Things Jamison Says on Podcasts

Filled with buzzwords and adjectives. I usually add a lot of comments to the PR, and I know the author sends them directly to their LLM and then pastes back a verbose answer. As a result, I end up in endless conversation loops.

I know we're not done with the question. Can we just pause there for a moment and just commiserate with how demoralizing it is knowing that you're writing real heartfelt commentary back and someone is just not even reading it and just pasting it into a machine and whatever the machine generates, pasting it back to you.

I want to finish the rest of the The question, but first, I also want to say buzzwords and adjectives. I'm like, yes, that's how you describe AI output, buzzwords and adjectives. I'm like, why does that resonate so much with me when I hear that? I'm like, yeah, that's exactly the stuff that it makes.

Let me pick back up. I've tried talking to my colleagues one-on-one, explaining how much work they are delegating to me. I've asked them to review their own work first and explained how exhausted I am, hoping they would show some compassion. But nothing has changed because everyone seems to be in survival mode in this era of layoffs. And I feel like they've become comfortable with me doing their work. I've also tried talking about this in retros and tech team meetings, but the team lead and tech directors did not support me because AI usage is encouraged. Instead, they said they really appreciate my feedback because I have so much experience and thanked me for doing such excellent code reviews. I also end up making most of the project's tech decisions. I am the sole contributor to the project's documentation, and my vacation is mapped out in the roadmap as a low delivery period. I like the project, and I'm terrified to switch jobs in these times, but every day it gets harder and harder to comment on obvious slop written without care, without sounding rude or sarcastic. Sometimes I find myself still angry after work. Is it too late to set the boundaries?

Oh man, how many people listening to this right now are like, hey, that's me too.

Yeah. Yeah. My pessimistic expectation is that corporate bureaucracy will sanitize the culture I helped build. Yeah, it'll definitely change.

Yeah. And I don't even, I don't think characterizing it as corporate bureaucracy taking over is the right way to say it because you might not know much about the incoming company, but every company has some kind of culture, you know, where culture is very loosely defined as how we do things around here. And you might actually find that it's cool. It's great. Maybe it's a really cool company. It's a publicly traded tech company that has more than 3,000 people. So I don't know. That could be pretty cool. Maybe you'll find out there's actually a lot of better ways to do things you've been doing and you're eager to adopt some of these tools and get some efficiency wins or get some friction reduction or get some new, you know, new learnings, new, I don't know, new ways of doing it. I don't know. It's just cool. There's a lot of cool opportunities. And I wouldn't necessarily go in thinking it's going to be all corporate bureaucratic nightmare material.

Yeah. You know, I was part of a big acquisition once and it was kind of interesting because I got to learn a bunch of valuable lessons about. Mistakes I made. I was young in my 20s, and I actually, this is kind of crazy, but I worked for a remote office of a bigger company that was located in a different state. And just to give you a sense for the numbers, the bigger company probably had like 500 people in it. And my remote office had, well, we grew from 20 or 30 people to about 100 over the course of five or six years. It was a great, it was a really great team. And one of the things that made it great is we had a ton of autonomy to do things whatever way we wanted in the small office. And that was great. I mean, I learned so much. This is a long time ago. And so there was a lot to learn, you know, as the industry kind of figured things out. But one of the things that was a little bit toxic that I myself contributed to is that we can, we thought of ourselves in this small office as some kind of elite special unit.

Oh, yeah.

You know, that the big company, big corporate people are just trying to ruin our lives all the time.