As I keep mentioning, I worked as a contractor inside Honeywell for 5+ years. My experience of my immediate team was mixed: some very good people, some total morons. My experience of the organization was uniformly terrible. Absurd company-wide requirements for security checks, code quality verification, financial controls. Insane restrictions on product development to use X technology or integrate with Y unit's product. Billions wasted on their IIoT play that got rebooted after several years (and the billions I saw wasted wasn't its development, it was moving everyone in the company onto and off it again ["offboarding"]).
In that time, the stock price went up, and Honeywell went back on the Fortune 100. Just zero relationship between productivity or effectiveness within the company and the stock price.
They do care about those things. But it turns out that stock price and profits often turn on “bigger” things than productivity. Google didn’t win search because they were productive. Nor did Tesla win EVs due to it (and they won’t lose EVs due to the lack of it).
There are some spaces where productivity does matter. My uncle runs a painting company. It’s all about productivity, costs, and customer acquisition. HeAl’s not waiting on new markets or innovation to fundamentally change how he makes money (although tech has improved productivity). He’s made it for the same way for the past 30 years.
Good ones really do and they work hard to enhance the productivity of their workers. I always say to my people that my job is to make their jobs easier, and to a large degree that's true.
There are other types who prefer the power trip, or that if you're a bad manager then your job is pretty easy, etc. But GOOD execs actually do care quite a lot. I tend to tangle with HR over salaries because I'd rather hire a handful of really good people for 15% above market and get double the productivity than a lot of people at or below market.
This article is confusing the corporate raider mindset rampant in big public companies with the genuine growth mindset most companies actually have. Everyone focuses on productivity and costs, enshittification only happens when you're near enough of a monopoly you can afford to squeeze your customers. Most companies can't do that and most companies try to just keep improving. Don't look at MS or Exxon and think that's who most companies actually work. That's just the beginning of the end stage of a megacorporation's life.
Maximizing productivity comes from maximizing efficiency. Efficiency is about sitting down and analyzing your tasks holistically and doing min-maxing to ensure every process achieves its greatest result.
Now ask yourself this: how often do people do this at all? Pretty much never. Most of us only do it when you have to, because you aren’t making enough money, because your application is slow, because you can barely meet budget, or because you are trying to land on the moon and failing costs too much.
> There’s obviously a financial bubble in full force.
If it’s so obvious, figure out how to bet against it, get rich, and never have to worry about productivity again.
> The environmental impact is real.
If every LLM disappeared tomorrow, the environment is still equally fucked as it is today. “Think of the environment” is the second most mindless appeal to emotion argument against anything other than “Think of the children.”
Large language models have their place, but they’re quite limited and no real substitute for human intelligence or judgement at its best.
That said, abusive corporate environments (and they’re pretty much all abusive) turn people into automatons. Execs can thus wave LLMs around and say, “Look, you’re so useless a machine can do your job.”
And even then it does a shitty job. It misses special cases and causes messes. But it’s cheap in the short term, which is all that matters to the boss’s career. Things will go to shit in a few years, but if you’re good at executive social climbing, you are three promotions away from your bad decisions by the time anyone figures out that’s what they were.
The author has twisted themselves into a weird pretzel trying to tie a broad societal critique about short-termism to day-to-day line management. Your manager almost certainly does care about your productivity; in fact, the more biting critique is probably that they care too much about it, working to juice output in the short term while paying short shrift to downstream consequences.
The pretense here is that we actually know what leads to long term progress? As much as it pains people to admit it, short term results are often far more predictive of long term results than any other single data point.
Is it perfect? No. Of course not. But having a team that is just willing to show up and work towards a goal is such a leg up over any other thing that we know that it is painful to see it argued against.
Will there be some people that make progress in leaps? Absolutely. Most of that progress will be taken up and incorporated rather quickly in the places that also employ the teams that just show up.
This, again, makes me question what meaning individual workers should find in work.
Ideally (level 3, the best), I could work with good people on something that I personally care about, like curing childhood cancer or something. This is the type of work I would do even if I wasn't paid, although I couldn't do as much without pay. The meaning is obvious.
This type of job is rare though, so I can't reliably expect to find this level of meaning in work.
