[HN Gopher] My Colleague Julius
___________________________________________________________________
My Colleague Julius
Author : dabacaba
Score : 453 points
Date : 2024-12-23 13:03 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ploum.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (ploum.net)
| oddly wrote:
| Haha, I genuinely laughed, thanks for this gem.
| electric_mayhem wrote:
| At the risk of getting too meta, I feel like lots of folks will
| get the gist of Julius and check out from the article...
|
| ...missing the twist.
|
| So as a TLDR, I'll say that Julius is a peer of the author who
| is polished but uncomprehending, often spouting convincing-
| sounding nonsense.
|
| And here in 2024 we not only have folks like that to contend
| with, but also have polished AI output being forced at us from
| every direction.
|
| What a world we have ahead of us with Internet-scale automated
| uncomprehending nonsense
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| I mean I thought it was a allegory about LLMS right from the
| start.. way too long winded. Just skipped to the bottom to
| validate it.
| dgeiser13 wrote:
| I read the whole thing and never saw any twist. What did I
| miss?
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| I missed the twist also. When he said he was surrounded by
| Juliuses I thought he meant his other colleagues had gotten
| to their positions by cheating with LLMs to look like
| Julius.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Re-read the last 7 paragraphs, quoting paragraph[-7]:
|
| > On my side, I tried to forget Julius. But, recently, my
| boss came to me with a huge smile. He had met the
| salesperson from a company that had amazed him with its
| products. _Artificial intelligence software that would, I
| quote, boost our productivity!_ [emphasis added]
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| I simply did not follow the transition between these two
| paragraphs:
|
| > I now have an artificial intelligence software that
| helps me code. Another that helps me search for
| information. A third one that summarises and writes my
| emails. I am not allowed to disable them.
|
| > At every moment, every second, I feel surrounded by
| Julius. By dozens of Juliuses.
|
| The first paragraph is my situation and I like it, so the
| second paragraph didn't follow for me. My inner voice had
| a short mental hitch where I thought "was something
| missing between those? Should I slow down and stop
| skimming?" Then my eye jumps to "My boss came to see me.
| He told me that the team's productivity was dangerously
| declining" and I decide "the paragraph before must have
| been referring to the team members using the AI tools",
| and I've missed the point of the story.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Julius is the AI.
| analog31 wrote:
| There might be multiple interpretations. Mine was that the
| colleague whom management is gaa-gaa about, makes flashy
| presentations, and seems much smarter and quicker than us,
| but whose work is usually incorrect and often damaging, is
| AI.
|
| In Kafka's _The Castle_ , the protagonist is sent two
| assistants by the local government, and (spoiler alert)
| they thwart everything he tries to do, and end up killing
| him.
| amelius wrote:
| What I learned from this is that by using an AI, I can have a
| good career with a salary that is above average.
| bruce511 wrote:
| What most people will miss is that "presentation is important
| ".
|
| As coders we spend a lot of time And pride on the code. We
| evaluate our work based on its correctness, elegance,
| effeciency and so on.
|
| But the way everyone else values it is on how it interacts
| with the world. We get frustrated when someone with clearly
| inferior skills perfects the presentation layer.
|
| The solution is not to teach Julius to code. The solution is
| to understand the _importance_ of what Julius is doing and
| prioritize adding that to our skillset.
|
| Make no mistake, the 10x programmer doesn't write more code,
| rather they make their code more useful, more accessible,
| optimized for usefulness as much as effeciency.
|
| Internalize phrases like "if it's not documented it doesn't
| exist" and understand that _training_ is more important than
| creation.
| lmm wrote:
| > Make no mistake, the 10x programmer doesn't write more
| code, rather they make their code more useful, more
| accessible, optimized for usefulness as much as effeciency.
|
| Nope. Generally they push back on the requirements and make
| only the part that was needed. 10x programmers are much
| more like the top comment's "Pete" than the article's
| "Julius"
| varjag wrote:
| Not really. I know it hurts to hear but they are simply
| better.
