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vexations

An incomprehensive list of things that irk me at $DAYJOB:

  1. the push, in the guise of incessant encouragement, by upper management for engineers to adopt AI tools with vim and vigor to improve work efficiency
  2. work efficiency having the definition of merely more output and as soon as possible, quality be damned
  3. the IT team passing around Copilot Enterprise licenses as one would breadcrumbs at a flock of pigeons, sparing no expense, but would embody Scrooge if you request a Dev Mode seat on Figma
  4. the same IT team blocking access to CLI tools that actually improve work efficiency
  5. the glacial response time of the very people who wax poetic about AI and how it makes them work harder, better, faster, stronger
  6. having to file a request for access to said tools on a certain platform and then ping the IT team on Slack after 2 days of radio silence to follow up on the request
  7. when a coworker, failing to understand what I was asking for in item 6 and not bothering to put actual effort into doing a bit of research, resorts to consulting ChatGPT and responds with:

Just some GPT clarification.. does it help at all?

<insert several lines of copy-pasted LLMese that restated the obvious and contributed a grand total of nothing in actionable or hell even just informational value to the conversation>

  1. the designer who turned a blind eye to my improvement suggestions on Figma because I’m just a dev and shouldn’t(?) know anything about UI/UX
  2. coworkers who turned deaf ears to my English wording and grammar suggestions because I’m not Caucasian
  3. that hapless software engineer who gets a higher pay because of a master’s degree but doesn’t know how to write shell scripts or what they’re for
  4. that security engineer cosplaying as Neo, insisting that form validation error messages could be used by would-be hackers to divine, perhaps through a mixture of tea leaves and letter frequency, the inner workings of the system; and suggesting we make them as vague and opaque at the cost of UX
  5. having coworkers who earn more while vibe coding
  6. having to review blatantly vibe-coded pull requests
  7. being pinged by coworkers who earn more while vibe coding when they get stuck on an issue that Copilot or Claude or some such can’t bail them out of
  8. being forced to use only Google Chrome
  9. being underpaid
  10. Ninjio

TGIF

— josh