tax burden? That hole in the tax system? They use tax loopholes, so YOU cover their tax burdens. YOU do.

[–] skunk@pawb.social 32 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Billionaires do this to avoid income taxes.

The most infuriating part of this? Mr. Lütke endorses the idea of granting more votes to those who pay more income tax, including stripping the right to vote from people who do not pay income tax.

He has also called pensioners 'dependents' who shouldn't get to vote:

New deal: when you get your pension deal it’s locked in and guaranteed. But now you are a dependent and that means no voting, just like dependents under age. Enjoy the deal, let people with a stake in the future decide.

Sources: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/shopify-ceo-endorses-idea-to-give-more-votes-to-wealthy-canadians-9.7286688

https://moneywise.com/news/top-stories/shopify-ceo-tobi-lutke-pensioners-voting-rights

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