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by sbarre 1027 days ago
> We haven't all been there. This is not a common use case at all.

I'll speak anecdotally for myself here: I have seen - and experienced - this enough times in my almost 30 years, and I have heard from plenty of colleagues who have also seen or experienced this. These stories come from somewhere.

Times are changing, office toxicity is (relatively) on the decline but you don't have to go back too far - less than 10 years - where this kind of subordinate abuse was relatively common, and it still happens to this day.

I 100% agree with you that it shouldn't be normalized or made light of as part of a sales pitch like Duet AI is doing.

But to say this isn't common (we can argue the definition of "common" perhaps) is just inaccurate in my experience.

5 comments

"Imagine you’re a Google PR writer and you get an email at 5 PM from your boss asking for a blog post about Duet AI for release to the public at 8 AM tomorrow ..."
This comment wins.
> office toxicity is (relatively) on the decline

I think it's worse than ever, just on the extreme of toxic positivity where we all have to pretend we're a family and do constant culture training that doesn't actually help anyone but just enables the toxic people to do culture-fu to practice their toxicity under the guide of "holding people accountable" and "being upfront and honest"

I can understand that certain situations come up that require an all hands on deck emergency, but in such situations I would argue that the last thing you want is an AI generated failsafe presentation, but to get the necessary people on to fix this situation.

If it's part of the business to have people craft this regularly between 5pm and 8am then there is a systemic problem where AI will be a band aid at best.

I see your point. I too have been asked to do something unexpected around end of day that ends up taking the night. Over the years, I have learned to say no. It was difficult to learn, but now people understand how to work with me. You're right, inaccurate to say this is not common, I just don't like how the usecase is promoting the worst stereotypes about managers. There's a lot of positive stuff. Ex. you want down time to spend with your family. There are a few calls you think you can skip on. You can ask Duet AI to attend on your behalf and give you summaries at the end of the day, etc...

AI is here to help us work smarter. Hopefully this creates time to work on more interesting & impactful problems thereby improving productivity. The worst case scenario is if people just end up working more on meaningless tasks.

Remember the "let me google it for you" meme? Not very different if all the manager has to do is ask Duet AI to pull together this report instead of asking you.

I'm digressing. This use case really triggers me.

My pov on this is, I say no to people I don't want to work with and don't like, and I say yes to bosses I respect and who I want to work with more.

That way, I earn the trust of the people I like and fall off the radar of the people I don't.

> I have seen - and experienced - this

I have also experienced it, but when your colleague approaches you at 8AM to ask if you saw their email last night, it is easy enough to say "No, I just got here." Be the workplace you want.