But maybe (level 2), I can work with good people towards making a company profitable. Helping an honest company be profitable for the mutual benefit of all the good people I work with is meaning enough for me.
But companies often ask individual workers to do stupid things, or a company is not open to hearing ideas about how to be more successful from individual workers. So I can't reliably take personal meaning from making the company profitable, because the company isn't interested in hearing my ideas about the business, and/or is acting is self-destructive ways, and/or the companies profits are completely disconnect from anything I personally do.
But maybe (level 1), I can find meaning in making my boss happy. This is hell, this is a pathetic meaning for work, but making the boss happy is at least something.
But often my bosses are not good people (about 50%). I've seen what makes them happy and I don't want to be that.
So, (level 0) I guess the only meaning I have left is to make money. If this is really the meaning behind my work, then I see no reason to not cheat and lie at every opportunity, while being careful to avoid consequences. If earning money really is the deepest meaning I should seek in work, then lying and cheating will help me with this--let's go full psychopath mode!
On HN people often say that level 2 is the right attitude, but companies do things that are self-destructive, so I cannot maintain level 2. Level 1 and level 0 are stages of hell.
What meaning do you find in work? What level are you?
A bit tangential, but I've wondered with AI where is the growth?
If you want to move up the stock, cost cutting is good, to some extent, but it has limits, competition can become more fierce, and the whole thing can become a race to the bottom, you cut cost, than you're forced to cut margins, and now you are no less profitable.
Growth requires new products, new markets, for people to spend additional money, to acquire more customers, etc.
A few companies are growing because their product is AI, so that's going to be new money coming in from people who want AI in itself.
the stock price thing at least seems like Goodhart's law. Stock price is supposed to be a measure of investors' confidence in whether a company will make money, because (common, non-voting) stock is nothing more than entitlement to a share of the profits. How much will you pay me today for a tiny slice of the pie periodically over the lifetime of the company? The problem w this is twofold:
1) You can sell stock after you buy it, which isn't itself a problem but introduces a confounding variable. Now stock price is a reflection partly of investors' confidence that the company will make money, and partly of investors' confidence that the stock price will go up. These two obviously feed back into one another: if a company announces things that make it seem profitable the stock price will go up, which can drive another round of investing beyond what the announcement warrants just hoping that they can ride the wave upward and get off at the peak. I personally did this with dogecoin when it went on its bull run a few years back. Despite my wholehearted belief that DOGE was basically worthless, I saw the price going up so I threw some money at it with the intention of bailing as soon as I saw any substantial growth. I tripled my money in three days and greater fool'd my way out of that position.
2) The tail starts to wag the dog. The perceived health of the company should make stock prices go up, but the stock price going up ends up influencing the perceived health of the company. What other measure do we have? The answer of course is "several, but none as easily summarized and delivered as a single number that has either increased or decreased since yesterday".
> For those of us who care about improving how we work and, specifically, about making better software, is there even an audience out there that both cares about doing things well and has the ability to change their practices?
Most of that sentence is overkill. :-) It's becoming hard enough to find organizations (or even individuals) that care about doing things well, period.
Turns out that if you’re core philosophy is authoritarianism, that surveillance and control matters more than anything else, including profits and business outcomes.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 37.8 ms ] threadIn that time, the stock price went up, and Honeywell went back on the Fortune 100. Just zero relationship between productivity or effectiveness within the company and the stock price.
There are some spaces where productivity does matter. My uncle runs a painting company. It’s all about productivity, costs, and customer acquisition. HeAl’s not waiting on new markets or innovation to fundamentally change how he makes money (although tech has improved productivity). He’s made it for the same way for the past 30 years.
There are other types who prefer the power trip, or that if you're a bad manager then your job is pretty easy, etc. But GOOD execs actually do care quite a lot. I tend to tangle with HR over salaries because I'd rather hire a handful of really good people for 15% above market and get double the productivity than a lot of people at or below market.
This article is confusing the corporate raider mindset rampant in big public companies with the genuine growth mindset most companies actually have. Everyone focuses on productivity and costs, enshittification only happens when you're near enough of a monopoly you can afford to squeeze your customers. Most companies can't do that and most companies try to just keep improving. Don't look at MS or Exxon and think that's who most companies actually work. That's just the beginning of the end stage of a megacorporation's life.