|
| The first one I worked with would come in the morning,
| sit down and code. Then take a lunch break and code some
| more until late in the evening. He was super prolific,
| his projects were well structured and followed all
| necessary conventions. He culled his code mercilessly and
| rewrote things that were going stale without hesitation.
| He delivered on time to happy customers.
|
| He wasn't much for chit-chat but was friendly and would
| explain or help if approached. This was all in a small
| obscure European company. Now almost three decades later
| he is in a senior IC position at Arm I believe.
| jjulius wrote:
| _cough_ We 're not all that bad... _cough_
| jpfr wrote:
| seconded
| jparishy wrote:
| we should start a club
| pimeys wrote:
| Yeah. Juliuses who understand the code.
| JuliusSu wrote:
| I would like to be included in this collection of Julii.
| juliusgeo wrote:
| I would also.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I'd be interested in seeing a presentation detailing how y'all
| actually, very good.
| angarg12 wrote:
| I've met a breed of career min-maxers adjacent to Julius that I
| have a hard time describing.
|
| Picture this: you join a new team with a senior engineer, call
| him Pete. Pete wrote the initial version of a new product, and
| you joined the team to take over and continue it's development.
| Pete is bona fide genius who can work miracles and he is always
| in the critical path of each new initiative, you are told.
|
| Once you open the lid of this new codebase you discover that this
| new product is a half baked spaghetti ball of mud that barely
| works as the demo that it was intended. With no documentation or
| tests, it takes you a while to even understand what's going on.
| Meanwhile the clock is ticking. It took Pete a mere 2 weeks to
| write this system, why it is taking you so long to add new
| features?
|
| You try to explain to management the pickle you find yourself in,
| but to no avail. They fucking love Pete, and won't have anyone
| criticizing him. He has saved their asses in numerous occasions,
| and why is it always that _others_ are the ones who can 't keep
| up with him?
|
| So you chug along, paying the price of the mess that Pete made
| while he keeps moving to even larger initiatives under leadership
| adoration. He also seems to have a knack to leave ship before his
| acts catch up with him, and when he decided to leave the job for
| a promotion and significant raise, management will miss him.
|
| I've seen this behavior more than once and it seems too specific
| to not be intentional. Let me know if you ever met someone like
| Pete and how you call such people.
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| In large companies I have seen a related pattern. Usually a
| mid-level engineer that the managers love because they "get
| stuff done".. meanwhile they are a bulldozer in the code,
| usually with some "ship-it" buddy green lighting the work.
|
| The reason they can "move fast" is because everyone else is
| trying to limit complexity, etc. and they are punching holes
| through the abstractions.
|
| Then turn into your "Pete" when they get promoted...
| rvba wrote:
| The reason is why they move fast, since there are tons of
| Juliuses (as per the article terminology) who cannot code at
| all.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _He also seems to have a knack to leave ship before his acts
| catch up with him, and when he decided to leave the job for a
| promotion and significant raise, management will miss him._
|
| This is not a "knack". It's a manipulative skill he has learned
| over time. A way to burnish his reputation at the expense of
| his peers. Petes suck.
| YmiYugy wrote:
| That sounds like a management error, not a Pete problem. If
| Pete was told to get a demo done as soon as possible, that's
| what he did. And in many cases that's not a bad thing for
| management to tell people. Finding product market fit, usually
| trumps tech debt. The thing is, that management should know,
| how time intensive and difficult it can be to turn a cobbled
| together demo into a production system.
| intelVISA wrote:
| Pete's just a rational actor in this scenario, the real issue
| is management with no insight into the reality of what
| they're 'managing'.
| photonthug wrote:
| Mostly agree, although Pete is kind of a jerk if he's self
| aware enough to notice exactly what he's doing to
| repeatedly and intentionally exploit this pattern of
| ignorance in management anyway.
