Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by carlosjobim 539 days ago
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?
2 comments
johnorourke 538 days ago
> 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.

link
carlosjobim 538 days ago
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.

link
prmoustache 538 days ago
> 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.

link
carlosjobim 538 days ago
That's not how I read it. The comparison to AI comes at the end, written out literally.
link