Now ask yourself this: how often do people do this at all? Pretty much never. Most of us only do it when you have to, because you aren’t making enough money, because your application is slow, because you can barely meet budget, or because you are trying to land on the moon and failing costs too much.
If it’s so obvious, figure out how to bet against it, get rich, and never have to worry about productivity again.
> The environmental impact is real.
If every LLM disappeared tomorrow, the environment is still equally fucked as it is today. “Think of the environment” is the second most mindless appeal to emotion argument against anything other than “Think of the children.”
That said, abusive corporate environments (and they’re pretty much all abusive) turn people into automatons. Execs can thus wave LLMs around and say, “Look, you’re so useless a machine can do your job.”
And even then it does a shitty job. It misses special cases and causes messes. But it’s cheap in the short term, which is all that matters to the boss’s career. Things will go to shit in a few years, but if you’re good at executive social climbing, you are three promotions away from your bad decisions by the time anyone figures out that’s what they were.
Is it perfect? No. Of course not. But having a team that is just willing to show up and work towards a goal is such a leg up over any other thing that we know that it is painful to see it argued against.
Will there be some people that make progress in leaps? Absolutely. Most of that progress will be taken up and incorporated rather quickly in the places that also employ the teams that just show up.
Ideally (level 3, the best), I could work with good people on something that I personally care about, like curing childhood cancer or something. This is the type of work I would do even if I wasn't paid, although I couldn't do as much without pay. The meaning is obvious.
This type of job is rare though, so I can't reliably expect to find this level of meaning in work.
But maybe (level 2), I can work with good people towards making a company profitable. Helping an honest company be profitable for the mutual benefit of all the good people I work with is meaning enough for me.
But companies often ask individual workers to do stupid things, or a company is not open to hearing ideas about how to be more successful from individual workers. So I can't reliably take personal meaning from making the company profitable, because the company isn't interested in hearing my ideas about the business, and/or is acting is self-destructive ways, and/or the companies profits are completely disconnect from anything I personally do.
But maybe (level 1), I can find meaning in making my boss happy. This is hell, this is a pathetic meaning for work, but making the boss happy is at least something.
But often my bosses are not good people (about 50%). I've seen what makes them happy and I don't want to be that.
So, (level 0) I guess the only meaning I have left is to make money. If this is really the meaning behind my work, then I see no reason to not cheat and lie at every opportunity, while being careful to avoid consequences. If earning money really is the deepest meaning I should seek in work, then lying and cheating will help me with this--let's go full psychopath mode!
On HN people often say that level 2 is the right attitude, but companies do things that are self-destructive, so I cannot maintain level 2. Level 1 and level 0 are stages of hell.
What meaning do you find in work? What level are you?
If you want to move up the stock, cost cutting is good, to some extent, but it has limits, competition can become more fierce, and the whole thing can become a race to the bottom, you cut cost, than you're forced to cut margins, and now you are no less profitable.
Growth requires new products, new markets, for people to spend additional money, to acquire more customers, etc.
A few companies are growing because their product is AI, so that's going to be new money coming in from people who want AI in itself.
But for those using AI?
1) You can sell stock after you buy it, which isn't itself a problem but introduces a confounding variable. Now stock price is a reflection partly of investors' confidence that the company will make money, and partly of investors' confidence that the stock price will go up. These two obviously feed back into one another: if a company announces things that make it seem profitable the stock price will go up, which can drive another round of investing beyond what the announcement warrants just hoping that they can ride the wave upward and get off at the peak. I personally did this with dogecoin when it went on its bull run a few years back. Despite my wholehearted belief that DOGE was basically worthless, I saw the price going up so I threw some money at it with the intention of bailing as soon as I saw any substantial growth. I tripled my money in three days and greater fool'd my way out of that position.
2) The tail starts to wag the dog. The perceived health of the company should make stock prices go up, but the stock price going up ends up influencing the perceived health of the company. What other measure do we have? The answer of course is "several, but none as easily summarized and delivered as a single number that has either increased or decreased since yesterday".
This post is full of non-sequitur assumptions, conjecture, and almost every logical fallacy.
Most of that sentence is overkill. :-) It's becoming hard enough to find organizations (or even individuals) that care about doing things well, period.