|
| But engineers blaming engineers that benefit from being a
| rational actor inside the mainstream incentive structure of
| corporate life is basically a distraction, because it gives
| management a pass for their mismanagement. Like, you don't
| have to know the details, but it's pretty fundamental to
| understand / recognize / triage tech debt.
| roenxi wrote:
| What choice does Pete have? There is a certain romance in
| defying management but that sort of move is ... career
| limiting in multiple ways. Management are not there to be
| defied.
|
| Persuasion and honesty are great tactics with good
| managers. With bad managers they tend not to work. Bad
| managers will demand bad software and only be happy when
| they find someone to deliver it.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| > Finding product market fit usually trumps tech debt
|
| This, 100 times.
| spit2wind wrote:
| This is what John Osterhout calls a _tactical tornado_. It's a
| programmer who only develops tactically. I find his book, "A
| Philosophy of Software Design" provides a good vocabulary to
| think about the technical aspects of this. See Chapter 3:
| Working Code isn't Enough. It may be enough vocabulary to begin
| working on the problem without attacking the person.
|
| As for the psychology of such people, I haven't found a single
| resource. Clearly the system they operate in provides a
| feedback loop that reinforces their behavior. I'm sure
| personality, as defined by the Big Five model, plays a part
| (e.g. orderliness).
| mst wrote:
| I really like that book. A bunch of people I've mentioned it
| to said there was nothing in there that was new to them and
| they thought it was a waste of time.
|
| I fear they missed the vocabulary part, which was what I
| found most valuable.
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| Oh man, I remember the difficulties explaining to management
| that "but it's working code" is just the absolute minimum
| requirement(!) for any piece of code and not a real measure
| of quality - any expectation lower than that, that also
| satisfies the term "software", just doesn't exist. There is
| some truly incomprehensible stuff out there to trick the type
| system into accepting your way of coding, to safe another 2
| LoCs, or some assumption where team members didn't want to
| communicate with each other etc. Specs are hard enough.
|
| As for the psychology: I always assumed that some people just
| don't perceive the contrast between creation and maintenance
| as very expressive or strong, the article _The Maintenance
| Race_ [0] from _Works in Progress_ comes to mind here. That
| article distinguishes between 3 types: _Robin Knox-Johnston_
| , _Donald Crowhurst_ and _Bernard Moitessier_. Maintenance
| isn 't fun for me, it's just tedious work that needs to be
| done. The easier and the faster it can be done, the better.
| There's accidental complexity anyway, and the world sure can
| be messy, but I'll do my best to keep my produced artifacts
| in line. My perception to orderliness is probably pretty
| sensitive, maybe my tendency towards depression plays a role
| here ("Doing maintenance cures depression" is a quote in the
| mentioned article above) and I can acknowledge that not all
| people are like that. But for me it feels somewhat similar as
| if I would compare real vintage things to things that just
| have been designed with that certain vintage look. Real
| vintage has to be accepted, it's history after all, but
| history just can't be designed and you're better off to work
| into the time ahead. I'll honor accidental complexity, it
| feels like history, but incomprensible problem-solving skills
| aren't somewhat part of it, in my book at least.
|
| [0]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-maintenance-race/
| tdeck wrote:
| I worked with someone like this at my first job out of college,
| he did build a lot before leaving the team. But what he left
| behind in our systems was a string of technical decisions that
| really hamstrung us, like building our core service around the
| API of an extremely inefficient protocol buffer library he
| wrote himself, resulting in a service that could only handle
| 4-5 QPS per node. One of our other services used an application
| specific enum that for some reason existed in its own separate
| RubyGem that he published, so in order to update it we had to
| update the gem and then change the dependency reference.
| RalfWausE wrote:
| Oh, i know him... it's me!
