Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
jasonkester | on: Don't be a meat proxy
I just can’t understand why this is not a fireable offense.

Like, I can see getting a strong warning the first time somebody notices you do this, then if you persist you’d have to be let go.

Just like anybody else who is clearly not doing their job.

Why would you tolerate this sort of behavior at your company?

impulsivepuppet | parent | next
what is often overlooked in corporate culture: if you take a step back, two coworkers refusing to cooperate, regardless of the reason, is a typical "corporate kindergarten" scenario for the manager to take care of.

To avoid rushed or incorrect decisions, conflicts intentionally move through gradual escalation. If someone behaves unprofessionally, for example by submitting a code review they do not understand, the first step is to establish the likely cause.

They may ultimately be at fault, but that does not absolve the surrounding environment. The culture may be toxic, deadlines unrealistic, or communication poor.

The best course of action for someone directly affected by uncooperative coworkers is to avoid assuming ill intent. Get them on a call and let them explain their pull request, however trivial the issue may seem. Even if the gesture is misinterpreted, you still have a far stronger position than righteous indignation.

shuvrojit | root | parent | next
This, I totally agree with you having a call and letting them explain the changes. One of my coworker used claude to write and push PR's and the message was so cryptic, it's not really understandable. I got him on a call and let him explain the PR. He also actually couldn't really interpret the PR message. I warned him not do this again. Now he writes by hand. I think communication between humans should be written by only humans. AI is not really good at communication.
ozim | root | parent | next
That here.

I once worked in a place where a guy would pick on me in code reviews, he wasn't really higher position, but had been with the company longer than I was.

He was just an asshole asserting his dominance and needed to be taken a notch down by a manager and it turned out he didn't understood (or more likely didn't try to understand) the PR when confronted.

a34729t | root | parent
You are absolutely right to push back...
jurgenburgen | parent | next
Because engineers don’t decide on hiring and firing. The managers all have KPIs to transform the org into AI-native. This is the kind of behavior that organizations encourage right now.
Gigachad | parent | next
The psychosis is largely coming from the top.
girvo | root | parent
Fish rot from the head, as they say.
whywhywhywhy | parent | next
I get it’s annoying and I personally hate it but firing someone for it is ridiculous. Are you expecting everyone to rewrite everything from an AI before they share it because that doesn’t sound a good use of company time either.
jasonkester | root | parent | next
No. I’m expecting everyone to answer direct questions that they are the only one who can answer by thinking up the answer with their own brain then writing or speaking that.
nkrisc | root | parent | next
If someone asks you a question at work, you answer them, or explain why you won’t/can’t.

If they wanted an AI answer they could have asked it themself.

ungreased0675 | root | parent | next
I think that’s not an unreasonable expectation. Don’t share raw LLM output with other people.
carlosjobim | root | parent | next
Firing somebody for it is ridiculous? If you say that, then you are also obliged as a customer to keep giving your money to companies who do not perform as expected. You have no right to choose a different lawyer if your lawyer makes an AI-generated report for your case. You have no right to walk past a restaurant which is using AI-generated billboards, you shall eat there.
californical | root | parent
It’s just a fancy version of previous tools. Imagine a coworker instead does a refactor by grepping the entire codebase and doing a find-and-replace.

Do they ensure that it didn’t accidentally overwrite something it shouldn’t have?

Or do they just throw up a PR and assume their little refactoring bash command works fine, then expect their coworkers to debug it for them?

loading story #49157465
somenameforme | parent | next
It seems that this is largely coming from higher ups who are probably (consciously or not) testing the waters for LLMs being able to replace the people they're dumping the walls of text on. I don't mean in any sort of malicious penny pinching scheme either, but simply people wanting to be able to do things quickly and as close to their own demands as possible, while getting rid of the 'middle man.' It just so happens that as LLMs become ever more capable of delivering on e.g. software tasks, software engineers start to become the middle men.
maccard | root | parent | next
My experience is it’s over eager engineers who we would have historically considered not strong who suddenly feel able to contribute in a different way
eddythompson80 | root | parent | next
I know exactly the persona you’re describing. It’s unfortunate because they have a great learning tool now. I always felt bad for over eager engineers who were not strong. They had the right attitude but I thought lacked the learning resources and perhaps the learning skills others stronger engineers had. Before if you found yourself in an area you don’t understand. Some people make it all the way through school without learning how to learn on their own. Or at least have underdeveloped skills in that area. Once they enter the workforce and no longer have a syllabus that outlines learning plan for a subject, and an instructor and TAs that hand hold them through the learning process, learning becomes really difficult. AI could really solves that. But maybe I misunderstood the original problem.
bigfishrunning | root | parent | next
So, in other words, the pipeline that's producing engineers is not filtering out people without talent. It used to be that people who "didn't know how to learn" couldn't make it through the early engineering courses and moved over to some other field.
darkwater | root | parent | next
That's why we have courses and certifications!
maccard | root | parent
Yeah that’s exactly the person I’m talking about.
dwedge | root | parent
Those engineers are annoying but I'm so sad about the previously great engineers who are doing this and now contributing slop everywhere.
maccard | root | parent
Anecdotally, there are no engineers who I considered “great engineers” before who are now just posting slop. The great engineers are still great engineers - and I don’t know (or care) if they’re LLM assisted.
weatherlite | root | parent
I doubt higher ups wanna babysit agent software engineers all day long, it's not fun and its pretty time consuming and cognitively demanding. They'll let humans handle it - but their dream is way less humans will be needed than before.
fennecfoxy | parent | next
Because it's harder to fire managers. And even harder to fire executives.

Who goes when companies need to downsize? Rarely executives; they'll always find a way to be retained...hell, they're the ones with the power to decide who goes.

sdiupIGPWEfh | parent | next
How can it be a fireable offense when it's actively encouraged and rewarded?
mlrtime | parent | next
Let me give you a scenario and see if it is in this same fireable offense line:

An Ops person who deals with company code base but is not a SWE in the code base regularly has to work around issues with this software (They are OPs). However they have read access to the source.

In the past, they see a bug and open a jira with how it was found for the dev team, and it may or may not ever get looked at.

Now ops can point claude to the repo and it can most likely [but not always] find the issue.

So this ops person can do most of the work of reproducing the bug and finding the problem/solution but doesn't understand the code. Should they not produce the findings for someone else to read/validate? Should they go back and just open the ticket the old way?

loading story #49156866
loading story #49154478
loading story #49155517
loading story #49154231
loading story #49157091
dude250711 | parent
That would make execs who asked staff to tokenmaxx look even sillier than they already are.