[tharant]

Is it possible that what happened was an impedance mismatch between you and the engineer such that they couldn’t grok what you told them but ChatGPT was able to describe it in a manner they could understand? Real-life experts (myself included, though I don’t claim to be an expert in much) sometimes have difficulty explaining domain-specific concepts to other folks; it’s not a flaw in anyone, folks just have different ways of assembling mental models.

[kevmo314]

Whenever someone has done that to me, it's clear they didn't read the ChatGPT output either and were sending it to me as some sort of "look someone else thinks you're wrong".

[tharant]

Again, is it possible you and the other party have (perhaps significantly) different mental models of the domain—or maybe different perspectives of the issues involved? I get that folks can be contrarian (sadly, contrariness is probably my defining trait) but it seems unlikely that someone would argue that you’re wrong by using output they didn’t read. I see impedance mismatches regularly yet folks seem often to assume laziness/apathy/stupidity/pride is the reason for the mismatch. Best advice I ever received is “Assume folks are acting rationally, with good intention, and with a willingness to understand others.” — which for some reason, in my contrarian mind, fits oddly nicely with Hanlon’s razor but I tend to make weird connections like that.

[kevmo314]

> is it possible you and the other party have (perhaps significantly) different mental models of the domain—or maybe different perspectives of the issues involved?

Yes, however typically if that's the case they will respond with some variant of "ChatGPT mentioned xyz so I started poking in that direction, does that make sense?" There is a markedly different response when people are using ChatGPT to try to understand better and that I have no issue with.

I get what you're suggesting but I don't think people are being malicious, it's more that the discussion has gotten too deep and they're exhausted so they'd rather opt out. In some cases yes it does mean the discussion could've been simplified, but sometimes when it's a pretty deep, technical reason it's hard to avoid.

A concrete example is we had to figure out a bug in some assembly code once and we were looking at a specific instruction. I didn't believe that instruction was wrong and I pointed at the docs suggesting it lined up with what we were observing it doing. Someone responded with "I asked ChatGPT and here's what it said: ..." without even a subsequent opinion on the output of ChatGPT. In fact, reading the output it basically restated what I said, but said engineer used that as justification to rewrite the instruction to something else. And at that point I was like y'know what, I just don't care enough.

Unsurprisingly, it didn't work, and the bug never got fixed because I lost interest in continuing the discussion too.

I think what you're describing does happen in good faith, but I think people also use the wall of text that ChatGPT produces as an indirect way to say "I don't care about your opinion on this matter anymore."

[cogman10]

Definitely a possibility.

However, I have a very strong suspicion they also didn't understand the GPT output.

To flush out the situation a bit further, this was a performance tuning problem with highly concurrent code. This engineer was initially tasked with the problem and they hadn't bothered to even run a profiler on the code. I did, shared my results with them, and the first action they took with my shared data was dumping a thread dump into GPT and asking it where the performance issues were.

Instead, they've simply been littering the code with timing logs in hopes that one of them will tell them what to do.

[59nadir]

I'm sorry, how is this a "senior engineer"? Is this a "they worked in the industry for 6 years and are now senior" type situation or are they an actual senior engineer? Because it seems like they're lacking the basics to work on what you yourself seem to consider senior engineer problems for your project.

Also, what is your history and position in the company? It seems odd that you'd get completely ignored by this supposed senior engineer (something that usually happens more often with overconfident juniors) if you have meaningful experience in the field and domain.

[cogman10]

> how is this a "senior engineer"? Is this a "they worked in the industry for 6 years and are now senior" type situation...

Yeah, this is the situation exactly, though I've known a few seniors that were senior just because they've hung around and not experience.

> what is your history and position in the company? It seems odd that you'd get completely ignored by this supposed senior engineer

Been with the company for over a decade at this point. I think I have a pretty good reputation generally. Someone sent me a "This is why cogman10 is the GOAT" message for some of my technical interactions on large public team chats.

Why I'm being ignored? I have a bunch of guesses but nothing I'm willing to share.

[tharant]

It sounds like the engineer may have little/no experience with concurrency; a lot of folks (myself included) sometime struggle with how various systems handle concurrency/parallelism and their side effects. Perhaps this is an opportunity for you to “show not tell” them how to do it.

But I think my point still holds—it’s not the tool that should be blamed; the engineer just needs to better understand the tool and how/when to use it appropriately.

Of course, our toolboxes just keep filling up with new tools which makes it difficult to remember how to use ‘em all.