|
| I do "computer stuff" as my profession for about 20 years and
| always for rather small companies. I do everything from wiring
| a network, any level of supported, programming and
| administrative stuff... oh yeah, and in my current job I
| sometimes drive a forklift in the warehouse.
|
| I work now for about 10 years for the same company and have
| built significant parts of their software ecosystem, and in my
| professional opinion: Its a Rube Goldberg machine fixed and
| extended with duct-tape, hotglue and tons of wishful thinking.
| Nothing, absolutely nothing in the system I had to build was
| carefully planned, implemented or tested. Most new feature
| requests were handed in by an stressed out boss on a Friday
| afternoon telling me that we need feature X / solution for
| problem Y / bugfix Z ABSOLUTELY URGENTLY because something went
| terribly wrong. Its not uncommon that this visits were the
| result of some prior hotfix backfiring.
|
| And I build it. And it works.
|
| I have often told my boss that it would be best to drag the
| whole system behind the warehouse and shoot it to relief it of
| its misery... but, well, it works...
|
| Perhaps I should work on having this 'Pete skill' of leaving
| ship for the raise and promotion thing ;-)
| bombela wrote:
| I don't think you are the same Pete.
|
| People like you acknowledge and understand the engineering
| trade-offs. Which you might smirk at, but is true
| nonetheless. If there is only one example of you not being
| op's Pete is that you tell your boss about the reality of the
| situation.
|
| The OP's Pete I have met many. It is exactly as described.
| pyrale wrote:
| The key issue of Petes is when they don't stay and make sure
| management knows that it's a prototype that needs more love.
|
| They milk the credit and move on, leaving the next engineer
| explain to management that what they have is not what they
| believe they have.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > I've seen this behavior more than once and it seems too
| specific to not be intentional.
|
| I mean, why not, this sort of quick delivery is super valuable
| to companies. But management needs to understand that the
| solution is more like a prototype, difficult to scale (in
| features, team) and that's where it is the engineer's
| responsibility to be transparent.
| grecy wrote:
| The last telco I worked at had a project manager like this.
|
| She would take on a dozen small-ish projects (~6 months / $1M),
| and just jam them through by buying some off the shelf managed
| solution and using an external contractor who would write
| spaghetti to run tentacles to everything. She would routinely
| deliver projects early and under budget, which made her a stand
| out STAR. No other projects in the entire company were remotely
| close - normal was double time and budget. Green ticks next to
| her name, promotions, bonuses, etc.
|
| Once I was invited to a conference call with a dozen people I
| didn't really know.
|
| Her: We've tapped you as the main support person for this new
| system we've just deployed into production as part of this new
| project. I has customers live now.
|
| Me: OK, great. Where's the documentation (there is none). What
| server does it run on? (Huh?). What credentials do I use to
| login (what?). Who is managing this SSL certificate? (What?).
| And so on.
|
| I was told later that was a Career Limiting Move (CLM) on my
| part, because I wasn't being a team player, and I was adding
| friction to The Greatest Project Manager(TM).
|
| She did this for at least 50 projects, always getting accolades
| while creating an absolute shit-storm for support to deal with.
| As the years rolled on I learned this is perfectly normal for a
| telco.
| miksak wrote:
| Damn, I saw that dozens of times already, especially in
| relatively successful startups/scaleups in eu
| resonious wrote:
| I'm quite scared of being this. I tick a lot of the boxes: I
| have a good rep for being fast and management likes me quite a
| bit. And I definitely have spearheaded things that I've since
| been pulled away from. I try to counter balance all that by
| writing docs and sticking around though. I do my best to help
| those who work on the stuff I was involved with.
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| I doubt you are. There is an enormous spectrum, and the
| parent comment makes it sound all bad.
|
| If you got something working, and are available to answer an
| email explaining why you made a design decision, then you're
| already cleared of being a bad Pete.
|
| Pete can't make the perfect product and he shouldn't try to.
| If it took 2 weeks to make management happy then its a
| problem you can do "right" in 1 or 2 months. A new dev needs
| to read up on the problem, what Pete did, what needs
| improvement, and maybe restart fresh to deliver. Good
| management knows this.
|
| But a 2-week-delivered project is naturally bounded in scope,
| and its better off for being 'proven' than whatever OP
| imagined the right way to do it is.
|
| There are only 3 cardinal sins. Don't destroy/overwrite an
| existing architecture, don't be a smart/dumb coder, don't do
| a months long Pete-style yolo project.
| cgio wrote:
| We tend to underestimate management's visibility in such
| situations. I had three senior engineers. One was your Pete
| (names are not real of course), throw him anything and he'll
| have something half-working in no time. Ugly but enough
| function to be called a proof of concept. One was the opposite,
| call him Paul, give him any problem and he would spend his
| whole life if possible researching every minute detail of the
| problem, similar domains and patterns etc. The last one, Mary,
| was the master combiner. She could collect all kinds of
| information, abstract and deep as in Paul's, quirky, dirty or
| non-existent as in Peter's and make them into something deeply
| practical and down to earth. Can you see how one could manage
| the work between these 3, all with their teams, in a way that
| everyone felt respected and admired for their approach? Same
| with the Julius of the post. Management might be aware of
| Julius weaknesses, but Julius could still bring a unique
| delivery skill-set that is required in the context of the
| overall team's work.
| thrance wrote:
| That's great, I really enjoyed that.
|
| I've met my fair share of Juliuses, both in college and in work.
| It often really made me question why I even care about what I do.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| I saw the end coming miles away, but enjoyed reading this essay
| anyway as it's well written. I guess I saw it coming in good part
| because I can really relate to the story, from the point of view
| of a CS associate professor.
|
| LLMs are a real pain for students on so many levels. These tools
| can destroy their confidence by being seemingly better than them
| at first, which also makes these students want to use these tools
| instead of learning, and then it starts to become a self-
| fulfilling prophecy. I kind of fear the impact this tech will
| have on our future. A society mostly full of Juliuses is doomed.
| ocschwar wrote:
| That's why the B-Ark was built.
| shever73 wrote:
| This comment made my day. Thank you!
| dgeiser13 wrote:
| Julius sounds like repeated application of The Peter Principle
| except he never went past any level of competence because he was
| always incompetent. Polished but incompetent.
| buggy6257 wrote:
| If this is going to enter our lexicon as a short-name for this
| type of person, I'll point out that since "Julius" is originally
| latin derived, the pluralization should follow that of most/all
| latin nouns, and thus be "Julii".
| whatisyourwork wrote:
| Well, yes. But the blog is an English blog and plural is
| Juliuses. The rules of grammar apply from the language, not
| from the word. Sometimes the language inherits the rules from
| the language of the word. But that's an exception.
| adammarples wrote:
| Well now we are choosing to inherit a newly contextualised
| word it's appropriate to discuss what grammar we should take
| with it
| m2f2 wrote:
| Just ask Julius, then....
| claudinec wrote:
| Except that the blog is also in French.
| https://ploum.net/2024-12-23-julius-fr.html
|
| The author is running a poll to establish the plural:
| https://mamot.fr/@ploum/113704470821790664
| tmtvl wrote:
| But in Latin Julius starts with an I. (with apologies to The
| Last Crusade)
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| That assumes Julius is a second declension noun. If it were a
| third declension noun it would indeed be Juliuses.
| tgv wrote:
| In the subject, but e.g. 'Surely you're joking, Juli?' or 'I
| feel surrounded by Julios.' My Latin is pretty rusty, though.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| As we're a tech site, the plural is clearly Juliuxen.
| bytesandbits wrote:
| we hired a Julius. Result after a year: Prolific people were laid
| off, yappers stayed, sales didn't grow, more money was spent than
| made. Company has 6 month left of runway. Oh Julius why you be
| like that? Amazing presentations tho. Like watching a movie.
| Dansvidania wrote:
| Wouldn't you agree that the problem in such a situation is not
| the Julius/Julii, but the managers who hired and misunderstood
| his/their contributions?
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| If this wasn't about AI, Julius would have been an excellent PM
| or mid-level manager.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| If highly confident bullshit artistry is a desirable trait in
| any job description the parent org should abandon pretense and
| pivot to flogging crypto and dietary supplements.
| pjbk wrote:
| This was pure gold. I've certainly met many Julii trough my
| career. The universe spawns and churns them abundantly. It must
| be fond of them.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| This is not a comment about the main story in the article, but
| about a paragraph at the end:
|
| "My boss came to see me. He told me that the team's productivity
| was dangerously declining. That we should use artificial
| intelligence more effectively. That we risked being overtaken by
| competitors who, without a doubt, were using the very latest
| artificial intelligence."
|
| This is the oldest scam in the book. A boss will never talk to
| you if there is any kind of problem with your productivity, they
| will fire you and that's it. Any boss talking about needing to
| work harder etc. is only trying to squeeze out some extra juice
| from workers who are already working perfectly fine.
|
| But the author and his team seem to be willing victims of
| scammers and exploiters, so what else is to be expected?
| bnetd wrote:
| > This is the oldest scam in the book.
|
| Sounds like you were born yesterday.
| prmoustache wrote:
| > But the author and his team seem to be willing victims of
| scammers and exploiters, so what else is to be expected?
|
| This is just a fictional story meant to be an allegory about
| AI. I don't understand why people takes it so literally in the
| comments.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| That's not how I read it. The comparison to AI comes at the
| end, written out literally.
| johnorourke wrote:
| > A boss will never talk to you if there is any kind of problem
| with your productivity, they will fire you and that's it
|
| I feel sorry for you having experienced that culture... this is
| not normal behaviour for good companies, and they do exist.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Of course there are different environments. If you work in
| the public sector you won't be fired unless you break the
| law. If you work somewhere with a lot of investor money
| coming in, then your employment is not dependent on your
| productivity. As long as the money keeps coming in, you're
| safe. Once it stops, everybody is out, even the hardest
| workers.
|
| And there's even good companies, where they will give a bad
| employee a chance to become better.
|
| But in more everyday workplaces you first don't get hired
| unless you're productive, and you secondly get fired if
| you're not productive. When/if the boss comes around to
| threaten about working harder, it's almost always a scam,
| because if there really was any issue, you'd been fired
| already. This becomes less and less of an issue the better
| paid a job is, because at the higher levels people know well
| if they're good or not.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > I now have an artificial intelligence software that helps me
| code. Another that helps me search for information. A third one
| that summarises and writes my emails. I am not allowed to disable
| them
|
| Wtf, are places actually making this nonsense mandatory now?!
| bnetd wrote:
| Hey Clau^HHHHDev^HHHJulius, summarize for me how did rsynnott
| spend most of his working hours for the past quarter. Stack
| rank against rest of department, and output a cost-reduction
| strategy as a powerpoint presentation for my next meeting.
| awanderingmind wrote:
| Fantastic, hilarious, and too relatable.
|
| Perhaps I am becoming overly cynical as I approach middle age,
| but it seems to me that this phenomenon exists because the people
| who have the ultimate decision making powers in businesses are
| business people. Businesses exist to serve the egos and goals of
| the people who run them - from their perspective things like
| technical competence and honesty are often secondary to achieving
| business outcomes or impressing upper management (it is telling
| that these are somehow different things). Julius is clearly
| better at this than the sad programmers who merely know how to
| code.
|
| I would dearly love to believe that an alternative is possible,
| but there seem to be powerful incentives pushing the world
| towards this scenario. For many of us the best we can hope for is
| a work place that is not too dysfunctional, that respects your
| personal boundaries while paying an ok salary. I count myself
| fortunate to work at such a place, while dreaming of other
| things.
| asimpletune wrote:
| The counter agreement often made is that if there was a better
| alternative to this then, like a company run by people who
| understand the fundamentals of what they actually make, then
| they would outcompete all these lazy bones, self-serving
| business people. My observation however has been that in fact
| many such companies have come, they have indeed dominated their
| competitors, only to later become infiltrated by the same
| business types they had once trounced.
|
| It's frustrating to simultaneously be able to perceive this and
| also do nothing about it. There are a lot of Juliuses out
| there. Still work doesn't have to be one's whole identity. If
| one happens to be there at the right place and at the right
| time then awesome. They probably got the experience of their
| lifetime. But if not then it's ok! I think we can all do work
| that we're proud of still, and it's probably best to not get
| too worked up over this stuff. I don't think Julius has that
| same option.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| There are two possible outcomes:
|
| - The Julii infiltrate and take over,
|
| - A company run by Julii from the outset comes to dominate
| the market.
|
| This is because "what we actually make" is a specialist
| skill, whereas business, sales, operations, financial
| planning and governance, HR, culture, legal are broadly
| generalist; and the bigger you get, the greater the important
| all that stuff becomes, relatively, to core execution on the
| product and its tech.
|
| Which is not to say the importance of the latter ever goes to
| zero, but as a ratio it's like 1/log N or so.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| I would argue it's because the whole economy is basically
| an oligopoly and there aren't really enough opportunities
| for competition. Once a company reaches a certain level, it
| focuses on pulling up the ladder rather than climbing the
| ladder.
| sourcepluck wrote:
| Really worth actually reading, very nicely done. I think the
| point is being made that real Julii exist, and also, that the
| mechanisms being used to get AI into workplaces and such are the
| same methods used by the Julii of the world to get ahead as well.
| spudlyo wrote:
| Ah yes, a masculine proper noun of the second declension in the
| nominative plural. Just one macron away from nailing it ;)
| m2f2 wrote:
| ;)
| Dansvidania wrote:
| My 10+ years professional life in software has seen me both
| thinking I am Julius and thinking I am working with Julii.
|
| What I try to tell myself is that I am working in a state where I
| am at best ~75% sure of what I am doing. I assume others are in a
| similar situation with a varying percentage value.
|
| Mistakes happen more often than I would like (not quite of the
| IP-less internet caliber, but still) and both when I make
| mistakes, and other make mistakes, I try to remind myself of
| this.
|
| I value highly anyone that takes the time to tell me I made a
| mistake and why, I try to offer the same courtesy when I get the
| chance.
|
| I only am worried when people _repeatedly_ make no attempt to
| learn from mistakes and just shrug them off, or worse leave the
| hot potato to someone else and still get the credit. But I can
| also see how sometimes we make mistakes and don't even realize.
|
| ...more on the topic, I guess, I have stopped using AI tools
| while coding almost completely
| dctoedt wrote:
| There are lots of politicians like Julius too.
| nis0s wrote:
| CEOs should be replaced by AI, charm shouldn't be a factor in
| decision making.
| sfjailbird wrote:
| This sounds made up and actually written by an AI. _" I now have
| an artificial intelligence software that helps me code"_, can't
| see anyone working in the field writing like that.
| laurent_du wrote:
| The author's native language is French, not English. The
| article doesn't sound AI-written at all.
| dsr_ wrote:
| I take it you're not used to people whose primary language is
| French (or Italian, Spanish or Romanian) writing in English?
| jollyllama wrote:
| There is an outdated term that I find perfectly encapsulates
| this: "goldbrick."
| bradleyy wrote:
| Thank you for this wonderfully useful word!
| fakedang wrote:
| TIL I'm Julius lol.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Are you sure? I'm always assuming that the Julius's aren't self
| aware, they don't know that they are like that. If they know,
| then they aren't Julius, it would be impossible to act this way
| if you were aware of it, without being a psychopath.
|
| Maybe that should be the discussion. Is Julius a psychopath,
| and that is what bubbles to the top of corporate hierarchies.
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| I think that on some level, Julius knows. He's just very good
| at avoiding it.
| narag wrote:
| I've met some grossly incompetent colleagues that were kept in
| the team just because they were willing to do certain kind of
| work that we didn't like, but management only pretended to not
| notice.
|
| As for AI being the new version of this, I don't think so. The
| effect of this tech is more likely to remove one layer in the
| hierarchy. But maybe it's your boss, not you, that will get
| replaced.
| bloomingeek wrote:
| In the non-tech world they're called schmoozers. They were either
| former athletes, quick witted, good looking, well spoken and/or
| cockie. Everyone knew they were incompetent, but they seemed to
| always get away with it because they were likable.
|
| When they were in over their head on a project, they were always
| assigned someone who could bail them out. Because of this they
| always increased the work load of others, thus they were loathed.
| What usually helped us was they would get promoted, then they
| became useful because then we could control the projects.
| caleblloyd wrote:
| > My boss came to see me. He told me that the team's productivity
| was dangerously declining. That we should use artificial
| intelligence more effectively. That we risked being overtaken by
| competitors who, without a doubt, were using the very latest
| artificial intelligence.
|
| I think this part is real. Developers who can use AI tooling to
| gain a multiple of productivity boost while still having the
| domain expertise to correct the parts that AI gets wrong will
| become much more desirable than ones who don't.
|
| But it's not so much like the article states- AI is not itself
| the employee that managers love and their peers despise. The
| developer who can achieve extremely high and accurate velocity
| due to a combination of domain expertise and AI use will be the
| one that both managers and their peers love. And that
| organization will seek to hire more developers like that one.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| There are two games in a career, a game of expertise and a game
| of status. Most people on this forum play the authority game, its
| in the name. But typically groups of humans only listen to an
| expert when the expert's ideas are propounded by a high status
| individual. And by status I don't mean class (in this group I
| assume I don't have to explain expertise) I mean presentation,
| appearance, biography, provenance.. Both things really matter
| with humans.
| ChilledTonic wrote:
| I have to say I became a lot happier in this field once I aligned
| myself more with Julius.
|
| I think what happens to developers and engineers is that since we
| have the ability to attune our toolsets very specifically to our
| needs, we assume everyone can do the same.
|
| This is untrue. Most people live a life of hodge-podge technical
| solutions that don't work very well, meaning their expectations
| for how software should work is supremely low.
|
| Once I understood this I became Julius. Management does not care
| how or why the software does or doesn't work - they just want 12
| rules for life style platitudes and charisma.
|
| The part about sending Julius to meetings while everyone else
| worked to fix things particularly stood out. The meetings are
| useless, but that's where everyone glad hands. Gladhanders get
| raises.
|
| The difference is that I like to think I'm still pretty good and
| doing my job. I'm just acknowledging that pure l33t skills does
| not a career ladder make. If anything it could even be a
| hindrance.
|
| Perhaps this is a cynical response.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| > Management does not care how or why the software does or
| doesn't work - they just want 12 rules for life style
| platitudes and charisma.
|
| Which clearly shows that something is wrong in the industry, or
| how management roles are filled, or how wealth and influence
| and opportunities are distributed generally.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I'd worked briefly with a "Julius".
|
| Unpleasant assignment at a decidedly unethical firm, and frankly
| often-dodgy industry, my own stay was brief.
|
| Technical masters from a top-tier university, had all the toys,
| flashy wheels, etc.
|
| But stymied by the most elementary coding tasks.
|
| "Julius" turned up in headlines a few years later charged (and
| subsequently convicted and sentenced) for insider trading /
| securities fraud.
|
| I can find links for the legal case, very little if anything
| online since.
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